The Healing Work of Reading: How Literature Holds Us Before We Write

The Healing Work of Reading: How Literature Holds Us Before We Write 

This workshop honors writing as a practice of care. Participants are not asked to heal on demand, but to engage honestly, gently, and at their own pace. Writing is treated as a companion, not a cure. 

Reading gives us language for what we feel. Writing gives us permission to speak it. 

• Reading as orientation, not escape

In bibliotherapy, reading is how participants realize: I am not alone in this experience. Stories give language to unnamed feelings, offer mirrors and windows, and create emotional safety. 

• Writing as integration and repair Writing is where experience is metabolized. It is sense-making: placing pain, memory, joy, or confusion into narrative form so it can be held, shaped, and eventually released. 

This is classic bibliotherapy logic: • Read → recognize • Write → integrate • Share (optional) → witness and be witnessed 

Key idea: Healing is not erasure of pain, but a relationship with it. We read to understand the world that shaped us. We write to understand what it did to us and what we will carry forward. 

Reading for Healing: When Literature Holds Us 

Silent reading of chosen text: poetry, short essay, flash fiction, song lyrics 

Prompts: 

• What line stayed with you? 

• What feeling did the text name or stir? 

• What did the text allow you to feel safely? 

Key idea: Reading gives us words before we have the courage to use our own. 

Writing as Listening: An Open Door to Understand the Self Write without explaining. 

Write without correcting. Write to hear yourself. 

Guided writing prompts: 

• What part of yourself felt seen by what you read?

• What are you carrying that has been waiting for language? 

Key idea: We write here not to make meaning yet, but to hear what meaning is forming. 

Closing and Integration 

Choose one line from what you wrote that you want to carry forward. 

Reflection prompt: Pick a question to answer 

• What did writing reveal today? 

• What did reading help you discover? 

• What might you continue listening to after this workshop?

Reminder: 

• Healing writing is cyclical like the season. It does not travel in a straight line. 

 • We return to reading when words fail. 

• We return to writing when silence becomes heavy. 

Prepared by: Zarach C. Gagatiga, RL 

http://lovealibararian.blogspot.com 

On IG: @zarahgeeh | @the.readingarmy |@silver_linings_t.zee 

Readings: 

What the living do: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2016/05/09/what-the-living-do-by-marie-howe/?utm_source= 

Keeping a Notebook: https://cdn.thewirecutter.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Joan-Didion-On-Keeping-a-Notebook.pdf https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=2386

Pied Beauty:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-beauty