Thank you for joining us for episode 526 of Live Happy Now.

It's summertime, so it's a great time to break out the books.

But this year, let's try a new approach to those summer beach reads.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Emily Rumble,

a distinguished licensed clinical social worker

and bibliotherapist who wrote the book Bibliotherapy in the Bronx.

Emily specializes in integrating the creative arts into psychotherapy and mental well-being,

and she's here to explain the healing power of literature and tell us how we can use those summer

reads to boost our mental

health. Let's have a listen. Emily, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. Thank you, Paula,

for having me. I'm so excited to talk with you today. This is going to be a fun conversation. And as I was

saying to you, I get to say something I very rarely get to say these days is this is something we've never talked

about on the show. So it's something very new for our listeners. I'm really excited. We're talking

about bibliotherapy. So to begin with, can you explain what bibliotherapy is? It's the million

dollar question. Everybody wants to know. Everyone's on chat, GPT, right? They're like,

right? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Bibliotherapy is the intentional use of reading, of reading literature,

and whatever genre or format that means for emotional insight, reflection, and healing.

It's not just sort of prescribing a book and crawling at a day. It's really about using stories, reflection, and healing. It's not just sort of prescribing a book and crawling it a day.

It's really about using stories, poems, narratives as mirrors and windows into our own life

experience. So when a character reflects our pain, our hopes, our fears, it's super validating

and it's liberating. And in my clinical work as a therapist who

specializes in literature-based approaches, I help clients name their emotions using literature.

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