Can Writing Bad Poems Build Resilience? The Healing Power of Poetry Without Rules

You don’t have to be a good poet to write something authentic.

Therapist and author Margaret Bryden explains why poetry can cut through the facts, explanations, and self-editing that often keep us at a safe distance from our feelings. A poem asks us to condense an experience, use metaphor, and pay attention to what is happening inside rather than recount every detail of what happened. That shorter, less literal form can bring us to the emotional center of a story surprisingly quickly.

Margaret calls this “bad poetry” because the goal is not to impress anyone. There are no rules, no pressure to sound polished, and no need to identify as a writer. By lowering the stakes, people can write more honestly and sometimes discover feelings they did not realize were there.

Margaret also opens up about the vulnerability of sharing personal work as a clinician. She reads poems about trauma, shame, grief, and miscarriage and describes how writing can turn an overwhelming experience into something we can see, name, and begin to understand. Poetry may not solve the pain, but it can give the pain a shape—and help us feel less alone inside it.

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Transcript

Welcome, Content Warning, And Help

Janine 0:40

Welcome to you by Polar She. I'm your host, Janine Owell. The content of the show may include suicide or suicidal ideation. If you're ever in need of immediate support, please dial 988 A Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Today I sit down with Margaret Bryden, author of the soon-to-be-released book How I Understand It: A Bad Poet's Guide to Mental Health and Resilience. Margaret is a licensed therapist who already integrated creative writing into her therapy sessions, but then she noticed that for herself and her clients, therapeutic writing in poem form was a pretty quick and contained way to write openly about emotions. Like the well-known therapist cliche, so how do you feel about that? For Margaret, valuing your emotions is key to therapy. And the process that works for her and her clients is writing poetry without rules or the desire to write well for others. And ultimately, that helps get something authentic on the page. Her Bad Poet's Guide is a traditional book of her own original poems, but it is also structured as a collection of prompts for you to write your own bad poetry. Welcome, Margaret, to the show. Well, thank you so much, Margaret, for coming on the show. It's really nice to see you.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

It's nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Janine 2:07

I'm excited about our conversation today because I actually think

A Family Story That Leads To Therapy

Janine 2:11

we have a few things in common. But what I like to do at the start of every episode is to ask a guest to share a personal story about mental health. It can be part of their mental health journey or perhaps someone they know. Just any way your life was impacted by mental health.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that I come from a fairly dysfunctional family. And as I got older and I matured a little bit more and I thought more about what was important to me and what I really felt passionate about. I think I really felt passionate about understanding myself and understanding my background and understanding my family and understanding how growing up, the way that I grew up and with the family that I grew up had shaped me. And that led me to studying more and more about psychology and getting very interested in emotions and how those manifest and what they say about us as human beings. And here I am, now a full-fledged therapist and an author.

Janine 3:09

We're here today because

Why “Bad Poetry” Works So Well

Janine 3:11

it's pretty exciting. You have a new book out, or almost out, and it's called How I Understand It: A Bad Poet's Guide to Mental Health and Resilience. And it really caught my eye, the bad poet title. It just made me it made me laugh a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

I think good poetry is actually quite paralyzing to me when I think about it. I kind of didn't like it for the longest time because it felt impractical. And I don't think I could ever be, you know, a good poet, so to speak. I don't, I don't know that I can write in sonnet, you know, but I could be a bad poet. To me, that's a lot more accessible. And I think the confluence of factors that led me into really appreciating creative writing had to do with me embarking on a journey to become a therapist. And I was incorporating creative writing techniques into my work as a therapist with my clients. And I could see how powerful it was. I could see how it helped create insight for people. I could see how it helped create clarity for people. I could see how it created this outlet when you lower the barriers to it by not needing it to be good or perfect or impressive. Then people really could use it to find themselves and find their own mind and understand their own emotions a lot better. And it helps people make better decisions. It helps people realize what's actually there for them. I've had so many creative writing exercises that I've done where people do their exercise and afterwards they're like, wow, I didn't realize I felt this way. Now I know, and I need to then incorporate this information into my decision making or how I'm thinking about things. So it's so moving, it's so powerful.

Vulnerability, Boundaries, And Being Read

Janine 4:52

You're very vulnerable in the book, and it could be read as if you're divulging lots of secrets. But at the same time, people reading it could go, oh my gosh, this is all Margaret. These are all her thoughts, which is kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

I will say there is a lot of me in this book. And I think if you read the collection of poetry, you will know a lot about how I think about things and how I understand things that have happened in my life. But you will not necessarily know if this specific anecdote is me or if it's someone else. I try to also focus on what I think would be helpful to a wider audience. But there is a lot of me in the book, and there it is quite vulnerable. And it is all my writing and it is all my thinking about things, and it is how I kind of put things together. So to me, it is terrifying actually to publish this book and to have other people read it because they will know a lot about me.

Janine 5:49

I know. It's so I kind of wrote down a few things. I'm like, oh, she went here and she went there. You throw F-bombs around, you talk about feeling feeling you're sexiest during pregnancy, and then you take on the voice of a man with a limp dick. And another asks, what if my vagina explodes? We take on love and dating, and you also are practicing their events.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yes, I do all of those things. Thankfully, my vagina has not yet exploded. And a part of me does wonder, oh my gosh, what if a client reads this and they know so much about me? But I think the book is nuanced enough that again, you wouldn't necessarily know if something is really about me or if it maybe I'm talking about an experience that I've seen a lot in clients, but you will know what I think about it. And perhaps that's maybe even more intimate. Knowing how somebody reacts and feels and thinks about a subject is maybe more intimate and more revealing than knowing exactly, you know, what date this happened and what date the divorce happened and what were the circumstances. You know, it's more intimate to know how I reacted and how I truly feel about it.

Poetry As A Shortcut To Emotion

Janine 7:07

We talked a little bit earlier about emotions. And emotions and getting them down on the page are very important to you. And I would love to know a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Oh, I think emotions can be so chaotic and so difficult to understand. And part of how we understand them is putting language to our experiences, and creative writing tools like poetry help us put language to things and they help us understand things. And I think poetry, especially because of the use of metaphor. Uh, if I'm experiencing something and I don't really quite have words for my internal experience, I might be able to pull from different other experiences and use metaphor to understand and give language and start giving shape and form to my internal experience. In poetry, if I give the same prompt to somebody, but I say write a poem instead of journaling, people tend to write less and they tend to get more to the heart of the matter and be less concerned about factual details and more concerned about their internal experience of it. And in writing less, somehow they are able to condense information and still make it very powerful and moving, and it's a way to engage them more on their emotional side. People don't necessarily have to be emotional when they're journaling, but if you tell somebody to write a poem, immediately they know, oh, I need to write about my feelings. And it really helps move the needle quickly in a way that I think journaling might not always do. When people read poetry that somebody else has written about their experience and how they're understanding their emotions about it, it helps us connect to something. It helps us connect to something that's alive in the other person, connect to the emotional world and the emotional experiences and the perspectives of the other person very quickly. And it's it's just really moving and very powerful in that way. And I think there's a lot less constraints involved with poetry. I think seeing somebody else's poem on this subject can open the door for you to examine your experiences from a different perspective. And it can also be empowering if you see somebody who's grappling with something that you have grappled with, and they did it 150 years ago, and you resonate with that, you go, okay, maybe I'm not so weird. Maybe this is part of the human condition. And it's okay if I write about this too, because my voice and my experience, my perspective is just as valid as theirs.

Janine 9:44

You write in the book that like you know you're getting into it when you start to cry. Oh, yeah. And that's part of your process.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

It can be. I don't always cry when I'm writing poetry, but if I do end up crying, I know, oh, I just tapped onto something that I didn't know was that vulnerable. I didn't know was that important to me, I didn't know was that charged. So when I I do start crying, it's an indication that that that was something that was really charged for me.

Janine 10:14

Maybe we should

A Trauma Poem About Shame

Janine 10:15

just read one of your poems. Would you be open to reading it? I would love to, yes. Yeah, so please read, look at it. That would be great.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Okay, here we go. It's always a bit terrifying, I think, for me to read out loud my poems because it's it's a lot of me, there's a lot of vulnerability in this, but also it's art. And art is in the eye of the beholder, and how people ultimately end up experiencing my poems is not really within my control. And part of I think my motivation behind writing this book was to not just plainly expose myself, but to find ways to connect with people. And poetry is, I think, a way that I've found that really works to create connection and groups with individuals, within ourselves, and towards others. So I hope people are able to receive my poems with that in mind. And here we go. This is Look At It, which is a poem that's in the chapter about trauma. Shame says, hide you are all alone. Nobody else has this problem. You are broken. Trauma says, hide, you are all alone. Nobody else has this problem. You are broken. Lies, lies, lies, lies. Look at it, to take away its power to tell you lies, to talk to it, to understand how it has affected you, look at it, to realize how weak it truly is. Even a speck of dust can look like a giant shadow monster until you turn on the light. I can assure you, however big the trauma, you are bigger, and you have hands to hold the hands of a safe person while you look at it.

Janine 12:15

I love that. What was it like writing that one?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

I was thinking a lot about shame and trauma and and what that experience of it is and how similar they are, and how they shame and trauma kind of feed off of each other, and how that keeps people stuck. And I wanted people to know that whatever it is that they have experienced, they are bigger than that one experience or than that series of experience. I think people underestimate their capacity and their strength. I also wanted to emphasize how important community is. You don't have to go through this alone. There are ways to find helpers who will help you through whatever it is that you need to work through. You don't have to be alone and you don't have to listen to the lies that trauma and shame tell you.

Janine 13:07

And

Finding A Safe Person To Hold Hands

Janine 13:08

to me, that's like a metaphor for therapy, and you have hands to hold the hands of a safe person. But at the same time, like if I'm reading this and I don't go to therapy and I don't tell anyone my secrets, I would go, like, how do I find the hand of a safe person to hold? I would think that. I would wonder. And maybe that's a start, you know, for a search for help.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

I think you will never find a safe person that will hold your hand if you don't raise your hand. Depending on people's life circumstances and the environment that they grew up in, and the people that they grew up in, it might be very unsafe to ask for help. But I would say there are safe people out there in the world. Raise your hand. Look. You'll find the helpers. They're everywhere. They're just they might not be immediately obvious at first, but there are organizations, there are therapists out there, and people might not always know how to help you, but they can maybe find you help. The important thing is to start raising your hand and ask.

Grief, Miscarriage, And Saying “Me Too”

Janine 14:23

I'm wondering if there was a chapter and a series of poems that were harder for you and what that subject may have been. You knew they had to be in the book.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Some chapters did come easily to me than others. I think the chapter that I grappled the most with was probably the grief chapter. That's actually probably one of my longest chapters, too. There's so much that can be said about grief, and I have very strong opinions about grief. The chapter about grief is, I think, more intended to highlight what to do about it. Which is, I think, a big part of resilience is being able to engage with your feelings, difficult experiences and difficult feelings, and being able to move through them and process through them. And I believe that is sprinkled throughout the book and a lot of the different experiences that I talk about that do involve loss.

Janine 15:22

In terms of grief, you do have so many poems that do hit on that. One of them was is very, very raw, and I'm sure it was hard to write where you share your miscarriage. How was that process for you? And how are you feeling as you open up and bring this book forward into the world?

SPEAKER_01 15:42

To be honest, it was incredibly difficult to write about the book, it didn't feel complete until I added that poem called Sometimes It Doesn't Work Out to the Collection. And that was the last poem that I wrote for the book. After several rounds of editing, I really debated and I went back and forth about whether or not I should include it. But I felt that it was such a personal experience that had so much emotional charge for me. And it's something that I knew would resonate with a lot of people because I know a lot of women, a lot of mothers, a lot of really good mothers who have gone through the experience of a miscarriage and how painful and raw and confusing it can be. And I I didn't feel like the book would be complete without it. It's under the chapter called Pregnancy, and it's the first poem in it, and it's called Sometimes It Doesn't Work Out. And it starts with, I'll just read the first few lines. Did my body fail me? Am I being punished? Do I count as a good woman? And those are questions that I really had about what was going on with me and why this was happening. And I it took me a minute to realize that when we're faced with an incredibly painful situation and we don't know why it's happening, we tend to fill in that gap with ourselves and make ourselves to be the problem because at least that gives us some kind of sense of a control over the situation. And I realized that I was doing that when I was going through the experience. And I thought it initially it was me. I must be a problem. There must be something wrong with me, or this should be some kind of karma or something that's coming to get me. And I think that's something really common that we as humans do, and especially that women do, when they're faced with an incredibly painful situation and they don't know how to solve it or don't know initially why it's happening. We fill in that gap of knowledge with ourselves and we make out ourselves to be the problem. And I I wanted to talk about that in the book.

Janine 17:51

Yeah, it's really powerful. At the end, you talk about would you read just the ending about how women coming together? The ending. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

It's learning that most of the mothers I know have gone through some version of it, having the sad privilege of putting my hand on another woman's shoulder and saying, Me too, me too, you will get through. I'm sorry. I'm gonna cry. I really do feel that way, and I think I still feel that way, and it's still a poem that's very charged for me. There's a solidarity that emerges from so much grief and sadness that can move us in the direction of happiness, which is maybe a bit of a contradiction, but going through grief and knowing that you don't have to go through it alone and using it as a way to connect with other people, I think is one of the central themes throughout my book. And knowing that you're not different in that way, you're not unique or there's nothing that's inherently broken about you. So many people have gone through and kind of experienced and had the same questions and same thoughts and not known what to do with the confusion and grief about it, and knowing that we can go through it together, I think is is really moving to me.

Janine 19:16

Absolutely. I think it's wonderful. I just have all the respect and excitement I feel it for you. So have fun. Thank you so much, Janine.

Preorder, Free Guide, And Share

Janine 19:28

Thank you so much for listening to the show. Margaret's book is on sale September 1st, and you can pre-order from Amazon and Barnes Noble. Margaret also has a free downloadable poetry starter guide at her website, SageInsytherapy.com forward slash the book, to start your own bad poetry journey. Check out the show notes for more, and when you can, please share an episode of Bipolar She with someone who needs to hear it.