Dear Mary,
Alanis Morissette recently commented that she found the songwriting process cathartic, but not healing. Your thoughts?
- Jen
London, UK
Dear Jen,
In 1990, I was arrested for drunk driving. A judge sentenced me to a year of probation and six months of weekly twelve-step recovery meetings. It worked. I got sober, then entered therapy. I wanted to recover, I wanted to heal. A few years later, I wrote my first song.
With fifteen years of serious drug and alcohol abuse behind me, I had no idea what all was festering inside me. I didn’t know where my wounds were located, how they got there, or precisely what I was recovering from. Songwriting worked hand-in-hand with sobriety and therapy to keep me looking inward, looking outward, and staying open to discovery. It took decades for me to learn the truth of my own story. Thirty years later, I’m still working on a deeper understanding of how it shaped me. Sobriety, therapy and songwriting all ask me to tell stories in ways that move my life forward in positive new directions – I doubt I would be here today without all three.
But I sometimes wonder, does songwriting, in and of itself, provide healing? I think it does. But how? What do I even mean by “healing”? And for that matter, healing what?
As soon as I put pen to paper and try to explain how the art of song works, I lose my bearings inside mystery and paradox. I do not know where songs come from, or exactly how I write them. The mystery of creation does not give way to analysis or reason. One observation is quickly cancelled by a counter observation. For example, while John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” is credited with helping end the war in Vietnam, Hitler used music and song to incite mass murder. In Germany today, the public singing or performing of songs identified exclusively with the Nazi’s can be punished with up to three years of imprisonment.
Music and song are tools, neither intrinsically good nor bad. Like all tools, music and song can be used for a variety of purposes. They can be used for both peace and war, for both love and hate. They can be used to check-in, or check-out.
I am in awe of the creative process and remain its humble servant. Humble, whose root word is humus, earth: dirt, from where we came, and where we shall return. But while here, like all of us, I’ve been given the power to co-create with that which has created me and vested the sacred power of co-creation inside me. I’ve chosen to commit my life to these powers greater than myself: imagination and creativity. Embedded in those powers is a mystery that lends itself to a litany of questions whose answers are always just out of reach. Words cannot do them justice. In fact, if we had the words, we wouldn’t need the art.
Art, when magnificent, always touches upon the ineffable.
I’ve written a book called “Saved By A Song” that comes out in July 2021. It is a collection of thoughts about the redemptive power of song, yet I still ask myself, exactly how does the art of song offer salvation?
I see salvation as the state of being saved from some kind of harm, redeemed from transgression and discharged from some kind of debt. Songwriting became a salvation for me after I got sober. It saved me from meaninglessness, saved me from work I did not love; work that did not connect with spirit. Songwriting gave me purpose and a goal that resets itself daily.
Every new song is a new challenge, forever leading to yet another a new beginning. I never feel like I have gotten “there” for very long. No matter the accolades my efforts bring, there is always the morning after, the blank page, the fear of having written my last good song. The work of song anchors me to life and to what matters, and my work is never done. Songwriting has given me a way to name and articulate the various traumas I’ve carried, helping pain get “unstuck,” making room for joy, and moving me forward. Undoubtedly, this catharsis has saved me from self-harm and relapse.
I think of catharsis as the release of emotion, often pent-up, that brings relief, especially when there is trauma and deep wounding. Like the unclogging of a drain or the tearing down of a dam, allowing water to flow freely, catharsis is the opening of a spigot.
Music and song speak the language of emotion. They activate brain areas associated with feelings and bring them to the surface to be released. With catharsis comes cleansing, clarity, and a feeling of relief that can be carried out of concert halls and into our lives. Releasing half-expressed emotions stored in the body, waiting to be fully expressed, can be in and of itself healing. Crying old tears can help put the past, finally, in the past. The power of art to induce collective emotional release has value in every culture.
I’ve revelled in the catharsis of writing and singing my own songs. My work has been a joy even when my songs have brought tears. I am forever inspired by the power of truth to raise goosebumps on my skin and put a lump in my throat. But for me, the effect of songwriting goes beyond catharsis.
To heal is to regain health, to mend, to get well. Songs, my own and others, have helped bind my wounds and harmonize my hurt by forcing me to stare down the stories of how it got there. Songs have helped bring clarity when I was confused, closure when I needed an ending, and faith when I longed for a power beyond myself. Through song, I’ve become my own witness and have been witnessed with empathy by others.
But to answer your question, Jen, I don’t think I can fully separate the impact of songwriting from the effects of therapy and twelve-step recovery. All three have all worked for me in tandem, a holy trinity of sorts, like guardian angels or guardrails, keeping me on the road and out of the ditch.
There is no cure for what I have - Alcoholism, addiction, and multiple layers of trauma. I deal with life a day at a time. While I know I am not cured, I’m healing, and in many ways, I am healed. Three decades later, I am more often at peace than not at peace.
There are plenty to whom the crucial problems of their lives never get described in ways that they can understand. They remain strangers to their own stories, alone in the confusion of their emotional woundedness. Again and again, they act out their pain on themselves and others. Like me, these souls are in need of salvation and healing.
I am forever grateful that I find salvation and healing through recovery, therapy, and a daily commitment to the art of song. I am a believer, and I count myself among the lucky, and the blessed.
- Mary