Bibliotherapy

Cognitive Bibliotherapy 

Cognitive behavioural therapy holds that thought patterns are largely responsible for negative emotional and behavioural patterns.

Our conditioning and self-talk tend to perpetuate distorted beliefs. With the advent of social media and its algorithms, many of us have a mental diet limited to existing beliefs that are reinforced by like-minded people sharing the same ideas.

The novelist, Franz Kafka argued that we take a wholly different approach when it comes to reading materials:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

When a book curator prescribes the right book it can challenge and change cognitive distortions and behaviours, improve emotional regulation, and help with the development of personal coping strategies that target current problems.

When humankind lived more simple, nature-based lives one’s tribal medicine men and women drew on herbs and plant remedies to assist with physical ailments. Having entered the information age where people engage their minds more than their bodies in daily work and life, our apothecary is the bibliotherapist, librarian and tuned in counsellor.

Author Louise Hay argued that physical symptoms and illness often begin first in the emotional and mental bodies. Western medicine can offer emergency life-saving surgeries, and temper symptoms but it often misses the root cause. After producing her landmark work, You Can Heal Your Life, she founded Hay House, a publishing company for self-help authors. Such was her belief in books as medicine.