Bibliotherapy In Practice

How To Choose The Right Literature For Your Bibliotherapy Client

When choosing literature for your client it’s important to keep a few considerations in mind. As you get to know your client you will be able to identify their reading style, reading preferences, genre preferences and you will be able to understand who they are as readers. Once you’ve built a rapport and cultivated an understanding of who your client is as a reader, you will be able to select literature that is therapeutic and will further support their work in therapy. As a clinician, you will be able to pull out relevant themes based on your client’s specific therapy goals to select literature that is going to enhance the work you are doing in the therapy room.

Once you understand what type of literature will easily engage your client, you want to make sure that the literature is accessible to them. Literature that is accessible is representative of the client’s identity, learning needs, cultural, and racial background. You want to make sure to keep linguistic considerations in mind as well. This can look many ways including choosing literature in the client’s native language, choosing literature that is easy to read (in many cases I use novels in verse for young readers), or employing the use of comic books, graphic novels and other forms of oral storytelling.

It’s important to choose literature that will help the client to vent negative feelings and to identify exactly what is coming up for them emotionally. The reading experience should be a cathartic one for optimal impact and therapeutic value. For some clients, highly symbolic material might be too overstimulating and for others it might be exactly what they need to make meaning of their experiences. Every clinician should use sound clinical judgement when deciding what their client’s threshold is for particularly triggering themes in a text.

Most importantly, the literature should offer a hopeful outcome. This does not mean the story must have a happy ending. It does mean that the story should provide possible solutions to problems and offer up potential ways conflict can be resolved. This last component is the most crucial to choosing literature that is going to promote healing, understanding, and growth -even if the positive message is simply that human suffering is, in fact, survivable.