Engaged, Not Curious: Teaching Therapeutic Writing Online (article)

I have been teaching writing for personal development online for over 24 years and have taught therapeutic writing face-to-face as well. I am not a counselor, nor a psychoanalyst, though I am aware and informed by various psychological principles and processes.

Teaching writing online was the result of having no fear in using a computer and having a keen interest in people, narrative, and well-being. My father had handed me a copy of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) when I was 15 years old because he wanted to discuss it. As a result of our conversations, I realized early on that most people repress or hide parts of themselves to survive within their families. I was no exception, only I was aware of the dynamics and had a father who encouraged me to disagree with him.

He said I would need to complete four different things to have a good start in life: a driver’s license, a typing diploma, a uni-

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versity degree, and time spent in therapy. He paid for all these activities and by 25 I had done them all with mixed degrees of pleasure. (I was only resistant to the typing diploma, though I am ever grateful now.) Therapy increased my penchant for self-reflection.

In a trauma workshop I took recently, Canadian physician Gabor Maté reminded me of what I learned in talking with my father about Alice Miller’s work: Humans are apt to give up their authenticity if their attachment needs come into conflict with these needs. Two of the most basic needs we humans have are safe attachment and a need for self-expression/agency in a way that feels authentic. We often don’t realize how much we have given up of the latter to meet our perceived survival needs via the former. Although the word “authentic” is frequently problematic in academic and psychoanalytic circles, when we speak of “voice” in the (therapeutic) writing class, we are referring to the development—and often the reacquaintance—of this so-called “authentic” self. We want to express what feels true.

In 1996 the coordinator of the university’s writing department asked me to teach non-fiction writing online. I had just graduated with an MA and had published a few things. Many established writing instructors at the university were reticent to get online for all the reasons that are still being trotted out today: online learning is inferior, in part because it lacks social engagement, you cannot develop meaningful relationships, and learning the technology must be hard. I found that none of these things were true and doing creative and/or therapeutic writing in an online course format is eminently possible. I was fortunate to get an early start.

Reg, a colleague of mine, the first person I knew who had started building his own website, taught the fiction component of our program. In my group, there were eight women, at least half of them from small towns or rural communities where getting face-to-face courses would have been difficult. We engaged in an intense, fun, and fruitful two months of learning where I was present daily in the course and responded to most of the postings, using feedback sentence stems I had been taught in my first writing course with colleague Eunice Scarfe (“I like the sound of…” and “I want to hear more about…”).

The women wrote life stories. They wrote about loss (e.g., the death of children by accident or illness), career wishes, marriage, widowhood, divorce, and sexual orientation, and they shared

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their work in the forums. I believe these were the stories that they needed to write. I posted various creative and evocative prompts, but I did not pressure anyone to disclose anything personal. I took inspiration from Natalie Goldberg’s well-known book Writing Down the Bones (1986). This meant that if the students had wanted to write about gardening, travel, retirement, or anything that might be deemed not painful, they could, and in part they did. I did not deliberately focus on where it hurt, but inevitably that is where
students feel compelled to go.

At the end of the course, we met in person in Edmonton where I live; some of the women had to travel great distances to get to the city. One of the students even flew in from British Columbia, the neighboring province. Twenty-four years later, two of these students are still in touch. One completed her final master’s degree project with me a few years ago and another is a Facebook friend who has just turned 90.

In 2003, I started teaching graduate students online for Athabasca University, Canada’s Open University. For the last 17 years, I have been guiding graduate students through the process of writing-the-self. The two courses I developed, Writing the Self and Narrative Possibilities, have been popular and successful with good enrollment numbers and very little attrition.

What makes these courses successful? What creates the space for doing this transformative work? What do I do as a facilitator so we can work? How do I work with integrity, empathy, and stay engaged without crossing boundaries as students disclose? These are the questions I ask, re-ask, and will attempt to answer here.

Recommendations for Practice 

In the article “Writing as soul work: training teachers in a group-based career-narrative approach” (British Journal of Guidance and Counselling Vol. 45, No. 4, 2016, 402-416), which I wrote with my American colleague, Sjon Ashby, we determined a number of important aspects of teaching therapeutic writing. I will revisit these recommendations for practice here.

First, create a safe space for writing. A teacher creates this space by meeting the two needs I mentioned earlier in this article: a need for attachment and connection as well as the need for authenticity. What’s key is that an instructor engages and comments specifically with openness and non-judgment on what the student has

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written, even reiterating the words a student uses (e.g., “You wrote, ‘reaching over a mountain,’ can you describe the mountain? Is it a grassy Alp or a snow-covered rocky peak?”). Reiterating the words the student uses themselves is what expressive writing researcher James Pennebaker calls language matching. It communicates: “I care,” “you are safe here,” and “your choice of words matters.”

Second, write vulnerably yourself. Teachers of such personal writing should have practice in writing and disclosing their writing. A facilitator who practices what he or she teaches empowers his or her students to do the same, as Jeffrey Berman, Marian M. MacCurdy, and Ken Macrorie (to name but a few) have demonstrated. These are all writing instructors who have taught vulnerable and risky writing by sharing some of their own painful life experiences. In disclosing personal writing, a teacher develops a willingness to play, be vulnerable, and practice receiving responses to their own life. It is in this way that they come to understand viscerally the courage that is required to share vulnerably with peers.

Three, play with language. It is vital that those writing in this context find enjoyment in the process and get in touch with themselves as an artist, playwright, or storyteller and not merely as a reporter or scholar. This emphasis on playfulness focuses energy away from rumination and entrenched perspectives. An exercise where humor is included is a good way to engage students and make the work playful and useful in facilitating personal development. (For example, write a list of problems you don’t have. Pick one and elaborate on it colorfully. Describe it to the reader as if you’re the expert on having it. Then, the twist, tell us how it secretly applies to you.)

Four, don’t look for answers; go on a journey. A traveling mindset is most useful for learning about the self; we must leave the familiar thought pathways and entertain ones that feel foreign, exotic, scary, and uncomfortable. There is no assumed or required destination.

Five, slow down to the speed of the body. When leading a group in the writing process, face-to-face or online, it is important to be in touch with our own bodies. The development of real
presence and engagement in the classroom cannot be separated from the awareness of what is going on somatically. The body tells us when we feel uneasy, pressured, hesitant, resistant, or when a student is expressing such things. Our body awareness can inform

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how we change course, adjust our process, and provide fitting feedback. The body also tells us when there is joy, a moment to celebrate, or to savor laughter; we can miss these experiences if we try to work too efficiently.

Six, give kind, supportive, and inspiring feedback that takes notice of the student. As teachers, we tend to move out of the narrative learning process by offering interpretations, analyses, or solutions to problems instead of letting people spend time with their questions. We can make the mistake of telling our own story too quickly or minimizing another’s story with a careless or trite response. The intent of feedback should always be to retain space for a student’s healthy and compassionate attachment to themselves, peers, and the instructor through words that are kind and inspire. This does not preclude a nudge from time to time. (For example, “I want to hear more about how your grandmother’s house was a place of solace. Can you tell me more about the garden, the parrot, and the white-painted window sills?”)

Seven, have (or intend) a structure to the exercises that move writers from a disempowering to a more life-giving story. This idea is one I explain in much of my writing for the field. Along with my partner in life and work, Frans Meijers (now deceased), I developed a model that explains a process of moving from a first (i.e., pained, victim) to a second (i.e., empowering) story through a series of stages where certain writing exercises are more suited to one stage than another. Some exercises are useful for a gentle start; others are more suited to contribute to crystallizing insights. Exercises that ask more pointed questions and might usefully strip us of cherished stories are better done after those
focused on more expressive ways of writing have been tried.

Eight, notice your curiosity and park any part of it that could be intrusive. Teaching writing for personal development requires that the instructor be continually self-reflective. We bring our own life themes to our work and this can be a liability for our students, and therefore for ourselves. For instance, if we’ve had suicides in our family, we may be overly interested in suicide stories from students or we may avoid them without knowing that this cuts off space for a student to “go there.”

Conclusion

If I were to advise someone new to the field who is eager to teach, I would recommend they consider all of these recommenda-

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tions, but the most pertinent advice I would give is to cultivate one’s “internal dialogue.” That is, foster a relationship and conversation with yourself that is both cognitively congruent and affectively alive as well as that engages your bodily awareness. I would also say, “Don’t desire fans. Be engaged but not curious. Ensure that a student’s disclosure is not currency for a better grade or more connection with you!” We must intend to work in ways that enable students to remain in charge of their own writing and healing.

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