Why Words Help
Let’s accept then (whether you accept this premise or not) that all psychological well-being rests on our capacity to assemble a narrative that situates our experiences within a landscape that makes sense. When our lives begin as disparate impressions—a rawness of sensations laid down as memories—but it is only when we attach words to these experiences that they gain clarity and become intelligible, then writing is an act of constructing our inner world and world-building.
We are meaning-orientated and language is a fabric of meanings—a rich tapestry we actively weave to shape coherent narratives from fragmented sensory experiences. In writing, we do more than record events—we transform raw impressions into a liveable, meaningful world. Milton knew this. When Lucifer is cast down, he doesn’t say, I am ruined. He says the mind is its own place. That it can make a Heaven of Hell. Poetry does this. Therapy does this. Writing does this. When we use language to map what has happened to us—when we give shape to the unspeakable—we make something habitable out of ash.
Writing is both a way of making life more livable and of making ourselves more whole. Words have a being-ness: when we write poetry, we tap into a network of resonances. Language whispers to us at the edge of our awareness: each word carries echoes of personal experience, cultural associations, and historical contexts—and in this way language has a wildness beyond the uses we put it to, something which poetry sets free.
In poetry, meaning is not tethered, it moves. It flickers between things. The image is not fixed; the word carries echoes it never agreed to carry. The speaker and the spoken are no longer separate. When you speak a poem, you are not alone in the speaking. Something else in the language rises to meet you. It surprises you. It is the only place, perhaps, where language retains its creaturehood. Poetry frees language to be at its most alive. When we speak a poem we are not the only agent in the process: in this process words also speak back.
Hélène Cixous makes the point that in writing all conclusions are only temporary—pauses rather than stopping-places. Her thoughts on language invite us to view writing as a continual process taking place in both language and the psyche, one that never reaches a final destination but exists as an ongoing dialogue. For Cixous the essence of writing is captured in the image of a ladder—an ascendant, dynamic process where each step upward is both precarious and full of transformative potential:
The ladder of writing is not fixed, but a constant rise into the unknown, allowing us to ascend beyond our present limitations…*
Like therapy, writing is an opening of ourselves continually to new meanings allied to a movement up…
In both personal and group settings, poetry encourages us to negotiate the interplay between inner experiences and the broader cultural fabric of language. In writing contexts which are therapeutic—as individuals share and refine their metaphors—the fabric of a person’s experiences begins to shift and along with it their sense of themselves as creatures in the world and in time. As a therapist I have seen this in both individual psychotherapeutic work, as well as between groups in workshop settings.
Poetry takes us to the edges of our awareness and then allows us to look further, to be surprised. Writing gives us access to a capacity for discovery of that of which we were formerly unaware, and agency to reshape narratives through language. Through the process of working with language—climbing the ladder of writing—we engage in a process of self-discovery which is also a process of healing.
To write poetry is to step to the edge of what you know, and then go further. Not to explain, but to listen harder. To let language show you what you didn’t yet know you felt. In this way, poetry becomes a kind of magic. Not escape—but encounter. Not decoration—but divination. And through it, we become, slowly, more whole.
*Hélène Cixous Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1994)