Narrative Mindworks spoke with clinical psychologist, poet, and musician Carol Moog, PhD, about anger, creativity, and the different ways we learn to understand and express ourselves.
In This Conversation
- Why Carol sees anger as a survival response, not simply something to control
- How music helped her move from a shy child to someone comfortable performing
- What poetry allowed her to express that traditional autobiography could not
- How a clinician’s own emotions and experiences can affect the way they help others
- Why Carol questions the idea that every uncomfortable emotion needs to be regulated
Carol traces some of these ideas back to her own childhood. She describes growing up with a powerful parent while feeling strong-willed herself, but having little control as a child. The result, she says, was a kind of “helpless rage.” Over time, music, acting, writing, and performing gave her different ways to understand and use that energy.
The harmonica became an important turning point. Carol had played piano but struggled to improvise the way she wanted. With the harmonica, she found what she calls a kind of voice. Playing music pushed her onto stages, into bands, and toward becoming more comfortable taking up space rather than shrinking from herself.
That same exploration runs through her poetry collection, She Sat, But Not Still. Carol and Tony Errichetti discuss poems about alienation, anger, instinct, self-control, and survival. Carol explains that poetry reached parts of her experience that years of more traditional autobiographical writing had not.
The conversation also turns toward clinical practice. Tony raises the importance of the “self of the therapist”: understanding what a clinician’s own emotions, experiences, and motivations may bring into the room. Carol pushes the discussion further by questioning some of the language around emotional regulation. As she puts it, “I don’t want to be regulated. I want to be able to use my emotions.”
For clinicians, therapists, and Narrative Medicine practitioners, the conversation offers a practical question: instead of treating difficult emotions only as problems to calm or control, what can we learn by understanding where they come from and what they are doing?
