About poetry therapy and the collective wellbeing
I wrote this line down almost without thinking about it. It was said in passing, mid-sentence, in a Poetry Therapy group supervision meeting — the kind of gathering where future practitioners bring their cases, experiences, their doubts, their half-formed or fully fleshed questions. Geraldine Campbell, mentor supervisor with the Irish Poetry Therapy Network and iaPoetry, said it the way you say something you’ve earned the right to say simply, after years of practice:
“We do what we can but we also bear witness.”
It’s accompanied me since, because in all its simplicity is naming something essential: that the poetry therapy practitioner’s work has two halves, and one of them is much quieter than the other.
What we can do
The first half is the visible one. It’s the craft: choosing the right poem for the right moment, holding the structure of a session, knowing when a prompt needs to open something and when it needs to contain it. It’s skilled, deliberate work, and it matters.
But “what we can do” is also an admission of a limit. We cannot undo a loss. We cannot resolve a life. We cannot promise that a poem will fix what brought someone into the room. Naming that boundary keeps the relationship transparent and that makes it safer.
The other half: bearing witness
And that’s where the second half comes in, and it’s easy to underestimate because it looks like doing less, but witnessing isn’t passive. To really witness someone’s words, to receive them without rushing to interpret, fix, or redirect, is an active, relational act. It says: this happened, and I was here for it.
In one-to-one work, that’s already significant. In a group, it multiplies. Everyone in the circle is, in turn, the one witnessed and the one witnessing. What was a private weight starts to be held by more than one pair of hands. This is the part of poetry therapy that doesn’t show up in outcomes or techniques, but it may be the part that does the most quiet work over time, the way a season’s fallen leaves don’t just disappear but become the ground something else grows from.
Why this matters for collective wellbeing
Most conversations about poetry therapy focus, understandably, on the individual poem that meets a particular grief, a writing prompt that unlocks something for someone. That work is real and I wouldn’t want to diminish it. I relish the time spent reading poems to find the best ones for an specific theme and then, sitting with those poems until the writing prompt makes itself manifest.
But Geraldine’s sentence points somewhere else for me; it directs the attention toward what happens when witnessing becomes communal rather than one-directional. A group that has learned to bear witness together builds something more durable than any single session: a shared capacity to sit with difficulty without looking away, and to know that it’s shared. That’s not a side effect of the work. In many ways, it’s the point of doing it in community at all, rather than only ever one page at a time, alone.
Wellbeing, seen this way, isn’t only something we cultivate in ourselves, but something a group can hold in common, and poetry, read and written together, is one of the oldest ways we know of doing that.
If this way of working resonates with you, I’d love to explore it together — whether that’s in a one-to-one poetry therapy session tailored to what you’re carrying right now, or in one of my group sessions, where the witnessing happens collectively. Write to me at [email protected] and I’ll get back to you with how we might begin.
