Simply put, bibliotherapy is engaging in reading to find healing. Much of it focuses on certain kinds of readings. Perhaps works of literature that explore aspects of the human condition that are affecting us in certain ways. Perhaps works especially focused on what we are struggling with, such as reading memoirs by other sufferers or books by therapists or researchers exploring a topic we connect to with our life. Journaling through the books and/or discussing them in support groups or with therapists can be vital parts of bibliotherapy.
What I will share in these posts is a kind of annotated bibliography of the pivotal books, out of many more, that have helped me increase my self-understanding. Most have been sources for part of my journaling as I have reflected on life before and during recovery. Many, if not most, were first read while incarcerated and when I did not have access to a therapist. Certainly, much of my journaling that is a part of my recovery hasn't been sparked by books--events, memories, feelings especially, TV and radio, conversations, and dreams. But chronicling my journey through my reading is easier to share and more accessible to others.
When I didn’t have access to recovery groups either, or in addition to them, these books have become something of my needed “alternative community”. Since it takes discipline to read and contemplate and connect the dots to my life and share with others what I read, bibliotherapy has been a way I engage with all three of the key commitments for my recovery: Self-Understanding, Disciplines, Alternative Community. Because therapy is still often costly and not available to many, especially in more rural
areas, and the same goes for certain 12-step groups, and since spending time online to connect with recovery can at times be problematic for those trying to limit online time, bibliotherapy grows in importance.
The first book I want to mention before I get into posts on the main group of books explores how reading itself, as much or moreso than the content being read, can help us lead better and more whole lives, especially in this age of digital information and omnipresent screens. It is “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” by Maryanne Wolf, author of the award winning “Proust and The Squid.” Check out more at www.maryannewolf.com. She is a cognitive scientist and looks closely at the effects of being immersed in the digital world on our psyches. She finds some good things when it comes to multi-tasking productivity, but it seems this is out-weighed by the deepening lack of empathy that results.
For me, it is the physicality of holding and turning pages. The way the word on the page lands more easily on my mind. The way reading a physical book slows me down, something that is vital for my recovery. The way I can more readily stop and go back and re-read, re-think, jot something down, write in the margins if I own the book and make it a companion. Reading itself even on a screen carries some of this benefit, but the printed page deepens the healthy impact.
I was raised at a time when the electronic and print cultures were probably balanced, tugging against one another in a kind of draw. Some of my earliest memories are being two or three years old before I got my glasses and how I stood with my nose up to the black and white TV screen. Not comprehending I am sure what was being shown as much as I was just drawn and tethered to the screen imagery itself. An inauspicious start. But I learned to read and took to it also with an addict’s mind (using that phrase very loosely I admit). Reading anything I could find anytime I could. Everything on the cereal boxes. Any group of words I could find. In elementary school I got in trouble, in fact, for “reading too fast”, going
through book after book in the classroom, getting up and down more often than nearly every other student. The teacher may have felt I was skimming or pretending to read that many.
Reading as voraciously as I learned to do, especially drawn to fiction, might have seeded my mind to be drawn to the kind of eventual online fantasy chat sharing and story-reading that became a part of my harmful use, but I also believe that my addiction deepened when I came to stop doing the kind of deep reading of fiction, and literary fiction, that I had done. I substituted it with more mind engagement with online chat, role play, and video. The medium is part of the message at least, and the medium was increasing the levels of dopamine. In that regard, reading slowly through a fine literary novel or short story collection or challenging non-fiction work with a physical book in my hands is more like serotonin.
Wolf draws attention also to the self-reflection that the mind does while reading, in deeper ways than when the mind is online or in a visual medium. That aspect was a discovery to me. When I was spending several hours a day reading and also journaling on my reading I could feel my mind reflecting on itself. That self-reflection felt like a kind of second person, second mind, doing it, like a new creation of self that was healthier healing the old self. It was part of the mind that had become abstinent and now turning toward a nascent sobriety. It probably would have happened anyway as a part of the mind off porn, but reading-writing as part of the recovery discipline sped up the healing process.