Bad Poetry For Better Mental Health with Margaret Bryden

Creativity As Self-Understanding

We don't always need to explain ourselves better. Sometimes we need a different way to listen to what's already there. Today we are exploring how creativity can become a doorway into self-understanding, especially when our thoughts and emotions feel too messy, contradictory, or just difficult to explain. My guest shares why bad poetry may actually be a powerful tool for reflection, resilience, and reconnecting with ourselves. So welcome to Connect, Inspire, Create, a podcast exploring meaningful conversations about life, work, creativity, and the ways we can explore fresh ideas. Let's slow down just enough to notice what inspires or intrigues us and how these insights can help shape what we create in our lives. I'm Carol Clay, a life coach offering gentle accountability for navigating change, trusting yourself and creating what comes next. Joining me today is Margaret Brighton, a licensed clinical mental health counselor, author, and the founder of Sage Insight Therapy in Salt Lake City. Margaret's work is grounded in the belief that meaningful mental health support should feel accessible and human. Alongside traditional therapeutic approaches, she uses poetry as a tool to help people express what may be difficult to explain in an ordinary conversation. She has recently had her book published. Right, this month, right? Margaret? Yes, right, this month. And her book is How I Understand It: A Bad Poet's Guide to Mental Health and Resilience, which invites people to let go of the pressure to write something good and instead use poetry as a way to notice, express, and understand what's happening inside. So, Margaret, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this because this is just such a beautiful with the permission and what we're going to dig into about bad poetry.

Life Behind The Therapist Role

But before we get into poetry and mental health, I have a just a question for you. Sure. What are people most surprised to learn about you even after they've known you for a while?

Oh, geez, I don't know. I don't think I'm very mysterious. So there's not a lot that, you know, like is it hidden or something that somebody were to spend a lot of time with me, they wouldn't have picked up on.

Any lovely hobbies or something crazy? They'll go, huh? I never thought you would do that.

No, I have pretty boring hobbies.

Not boring.

Well, they're, you know, they're nothing spectacular. I don't like go hot air ballooning or anything like that. I think I mostly, when I have time, I like to read. And lately I've been reading maybe a little bit more poetry, but really my focus has been on work. My I work at the hospital, at a psychiatric hospital, and I have my own private practice stage insight therapy. And I just published a book, and all of that is all time consuming. So I think maybe people might be surprised to know that I don't have too much time for my hobbies right now.

I know I'm not surprised, but a

Curiosity Instead Of Self-Fixing

huge congratulations on getting your book published. So you make a distinction between fixing ourselves and understanding ourselves. And I like that observation. But what changes when we can approach ourselves with just a little curiosity instead of saying, I need to solve myself like a problem and be just a touch curious.

So I do feel like people come to therapy and they go, This is the problem, fix it, fix me. And usually the approach of in therapy is actually let's just get curious and start to understand what's really there. The rush to sort of arrive to some sort of quick fix is actually uh what prevents us from seeing the root of the issue of what's really going on. So I think with curiosity, we allow ourselves to approach life issues with a lot more understanding and self-compassion.

Yeah, self-compassion and trusting ourselves. I know you also say that people can sometimes explain their problems really well, exabilize what's going on, and then they still feel stuck. And so, why would what would you say that having this insight, you know, isn't always enough. And sometimes we need to begin doing something differently.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's it's one thing to know something. I have plenty of people and clients and friends in my life who will say, I know that I keep doing this thing and it's not working out for me, but I keep doing it. I can't stop doing it. And it's not an issue.

Why Insight Alone Can Fail

Right? It's they can't help themselves and they can't stop doing the thing. It's inside alone is not enough. And I find that it's usually a combination of emotional awareness too, that that is needed in order to fully grasp a situation. So we're not all just cerebral and we're not all just emotional. We need to have both sides in order to get the full picture. And so a lot of times when people have all that cognitive knowledge, what they're lacking is an emotional understanding of how it's really impacting them in order to be able to see the full picture and then be able to motivate themselves or get a better understanding of making different choices.

Yeah, I'll smile while I'm listening because I have my whiteboards up here next to me. And one of my quotes that I've got written here are emotions are part of life, giving color and texture to our experience. We don't need to be free of them. We only need to befriend them.

Right. I mean, befriending our feelings is such a powerful thing to do. And I feel like people don't do it enough. And a lot of times when when people are feeling stuck, it's they're feeling stuck emotionally. They're not feeling stuck logically, they're feeling stuck emotionally. So any tools that you can use to better understand your own emotional world and what your emotional motivations are is very helpful. I say this a lot in my work at the psychiatric hospital that I work in, but a lot of times people approach emotions and they feel like they should just have the same logic as like math. The same logic is like a one, two, three-step process. And the reality is our emotions work very differently than that. They have their own logic. So understanding that side of you means understanding a whole different language and a whole different way of being. And a lot of times what's

Emotions Have Their Own Logic

what's missing is that understanding that part of ourselves in order to be able to fully, as a whole, integrate a person move forward.

Right, and not beat ourselves up. But this is perfect to let's talk about bad poetry because I love the permission in that phrase. And what do you mean by us? And why can writing badly actually be useful?

Well, bad poets are people who write honestly and are people who are curious and they're curious about the human condition and they're curious about themselves. And that is what kind of motivates them to write, even though what they know, they know that what they're writing isn't necessarily going to win them any literary awards. So it's about writing without paying attention about how others might judge your work, because it's not about impressing other people. It's about getting to something that's true and that's real for you, and that's important for you to express. So bad poets are really fun, curious people, but they're people who don't necessarily worry about grammar or rhyming or what an iambic pentameter is. None of that really matters. Uh, the only real rule about bad poetry is to be honest.

I love this. I know because I think many people who listen to this are immediately gonna say, I'm not creative, I'm not a writer. You know, so if someone is listening who's already thinking that right now, how would you invite them to approach this without turning it into something else that they have to be good at? Oh, here's another thing that I can't achieve or won't achieve. What would you say to them?

I would say that writing poetry is worth doing. And the things that are worth doing in life are worth doing even if you do them imperfectly. And sometimes that's kind of the point. Doing the things that you know are going to benefit you, even if you're doing it imperfectly, will still bring you forward and will still show you different things and will still allow you to learn and grow. So try it. You really have nothing to lose. Uh, poetry has this amazing power to get us to reflect about issues in different ways. It gives us language in order to talk about experiences, it allows us to use metaphor and imagery to expand our understanding of issues that are going on inside of us. And who wouldn't want that? I mean, a lot of times people, when they tell me, oh, I have I have no ability to write. I am not a writer. I've never even read a poem. I have no idea what you're talking about. And this happens actually quite a bit because not most people aren't poets, right? And I just say, okay, let's try an exercise, just try it. And then they surprise themselves with what comes out. And it's actually quite good. I think some of the best poems I've read are from people who are very admint that they had no creative bone in their entire body. And then, and then even they write something and they go, Oh, but this isn't a poem, it's a paragraph. And I say, Okay, just let me see it, or let's read it together. And it was absolutely a poem.

Oh, wow.

And it said something, it said something about themselves that that maybe they've been holding for quite

What Bad Poetry Really Means

some time.

So they found a space to express, express that. How would you say writing a few lines of poetry is different from journaling? Oh, it's why might somewhere choose the one over the other.

So I know journaling is very popular, and I think for good reason, journaling is great, and it allows us to do a lot of different things and work through issues. Poetry is sort of like journaling but on steroids. And a lot of people think of journaling as a coping skill, but they would never think of poetry as a coping skill. Poetry is absolutely a coping skill. And part of the ways in which it is a bit more powerful, I think, than journaling is well, it's kind of like this. With journaling, if I if I tell you to journal and I give you a question, you could get lost in the details about it, and you will probably be trying to write in a very linear fashion, like first this happened, then that happened, then the third thing happened, and here are all the details about it. And not once would you necessarily have engaged your emotional side in writing, and you would have included a lot of details. With poetry, people automatically, like instinctively know, oh, there should be some emotional charge to this. And so they immediately, instinctively, without much instruction,

Poetry Versus Journaling For Clarity

know to write something that's about their emotional experience. So it gets to the heart of the matter rather quickly. And there's something really interesting that happens when people engage their creative side. Like with poetry, there's a lot of freedom. Oh, I can do this or I could do that, I could use all these metaphors, I could use all this imagery. And people aren't necessarily thinking about that with journaling. They're like, I gotta get it down, you know, with journaling, gotta get this out with journaling. With poetry, you're creating art. You would never, probably, I'm guessing, but I'm gonna ask you, would you ever show your journal to somebody? No. No. But you would never, right? But with poetry, you created something and you're like, okay, if you like that, you think it's kind of good, you would show somebody that. You've created then a vehicle for connection. Interesting. So poetry can be a vehicle for connection for us to feel less alone. And I think that's part of the enduring power of poetry, why it has such staying power with us. It engages our emotional side, it also can transmit important information, and it's a vehicle to connect. When when you read poets, poets' work, poems even from a thousand years ago, like Rumi poetry. A thousand years ago, Rumi was out there writing some stuff, and you read it now and go, Oh my god, that's me. How did they know?

Yeah, that's absolute power in those people.

There's power in that, in that transmission of information, but in that emotional reality that Rumi over a thousand years ago was able to capture. And then we connect with that and we go, Oh, maybe I'm having a human experience. Maybe I'm not so weird, maybe I'm normal, maybe the things that I think about and how I experience things, it's okay because they were doing it a thousand years ago.

And it's the interpretation for ourselves that we can pull and pick out of that what we need at the time. Yeah.

But uh so the flexibility of poetry, how it creates a vehicle for connection for us, it's artistry. So you're actually creating something, and it allows us to use our creative juices, our creative energy a

Connection Through Poems Across Time

little bit more. It just unlocks so many things.

That's yeah, this is really powerful. Um yeah, shame can often make us hide parts of ourselves that feel messy or contradictory. So, how does this creative expression soften that just a little when someone gives themselves permission to be honest on the page?

When you give yourself to permission to write some bad poetry, you're giving yourself permission to silence the inner critic. You're giving yourself permission to silence that that policing side of you that would be like, oh, you can't write or what you're writing isn't good. You're giving yourself permission to silence all of that. And you're opening up to see what's really there. So when you allow yourself to silence the shame, you'd be surprised at what emerges. The truth of situations emerges. You know, shame uh keeps us oppressed. It keeps us silent and it keeps us isolated. And uh 99.99999% of the time, I would say 100% of the time really, well, what shame is telling you to do is be quiet and be alone and be afraid and be, you know, it takes away your reasoning to live. Like if you let shame control things, and this is a way to take your power back. So it allows you to take your power back, to silence that critic, to silence the shame, and to talk about what actually matters to you.

Shame doesn't want you to discover the true beauty of who you are, of what's lying underneath, which wraps around the self-trust. And that's something that you know that we all I think is just a powerful place to work on self-trust, you know, just to be able to do that. But I'm wondering whether writing something down without immediately editing it or correcting it or judging it could become a tiny practice in self-trust.

Oh, absolutely. And I think it's a it's a very low risk way to do it. So the the risks with writing a bad poem, oh my gosh, so low, they're negligible. Well, what's the worst thing that can happen? You write something that's not good, okay. The best authors in the world have done that. But the reward can be so significant. I've had a lot of experiences with clients who write something and they go, Oh, I didn't realize that I was feeling that way about it. And now I know what to do. Yeah, it can be really powerful. So risk low, reward very high, in terms of increasing self-awareness, increasing clarity, increasing your direction, getting clarity on your direction on what you would like to do. Like you really have nothing to lose by trying it. And it's fun. It's fun to do. It's fun to get together with friends and write a poem. It's fun to get together and share something that you read that you found was meaningful. And I think part of the beauty of poems is that they're quite short. So it's not like reading a book. And plenty of people read a book and then go share books and talk about books with people. Poems have that same ability, but you get it much quicker because a poem will take you less than 10 minutes to read.

Well, that's what I was gonna ask you. Let's imagine someone listening is now intrigued by all of this conversation and how soul-lifting, heartwarming, there's just so many words, the joy, the creativity, but they've never written poetry before. So they're gonna sit down, they're gonna take this blank piece of paper. What would you invite them

Silencing Shame And Building Self-Trust

to do for the first five minutes?

Okay. Well, here's a poetry exercise that I like, and I think it helps people kind of open that door. First, I recommend getting into a kind of quiet place, a place where you can focus on yourself for at least five to ten minutes. You don't need that much time, and give yourself a blank piece of paper and a pencil or a pen, and concentrate on your breathing for just a minute or two, just on centering yourself on your breath and calming your nervous system with the intention of going deep. And then answer this writing prompt. What am I carrying today? And just see what comes up. Even if all you do is make a list, that list is your poem, and it might show you a lot about yourself today or how you're feeling this morning. I have a bunch of other poetry prompts that people can download for free from my website if they go to www.sage insight therapy.com on the page kind called the book. I have a free guide there that you can download that has a bunch of other poetry prompts like that one, just to help get you started.

I love that. It's called the Bad Poets Permission Slip, right? Yes, yes. And I love that. What are you carrying today? Such a simple, such a simple thing to just spend some time with, but that could be so, so freeing, and just as you say, that uh so I love that that we've got that resource for you. And then of course we've got your book, which I'm going to include in the show notes. So I just really, Margaret, thank you for just expressing, you know. It doesn't have to be perfect to be meaningful, but sometimes imperfect words on

A Five-Minute Prompt To Start

a page help us hear inside our own hearts just a little more clearly.

Absolutely. And there's a lot of research that shows that that creative expressive writing and creative writing in general has a healing effect on us. So if you look at the work even from the 1990s from Dr. James Pennebaker, he did a lot of research on creative expressive writing, and he he did his research mostly on college students because that was the group that was available to him. But what he found in his research was quite amazing, and and he did it in a very clever way. They would measure cortisol levels from people from before and after the creative writing exercises, and they would also look at number of times that the people who participated in the study actually visited hospital for any kind of appointment. And what they found was cortisol levels lower, doctor's appointments lower, other health indicators that they were looking at. People just felt better. Yeah. So creative writing has a lot of healing power in it.

That's beautiful. Well, I would love for you if you would like to share a poem

Research On Expressive Writing Benefits

from your book.

Sure. I'll share a short poem. This is from the chapter of The Paradoxes We Embody. So every there are many different chapters in my book. There are over a hundred different poems. This book is supposed to be used more as like a resource tool. So if you're going through something or a particular thing in life, you can go to that chapter and get hopefully what you need. All the poems are sort of infused with practical mental health concepts within them. And they are very, I hope, thought-provoking. So people can really dig into it. And then every chapter at the end of the chapter has reflection prompts, poetry prompts, and then there's a whole chapter on how to create your own poetry of resilience. So you have your own arsenal that you can pull from whenever you need a little pick-me-up. So I'm gonna read a poem called A Bird's Eye View. From a bird's eye view, I'm hilarious. I can hold that perspective and laugh through my personal tragedies. It is perhaps even more tragic and more hilarious when I choose not to. So this is a poem that talks about how we can take different perspectives basically on the same situation and even in on ourselves, and how we have the ability to kind of choose which which perspective to participate in that would allow us the most benefit. It's kind of short and sweet and to the point. So I like that. Absolutely.

The freedom to just, yeah, to ponder and to and I love that the bird's eye view, because so often we do need that if we could just look be up and and look over and around with uh without such a sort of the vision being so focused. It just has to be fixed. So thank you for sharing that with us. So I'm gonna make sure that people

A Poem Reading And Where To Find Margaret

know where to connect with you. Any platforms that you particularly like showing up on, then I can include that in the show notes.

Sure. I have an Instagram account. It's at Sage underscore insight underscore therapy. And you can also find me on Facebook at Sage Insight Therapy. And probably the best way to reach me would be my website, Sage Insight Therapy.com. Um, also I'm on LinkedIn and I post a lot of articles on LinkedIn about the power of creative writing and the power of poetry and how to use it and what's what's significant about it.

Wonderful. Margaret, thank you so much. This has really been delightful. So thank you for coming and just sharing another way that we can just look at taking care of ourselves and building ourselves trust. So for those of you listening, thank you for listening to Connect Inspire Great. Life doesn't always unfold the way we imagine. We all find ourselves navigating change and uncertainty, loss, or simply wondering what comes next. So thanks for listening to this episode. If you can think of somebody who might need to hear it, please share it with them. And thank you for joining Margaret and myself today. Until the next time, take care.