Venting

I attended a public meeting with my parents today and both them and I left were quite fed up with it for different reasons. They had a problem with the political message, which they found to be ill-informed and misguided. My problem was that the speakers all seemed to be saying the same thing in marginally different language, which can be interesting if done artfully, I suppose. But, all they were doing was venting their anger with the current government.

I'm not against venting per se as it can be therapeutic. But it also demands a lot from your audience because being on the receiving end of a vent it can be very distressing and/or boring. When I took a therapeutic writing course, the instructor told us the purpose of the course was to equip ourselves to be our own therapists, so that we wouldn't have to use friends and family as 'garbage bins'. 

The popular conception of therapy is that it essentially involves venting. If you expel the garbage from your mind, you feel better. People who keep their emotions "bottled up" suffer. That is not wholly incorrect. But, it is also a very mechanistic view of the mind, no doubt inspired by our view of the body. If  the body is attacked by pathogens, they have to be killed or expelled, and the same goes for the mind. 

But, therapy and therapeutic writing are so much more. Yes, it is important to get all your garbage out in the open, but that is  just the first step towards healing. Sometimes that step automatically triggers the process of healing, but often it doesn't (I  suppose). There is no one path to healing and a good therapist has to find what works for a particular patient. And, that is an incredibly difficult job.