TITLE:
Poetic Re-Authoring as Emotional Regulation: Narrative Therapy and Positive Psychology in Prolonged Waiting
AUTHORS:
Farzaneh Haratyan
KEYWORDS:
Narrative Poetry, Emotional Regulation, Positive Psychology, Narrative Therapy, Prolonged Waiting, Cognitive Reappraisal, Creative-Critical In-quiry
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.6,
June
30,
2026
ABSTRACT: This paper presents a creative-critical inquiry into how narrative poetry functions as a mechanism for emotional regulation for women who have endured prolonged waiting, intergenerational loss, and protracted uncertainty. The author uses her own original poem, The Fig Tree Speaks, as the central artifact of analysis. Guided by narrative therapy and positive psychology, close reading is applied to metaphor, meter, rhyme, and classical allusion. The paper argues that poetic composition enables cognitive reappraisal, restores narrative coherence, and transforms passive suffering into crafted testimony. The poem, written in iambic pentameter with alternating rhyme, deploys classical allusions to Virgil, Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, and Boccaccio as a shared literary heritage of waiting. The central metaphor of the fig tree—an ancient symbol of patience and hidden sweetness—anchors the argument: hope is not a shout but a seed, not denial but the small, slow work of hidden cells. The conclusion argues that for individuals living under conditions of protracted uncertainty, shaping experience into verse is a disciplined, integrative, and deeply hopeful practice of re-authoring the self.