2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
"What is written with a pen, you cannot cut it out with an ax"
I still remember the times when people wrote letters to each other, sealed them in a paper envelope and carried them to the mailbox. The ladies did not neglect the way to remind of themselves, sprinkling their message with their favorite perfume and putting a trace of lipstick. Friends could include a postcard, a stamp, and even a souvenir banknote. How romantic it was, and most importantly, sincerely! The feeling of real live communication remained. But the modern age of high technologies has "stolen" this opportunity from us, offering in exchange telephone, internet, skype and e-mail. Thus, the epistolary genre mutated, but remained alive!
People still write letters to each other, but now they do not need to go somewhere to send a letter, wait for an answer for two or three weeks. You can in the same way "insert" a picture or photo, underline, cross out, highlight and erase what you have written, throw it into the trash can. All this happens instantly! This is how the method "Psychotherapeutic correspondence" appeared.
Viktor Yuryevich Minovshchikov - (candidate of psychological sciences, associate professor, doctoral student of the Laboratory of Scientific Foundations of Counseling and Psychotherapy of the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education, academician of the Moscow Academy of Social Education) found a new term for this method - "Scribotherapy" (from Latin words: s crib io - "to write" and therapia - "treatment"). Despite the fact that this is correspondence, and not live communication, this type of consultation has a powerful effect of the consultant - psychologist on the client. The client's letter gives a lot of psychodiagnostic information. Willy-nilly, the person writing the letter materializes his thoughts, sometimes even better than verbally. He forms, thinks over, weighs his thoughts and at the same moment analyzes them himself. The presentation of his inner world on paper helps a person to understand himself, in the people around him, to put everything in its place. All this has its own therapeutic effect! Moreover, many people find it much easier to express their thoughts on paper. After all, no one sees their emotions, and often tears, as their cheeks turn red, their lower lip trembles, and their palms sweat. After all, it is not for nothing that the people say “Paper will endure everything”. But paper not only endures, but also helps. Scribo therapy in electronic form allows the use of traditional projective techniques: client's drawings, poetry and prose. Everything helps to compile information about the psychological state of the client: handwriting, style, frequently used words, words - parasites, font, sentence structure and much more.
A huge plus for the client is not only receiving feedback, but also the ability to keep it for himself. In order to turn to her more than once in the future, to think over the recommendations of a psychologist once again, to formulate an answer, questions and new requests.
Here are some guidelines for writing a “psychotherapy” letter to your psychologist:
- Give yourself enough free time to write your letter. Who knows how many minutes, if not hours, you will need to describe your situation.
- Make sure you are alone in the room and no one can read your letter.
- Try to formulate your problem first in a few words, sentences, and then revealing each moment in detail.
- Stay calm if emotions suddenly flood over you, this is a natural reaction of your body, because you are describing difficult, negatively charged and difficult moments in your life. It will get much easier by the end of the letter!
- Explain what kind of help do you expect from a psychologist? What ideas do you have on this topic.
- If you want to add color to your letter, emphasize, highlight, add a drawing, in no case deny yourself this.
