Processing Trauma Through Poiesis

The Allender Center Podcast

The Allender Center

Psychology, Religion & Spirituality, Mental Health, Christianity, Trauma, Health & Fitness, Theology

4.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are excited to have Sue Cunningham, who is acclaimed by Dan Allender as the officially-unofficial Poet Laureate of the Allender Center, back with us. In this discussion, we’re taking on the term "poiesis," which comes from the Greek word "to make" and is related to "poetry."

At the Allender Center, we believe that writing and telling your story is an essential part of the process of understanding and processing traumatic experiences. We explore how poetry relates to this process in our conversation with Sue Cunningham, Dan Allender, and Rachael Clinton Chen. They also discuss the effects of the creative process on the brain and the power of using descriptive language to make meaning.

We encourage you, our listeners, to be bold this week and try writing some poetry to see what insights you can gain from the experience.

Sue invites us: “Will you have the courage to just say one true thing? And whether it's like you speak it and I'll write it down for you and then give it to you, or you scribble it in a journal or you write it on the back of a napkin, anything to say, it's honoring, you matter. You exist.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.
0:06.7	I'm Dr. Dan Allender.
0:08.7	And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen.
0:10.5	We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.
0:14.7	And restoration for the heart.
0:17.2	Thank you for joining us.
0:18.5	Let's get this conversation started.
0:30.0	Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. One of my favorite guests that we have on, never enough, but enough that our audience should, well, might recognize the name
0:42.8	Sue Cunningham, what I would consider our poet laureate of the Allender Center and
0:52.0	a brilliant therapist, a brilliant teacher, and a spiritual director.
0:59.0	So Sue, Rachel and I welcome you, so glad to have you with us.
1:04.0	Thank you. It's so fun to be here, and I humbly accept as hillivore.
1:11.2	Good.
1:14.4	We are so blessed, actually, to have so many gifted poets among us,
1:22.0	you know, Campbell, Jill, many others.
1:26.0	So to be one of the voices of our engagement, just to warn people, we are talking poetry,
1:35.1	but we're going to make it a little more dramatic.
1:37.8	And that is, I want to introduce the word poesis.
1:41.5	Don't ask me to spell it.
1:43.4	My fourth grade teacher told me I can't spell, so I'm not going to bother. But poesis. Don't ask me to spell it. My fourth grade teacher told me I can't spell, so I'm not going to bother. But poesis is where we somewhat get the word poetry. And the word poesis has the notion of bringing something into existence that did not exist before.
2:02.7	It is blooming, that's the word Heidegger used, to talk about poises,
2:08.8	a flowering, a coming into reality of what may not have been able to be voiced or understood until this new creation occurs.
	...

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