Have you ever read a book that changed your life, increased your understanding in some way or created new insight? Have you ever “met” a character who you could identify with? Have you ever recommended a book? If you have, then you have experienced bibliotherapy.
Bibliotherapy is more than just reading; it is reading to gain insight, understanding and growth. It is an intentional process. Although this approach to enlightenment has been around since the early 1900’s and has been used by many therapists, it is not a “cure” for mental health. disorders.
This approach can be used in individual sessions with your therapist or in a small group setting. The benefit to joining a group is the added layer of growth that occurs through group interactions in addition to the material.
There is no age limit with this therapeutic approach. Children, as well as adults, benefit from reading books in this intentional way, also called “storybook guidance”.
Here are a few researched and documented benefits of reading for healing, or bibiotherapy, or storybook guidance:
Affective changes:
- Promotes empathy
- Creates positive attitudes
- Produces personal and social adjustment
- Develops positive self-image
- Relieves emotional pressures
- Develops new interests
- Promotes tolerance, respect, and acceptance of others
- Encourages realization that there is good in all people
- Helps reads to identify socially accepted behaviors
- Stimulates the examination of moral values, which results in character development
- Creates a desire to emulate models
Cognitive changes
- Stimulates critical thinking, such as analysis, drawing conclusions and implications, making decisions, solving problems, making judgments
- Gives perspective to problems so that they can be put into proper proportion; reader sees universality of problems
- Provides vicarious experiences
- Provides insight into human behavior and motives
- Develops in the reader the ability for self-evaluation
- Challenges reader to consider higher-level reasoning
- Encourages planning before taking a course of action
- Permits discussion on an impersonal level
- Reveals that problems have many alternative solutions and individuals have choices in solving problems (1980) C E Cornett & C F Cornett