How To Feel Better
January 22, 2026
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Use the power of poetry to ease emotional stress
I spent last weekend with sixteen women. Each of them had a story.
It was my most recent “healing poetry” retreat, showing people how to use the power of poetry to ease emotional stress, anxiety, and trauma.
I guided participants in how to write simple poems – as opposed to journaling – to lift the burden of painful feelings, find strength in their own words, gain a sense of control, and feel less alone in their emotional trauma.
The focus of my healing poetry program was not writing better, but writing to feel better.
Some of the topics we covered at Litchfield, Connecticut’s, extraordinary Wisdom House Retreat and Conference Center:
• How healing poetry eases emotional trauma• De-mystifying poetry• Expressive writing and its benefits• Overcoming loneliness• Writing to heal: three secrets• Writing for emotional strength• Self-discovery• Self-healing• Self-reliance• Self-acceptance• Silver linings: humor, gratitude, hope• Cherishing yourself
Healing loneliness – to heal all emotional trauma, in fact – starts with telling your story. This gives us a sense control. We choose the words, the images, and the structure, which can restore the sense of control that trauma has disrupted.
A poem can show us that hardship and mortality are part of everyone’s life, and through poetry, we can free ourselves from the feeling of being overwhelmed.
One of the women, Maddie Costa, wrote this moving poem in twenty minutes during one of the weekend’s writing periods:
RequiemI stand shivering at your grave.It is not the weather that shakes me,but the stone-cold words:Sgt. Jeffrey A. PinheiroDied Vietnam, Feb. 11, 1968Indelibly carved.No one knows but Ihow you once gifted me—my first, sweetest kiss.I remember how my fourteen-year-old soulstirred with new joy,awakening to tenderness,to possibility.And now, even all these years later,I know this truth:“If only…”are the saddest two wordsof my life.
This is what Wordsworth was talking about when he defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
I base my teaching on work done by Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Houston, who in the 1980s found that writing our honest feelings about a traumatic event changes the way trauma is organized in the brain.
If we suppress emotion, Dr. Pennebaker found, our mind treats the emotion as unfinished work. Writing closes the loop. It re-establishes our control.
Who benefits from my weekend? Anybody struggling with any emotional trauma:
• Grief• Sexual abuse• Domestic violence• Natural disasters• Bullying• Terminal illness• PTSD
Julia Darling, a British poet and playwright, was diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty-eight and died ten years later. She believed passionately that poetry should be part of treatment at every hospital. She thought that the language of illness needed to change, that we can find in poetry a path out of darkness and into light.
One of the last things she did was to complete the co-editing of an anthology about illness, The Poetry Cure, which she wanted to see read by doctors and patients everywhere.
Shortly before her death in 2005, Julia wrote:
“I believe poetry can help make you better. Poetry is essential, not a frill or a nicety. It comes to all of us when we most need it. As soon as we are in any kind of crisis, or anguish, that is when we reach out for poetry, or find ourselves writing a poem for the first time.”
If you’re interested in participating in my next weekend retreat, or would like to join my free, no-critique, bi-weekly healing poetry workshops via Zoom, email me at peterwyaremko@gmail.com and I’ll tell you all about it.