Working in the Imaginative Realm — Creative & Therapeutic Writing Monica Suswin

WORKING IN THE IMAGINATIVE REALM: using creative writing exercises in supervision helps supervisees tap into their inner wisdom appears in the December 2022/January 2023 edition of THERAPY TODAY

In recent years, an increasing number of people have discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing in journals, notebooks and dream diaries. Life-writing, autobiographical fiction and creative non-fiction are a few of the many forms that may come under the generic term ‘writing for wellbeing’, which embodies literary strategies for creative and therapeutic purposes. I offer online supervision workshops using creative writing as part of reflective practice for practitioners in the helping professions.

My own practice is anchored in the fusion of both creative and therapeutic writing and has evolved over the past 20 years. My particular interest in offering supervision is in the interplay and integration of the professional and personal self.

This article will explore how creative writing can enrich the process of supervision and help your inner supervisor articulate words of wisdom. I’ll focus on two literary strategies – the flow of writing referred to as freewriting and the use of pronouns, which give different perspectives.

Introducing creative writing into the supervisory process provides an additional transformative dimension to open conversation. Supervision is a very particular type of conversation, as Robin and Joan Shohet write In Love with Supervision: creating transformative conversations.* When I speak in relationship to another person, I tend to hear myself think. Writing means I think onto the page. When I unpack tricky issues alongside my supervisees through a creative and exploratory writing process, we often reveal surprising clarity to our insights. And I have found that what unfolds with the written word has a canny way of revealing emotional truths.

Freewriting

Freewriting is usually where we start. It has become standard practice in any course on creative writing. Popularised in the 1980s by Natalie Goldberg who wrote Writing Down the Bones: freeing the writer within, her approach to writing as a practice was underpinned with the experience of Buddhist meditation.* But the strategy can be traced back to Peter Elbow, Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who, as a student in the US and then at Oxford University, developed freewriting as an exercise to help his thoughts flow and ease up when he felt a complete block to writing essays.* And there are echoes with Freud earlier in the 20th century finding the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ through free association.* Writing may allow inhibitions to dissolve, and many writers such as Virginia Woolf let their pen find a stream of consciousness with internal monologues.

So how do you go about freewriting?

■ Write in a flow, without pause

■ Don’t worry about style, punctuation or grammar

■ Keep going and if you get stuck, write about that

■ Suspend judgment

■ If the inner critic starts an internal commentary, write that down too

■ Give yourself a time limit.

Perspective

Expression through the conscious use of pronouns such as first, second and third person gives a very different emphasis to voices. As a literary device, voice may be used to expose varying perspectives. In this article, I’ll outline the different effects this has for the writer to gain an understanding of the other person.

Case study

My supervisee Polly* had begun work one-to-one as a coach and mentor in a university setting (she has given permission for our work to be described in this article). She describes the issue she brought to supervision: ‘A pattern had emerged in the dynamic between me and a student, an extremely high-achieving woman in her 20s. The topic of shame often came up in our conversations. The student had experienced bullying in her early career, exacerbated by isolation and class difference in relation to her migrant background. Having worked extremely hard to sustain her position and gain recognition from others of her ability, she struggled intensely with impostor syndrome, and feelings of exhaustion and insurmountable difficulty when it came to the principal objectives of her role.

‘As our time together progressed, I noticed in myself a sense of resistance to the amount of empathy and kindness I felt able to offer. The need expressed by the student felt bottomless; I felt helpless in the face of it. I also felt myself withdrawing a little, as an act of self-protection. I felt caught between two positions – supporting her to a degree which made me uncomfortable or appearing cold or withdrawn. I felt that I wasn’t “doing it right”, and was worried that this dynamic might become an embedded cycle, in which both the student and I would become enmeshed.’

Strategies

The creative writing strategies I introduced into the supervision session with Polly were freewriting and expressive writing with the ‘I’ voice (first-person pronoun). We started with freewriting, for around 10 minutes. Polly’s freewrite, done during the session itself, revealed descriptive and poignant phrases – these reflected her feelings that she herself could not be the only ‘balm’ for the ‘hurts’ within her student’s needs.

After listening to Polly describe her student and the issue, my own freewriting emphasised her student’s ‘shame of not feeling good enough’ and her overriding need for ‘kindness’.

We both engaged in further writing and Polly wrote about repeating patterns; it was at this point after the freewriting that I took on the ‘I’ voice of the student. Here’s that writing in the present tense, which makes us feel that she is talking directly to us:

It soothes me Polly, you talking to me. I want you to soothe me. But I can’t make the shame of being me go away. Not only do I become shamed by other people but I guess deep down I become aware of how young I am here in England away from my family and I feel I am not good enough. You are kind. So kind. That is why I sought you out. But I don’t know what to say. I am still me when I leave you. I want more and more kindness.

In our sessions, we read our pieces out to each other pretty much after we’ve written them – this conveys an immediacy to our spoken words. I felt very moved reading out my imaginative piece as Polly’s student, as if in the supervisory role we can inhabit the absent client and find their own expressive words. The writing we both did revealed more nuances and extended our conversation with further insights.

Reflections

Polly reflected on our work: ‘Working with Monica in supervision helped me to unlock some of these thoughts and reflections. Through a series of gentle questions and writing exercises, we began to unpick what was happening. I had no desire to become a “mothering” figure, and felt that this was implicitly what was being asked of me. Monica role-played my student, and I role-played myself. We began to explore what I was holding back in my body and mind, and what the subtext of my client’s conversation might be, as well as my own.

‘I don’t want to suggest that supervision with Monica suddenly delivered answers to burning questions. It is more that, by providing a gently held space for these questions and explorations to unfold, my own understanding of the problem at hand became more spacious. This enabled me to hold my boundaries more gently with my client, rather than feeling an embodied desire to enforce these boundaries rigidly.

‘Although it is always difficult to disentangle cause and effect, there was a noticeable difference in subsequent meetings with my student. By holding space to develop my awareness of the dynamic through writing and supervision, the dynamic itself has begun to shift towards a place where my student seems much more confident in expressing her own agency, rather than her incapacity. And I was delighted to see this change, both for myself and for her.’

Further reflections

Understanding the student’s need for kindness in this context led to discussing transference, countertransference and issues of nurturing. Polly naturally knew it was inappropriate to take on the position of the mother figure. Indeed, we soon saw how this also could be mirrored in our own supervisory relationship. We talked of the importance of having our boundaries in place, which she immediately transferred back to the contact she had with her student.

Some months later Polly told me that after bringing the issue to supervision she found the effect was subtle and powerful, and she related more effectively with her student who is excelling in her work and seems more accepting of herself, as well as making very significant steps forward in her career.

Inner supervisor

It is always my contention that the writing itself takes on the nurturing role. Writing has many qualities which echo a good attachment – the notebook can always be at the ready for pencil or pen; the page will always receive the expressive words. Even if the inner critic makes her/himself known, s/he can be expressed and released. And the practitioner’s inner supervisor can find words of wisdom on the page – not to replace a human supervisor but to give added meaning to the supervisory process.

Shohet and Hawkins suggest supervisees develop their own system of writing up their sessions, and learn to self-monitor their own body sensations, breathing, feelings, thoughts and actions as a regular check-in: ‘Self-supervision is always relevant, even if you receive good supervision elsewhere. One aim of all supervision is to help practitioners develop a healthy internal supervisor which they can have access to while they are working.’ *

The voice of the other

Exploring the imaginative use of voice in writing allows us to reveal different perspectives. Taking on the ‘I’ voice of another person gives the feeling of being inside their skin and can be potent although we may never know what another person really feels. Finding the voice of Polly’s student conveyed a real sense of her vulnerability.

Experimenting with pronouns is very helpful in gaining different perspectives about another person. When we use the third-person pronoun ‘s/he’ or ‘they’, we shift from an imaginary position of inhabiting the ‘other’ to gaining distance from them. It is also helpful to write about yourself in a tricky situation in the third person to give a bird’s-eye view of what might be going on with a particular problematic interaction.

The second-person pronoun ‘you’ gives less of a distance when addressing the other as a separate being. As a practitioner, you have the complete privacy in your work journal to be both reader and writer. No one else will read this. You may not be a writer of fiction but you can creatively explore your internalised feelings of any work issue as if telling a story. As a supervisor you can encourage your supervisee to experiment with using the ‘you’ voice. And you can do the same for yourself.

Example: a journal write

Say I feel some irritation with Steve*, a client I’ve been seeing for around a year. He has postponed a session and asked for future dates, then cancelled again. This has occurred several times. Finally with Steve not getting back to me in good time and our arrangement hanging in the air, I am tempted to write a strong email to him but resist. Instead I turn to my journal.

Here I also use the present tense as well as the second-person pronoun, so the expressive writing is in the ‘here and now’:

Steve you are irritating me by asking for dates and then not getting back to me. I feel conflicted because I like you but I’m beginning to get very fed up. You’re being disrespectful to me, to yourself and to the work we’ve started. I could write you a strongly worded email but I am resisting this. I haven’t tipped over into angry feelings. I think I’ll wait this out another month and see what happens.

My journal writing allowed me to let off steam and eventually Steve and I set an appointment after what became an unplanned break of several months. I needed to address this with him. But I waited for Steve to speak first and immediately he expressed gratitude that I’d been patient with his need to keep delaying the dates of the session. He told me the circumstances and my irritation melted away. We then discussed the business of fixing future dates and renewed our agreement with a clear and firm intention. I’d enjoyed working with Steve and was happy to continue our work together, as was he. I’m pretty sure expressing my irritation in my work journal meant that I didn’t jump in with an ill-timed intervention right at the beginning of the session when we did finally meet.

Clients messing around with sessions may bring up a range of emotional responses and require exploration beyond the setting of contractual agreements. Taking these issues to your own supervision session means storing them up until a particular date. Writing in a work journal allows access to your responses whenever you have such a need.

In Reflective Practice: writing and professional development, Gillie Bolton describes how story-making may become a form of ‘self-supervision’ through her groupwork with many practitioners in medicine. She outlines the different ways practitioners have explored ‘narratives of experience’ to become reflexive about their work: facilitating ‘a wider view from a distance, a close acute perspective and authority over practice’ and how writing can recreate ‘powerful re-presentations of inter-personal relationships’.*

Third dimension

Writing gives another dimension to supervision, enabling both supervisor and supervisee to forge a personal connection with their writing self. In my own creative therapeutic writing, I made the point that ‘writing has become a character present in my day-to-day life’.* Indeed, writing provides a third dimension in the supervisory process, like the third leg of a stool.

The two strategies of freewriting and the use of pronouns, particularly the ‘I’ voice described in this article, show the value of flowing with a stream of writing and the different perspectives of the imaginative realm, whether giving distance from the issue being considered, or even creating the illusion of entering the skin of the other. Insights are gained, and these can be checked out later during the supervisory process.

Working with practitioners shows me time and again that the interplay of discussion and writing is a highly effective way of clarifying how to take professional practice forwards. Even after 20 years of reflective and exploratory writing, I am still surprised by the quality of the insights which writing reveals. And as Polly reported back to me, by uncovering and acknowledging the underlying need for support her student was implicitly asking for, she was then able to hold her ‘boundaries more gently’ rather than become rigid about enforcing them.

If you are new to creative writing within a therapeutic practice, the best way to learn is to experiment with your own writing until confidence builds up. Many writing courses are on offer, and it is a case of adapting the different ways of writing to the issues presented in supervision, one step further than how you might offer creative writing in a therapy session. This kind of writing itself is ongoing because it is also a process, not an end in itself.

The power of writing lies in the insights it offers the practitioner, both supervisor and supervisee. The transformative effects of writing for the supervisory process firm up boundaries, shift perspectives and offer deeper understanding. ■

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*Names and identifiable details have been changed

bacp members can access it at: https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/therapy-today/2022/december-2022/articles/working-in-the-imaginative-realm/

REFERENCES

1. Shohet R, Shohet J. In Love with supervision: creating transformative conversations. Monmouth: PCCS Books; 2020.

2. Goldberg N. Writing down the bones: freeing the writer within. Boston: Shambhala; 1986.

3. Elbow P. Writing without teachers. New York: Oxford University Press; 1998.

4. Jung CG. Man and his Symbols. London: Aldus Books; 1964.

5. Hawkins P and Shohet R. Supervision in the helping professions. Berkshire: OUP; 2012.

6. Bolton G, Delderfield R. Reflective practice: writing and professional development. London: Sage Publications; 2018.

7. Suswin M. Love & Loss: creative therapeutic writing on relationships. Sussex: Cabin Press; 2018.

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