What a therapist does is make something called an intervention if they see something is wrong. But what do you do when there is so much wrong that you aren’t going to be able to solve things one on one?
Do it through fiction. Get a movie made. That is what I want to do.
From now on.
I wasn’t expecting the intense pain of the last decade ten years ago. I really wasn’t. I was fresh with a master’s degree, from the finest school, and ready to go forth and heal the world. That is something my generation was brought up to do. Well? During all those hours and hours and hours of client time you hear stories. Stories that you cannot believe sometimes, but they are true.
It was at the Writer’s Conference I go to that I met a screenwriter who impressed me with his ability to move an audience because of the truth in his writing. I think I fell in love at first sight with that. I did. My whole thesis at school was on films as treatment plans, in a sense.
We live in a culture that is media driven now more than at any other time. Image is everything. Image is how people learn in 2011. In a sense the text is less than the image? Or the text creates the image through which learning can occur.
The thing about film is that it has the ability to touch people’s hearts and minds. As a trained therapist I can use the concept of bibliotherapy to help shift the collective psyche. I learned that when I was on a writer’s list in here.
Some writers have taken news stories and written from those. But, I have taken news stories and made therapeutic interventions.
Not bad. For one thing it is a way of working faster and larger and also it is way more fun.
The last client I saw had an inner world that was as fragmented as what we have been discussing over the last few days here. Literally he had no reality testing at all. I mean that. That is a big, big problem. So, I am choosing to step out of the old “field” and work as an ecopsychologist — as a writer. I want to see a bigger and faster cure.
What I did in the book was write a simple allegory about two teens who met on a beach.
But it’s more than that?
It’s a story about Love.
I grew up on morality tales. I guess that is how I am writing too, in the sense of bibliotherapy.
Has love gone from this world?
Maybe.
Can we get it back?
Maybe.
Love is pretty much all there is, in this life. That’s really true.
Can a therapist effect a cure by writing love?
Maybe.
That is what I did.
Bibliotherapy is a way of modeling what things look like. So, what I did in that book was model what love looks like?
That screenwriter I like had written this film.
I was thinking of him when I wrote my book. Character studies. That is what this sort of writing is called. Since as a trained therapist I know the backstory on social problems? Well, that gives me pretty great insight about showing things that are problems and then solving them through a work of art. That’s my plan anyway.
As above, so below…
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 