I really didn’t believe I would make it through childhood, but the act of writing brought me through.”
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s voice is whispery on the other end of the telephone as she relates some of the experiences she has overcome: living with a schizophrenic mother, growing up in a variety of foster homes, battling cancer, struggling with drug abuse - the list goes on.
Now 56 and an award-winning poet, Coke teaches writing as a way of healing to cancer patients, at-risk youth, doctors, families and just about everyone else.
Writing can be a type of meditation, says Coke in a phone interview from her home in Oklahoma. It’s a process that helps us unravel and understand both the good and bad things that happen to us.
Reading is also healing, she says.
We learn vicariously through the experiences of the characters we read about, Coke says. Because we empathize with them, we both expand our understanding of other people in other circumstances and are less concerned with our own misfortunes.
Coke points to books such as Frank McCourt’s memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” in which he relates growing up impoverished in 1930s and ’40s Ireland. Reading books like that makes us feel a little less alone, a little less troubled, she says.
The use of storytelling for our well-being is deeply rooted in human history, from fairy tales that teach moral lessons, to religious texts that wrestle with valleys of despair and mountains of hope, to poetry that purges the writer’s soul. Recently, doctors and psychologists have begun looking at the health effects of reading and writing with a more critical eye.
Raymond Mar, an associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, studies the effect reading fiction and nonfiction has on our ability to empathize. He found that children and adults who’ve read stories their whole lives were more likely to correctly identify the feelings and thoughts of others than those who do not read regularly.
In other words: People who read stories are better at empathizing.
Why?
“When people are engaging with narrative fiction, they’re imagining what it’s like to be in these stories,” Mar says.
Repeatedly trying to understand these characters exercises the same mental muscle that helps us understand people in the real world. And the better we are at “walking in their shoes,” the more likely we are to treat others well, he says.
For adults, it doesn’t appear to matter what you read, says Mar, so long as you’re reading.
With children, however, it’s important to talk with them about what they’re reading. Those conversations help them understand the story and empathize with its characters.
Reading stories, then, can become an opportunity for children and adults to talk about complicated states of human existence, Mar says.
Some doctors have also begun to see storytelling as a way to improve emotional well-being.
A movement called narrative medicine has grown from the idea that both writing and reading literature can help doctors and patients communicate better and discover meaning in the illnesses they battle.
Dr. John Harper, a cardiology consultant at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas, is a proponent of this movement. He founded the annual Literature and Medicine Conference at the hospital five years ago.
Each year, an author is asked to speak, teach writing classes to hospital staff and sponsor an essay contest about how literature influences medicine.
Harper says doctors who read stories are more empathetic and, therefore, more compassionate, more willing to listen to their patients’ stories. It also helps doctors communicate better, he says.
The nuances in poetry and prose can communicate meaning and emotion far better than any scientific explanation, he says.
“The sound of a coffin hitting the earth is a sound utterly serious,” Harper says, quoting one of his favorite lines from Antonio Machado’s poem, “The Burial of a Friend.”
He uses the line to communicate the depth of his intent to patients and family members facing deadly illnesses. Saying something beautiful and meaningful like that shows how serious he considers their illnesses and his compassion for their suffering, he says.
Writing is also therapeutic, says Harper, who teaches his residents that writing about their experiences is a way to release their emotions.
“If you have an experience and you sit down and write about it, you can pour that emotion out,” Harper says. Purging these thoughts and emotions helps to find meaning in what happened - the death or the survival of a patient - and then allows you to move on with your life.
That’s the same message Coke teaches her writing students.
“Getting it down allows that meditative process that we need as human beings to unravel the things in our life or to enjoy the things we’re having fun with fully,” she says.
“It’s like throwing a ball, and if you really want it to go to a certain place, you have to follow through with your hand. The writing is the follow-through that helps it land.”
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