Poetry As Therapy: Understanding Trauma Through Writing
Learn how writing poems can aid in trauma recovery
There are certain experiences the body remembers long after the mind forgets how to name them. Trauma has a way of lingering quietly, persistently, and beneath the surface of daily life. It reshapes how we see the world, how we speak to ourselves, and often, how we survive.
For me, the trauma was slow in many ways, but also sudden, sharp, and irreversible. My mother died by suicide, and contrary to belief, no amount of preparation could have softened the weight of that reality. But using poetry as therapy, to my own surprise, helped me finally begin to carry it.
This isn’t a guide filled with clinical advice or step-by-step healing techniques. This is my truth, which I discovered slowly: that writing poems became one of the most therapeutic ways I could meet my grief without turning away. To stare it straight in the face and to begin the long, unfinished process of trauma healing without trying to fix anything.
How Poetry as Therapy Opens the Door to Trauma Healing
Let’s get something clear from the start: using poetry as therapy isn’t a magic cure. It won’t erase memories or make pain more poetic. But it can offer you something gentler, something a little more human. It lets us witness our wounds without having to justify them and for anyone living with unresolved trauma, that is no small thing.
When trauma is held in the body, we often lose language. We lose the capacity to explain what hurts, because the hurt itself is unspeakable. Poetry, I’ve come to realise, bypasses explanation. It allows us to write in fragments, metaphors, and contradictions; all the things trauma itself contains.
Where traditional narratives ask us to make sense, poetry allows us to sit with what doesn’t.
Self-Reflection as a Bridge Between Pain and Expression
It’s been seven long years of coping with trauma and one of the most powerful outcomes since I started writing poetry is the opportunity for self-reflection. Not the surface-level kind. Not “what did I learn from this?” but deeper questions like:
What did this experience take from me?
What am I still carrying that doesn’t belong to me?
What would it feel like to grieve without guilt?
Poetry holds space to honour questions that are difficult, if not impossible to solve. In the days, weeks, and years after my mum’s death, I never found a way to tell the whole story. To tell it through my lens and memory. But I could write about the colour of the sky and the fact that it rained that morning. The shape of the silence. The ache in the middle of an otherwise normal sentence.
That’s where trauma healing often begins; through noticing. By giving yourself permission to pay attention to what still hurts, what still confuses you, what still demands to be written down.
Poetry Analysis as a Way of Seeing Ourselves in Others
Sometimes, we’re not ready to write about our trauma directly and that’s okay too. This is where poetry analysis (the act of reading and reflecting on poems) can become just as healing.
When you read someone else’s words and suddenly feel your own story mirrored back to you, it’s disarming. You realise you’re not alone in your grief and that someone else, perhaps a poet from centuries ago, also sat with this kind of sorrow.
Analysing poems gives us permission to understand our own reactions, to say, “Yes, this line hurts because I know exactly what it means to lose someone and not be ready, or angry, or not okay.” It invites us into empathy, for the poet and for ourselves.
Here are a few poems that held me in that way:
“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop – a meditation on loss disguised as detachment
“Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden – raw, dramatic, and necessary in its despair
“The Ache of Marriage” by Denise Levertov – not about death, but about the silent ache of intimacy, which felt parallel to my grief
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye – the poem I return to when nothing else makes sense
It’s important to note that you don’t have to analyse poems academically. Sometimes just underlining a line that echoes in your chest is enough. That, too, is poetry analysis. That, too, is part of the healing.
Writing Through, Not Around, the Trauma
When I first tried to write about my mum’s suicide, I felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe and was worried that at any given moment I’d faint from a mild panic attack. So I didn’t write about her. Not directly. I wrote about my fears. About politics. My confusion with information about nutrition. I wrote about how I have my mother’s hands, about forgetting or not being able to forget, about things that cracked (like my relationships) but didn’t break.
And slowly, without noticing, I was writing through the trauma. Not around it.
That’s the difference poetry offers. You don’t have to write a full narrative. You don’t have to explain the moment they left or how it all fell apart. You just write the breath between two thoughts. The flash of memory when you see someone who walks like them. The guilt that clings even when you know you did everything you could and that it’s not your fault.
These aren’t poems you write for publication and performance. They’re for personal processing. For putting shape to what’s otherwise shapeless.
What do you do with the feelings you don’t know how to name?
When grief shows up in quiet moments.
When burnout doesn’t feel dramatic, just dull and daily.
When the past tugs at your present but you don’t know what to say about it.
7 Days of Healing Poems & Prompts is a free eBook to help you start. One poem a day. One quiet prompt. No pressure to be a writer. Simply the willingness to listen to yourself more closely.
Get the free eBook and begin where you are.
The Ongoing Nature of Healing
Here’s something you won’t hear in most articles about trauma recovery: healing doesn’t mean closure. It doesn’t mean the absence of pain. Sometimes, healing looks like being able to sit with the memory and not flinch. To cry without collapsing or resorting to alcohol to feel better. To write about your trauma without spiralling into it.
Poetry gives that kind of spaciousness.
You can write a poem five years after the event and realise you’re still healing, but also that you’ve changed. That your language has softened and that you are kinder to yourself. That you now write not from the wound itself, but from the scar.
The difference is subtle, but it matters in a monumental way.
How to Start Writing for Trauma Healing
If you’re wondering how to begin, here’s what helped me:
Start small. My journey began through journaling and committing to writing one page per day, even when I felt I had nothing to say. Don’t force yourself to “write a poem.” Just write what comes to mind and see what shape it takes.
Write in metaphor. If the pain is too sharp, disguise it. Let the body become a house. Let the grief be an ocean or your own pool of tears. You’ll still know what it means.
Don’t worry about form. Forget rhyme and rhythm. The poem doesn’t need to be beautiful. It just needs to be true.
Return to it. Healing is not a one-time poem; a one-time journal entry. It’s a practice, preferably daily. Some days you’ll write nonsense. Other days, you’ll write the truth. Both matter.
Read others. Find poets who write about grief, loss, and trauma. Let their words be a mirror to your own thoughts and emotions.
Final Words From The Quiet Below
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I know this isn’t easy terrain. Trauma has a way of silencing us, of convincing us that our pain is too much, too ugly, too unfixable for you and others to handle. But writing poems, whether they ever leave your notebook or not, is a way of reclaiming that voice.
You don’t need to be a poet to explore poetry as therapy. You just need to be willing to feel. And in that feeling, even through the ache of it, something begins to shift. It’s probably worth mentioning here that handwritten journaling or poem-writing is most likely still the most transformative and therapeutic path towards healing. Allow yourself to be old-school and get yourself a pen and notebook to physically write things down, not on a mobile app.
To this day, I still write about my mum. Not always directly. But in most poems I write, there’s a trace of what her loss taught me: that grief and beauty can exist in the same breath. That pain can be transformed, not erased.
And that somewhere, beneath all the noise, there is still a quiet place where healing begins.
