Patty Wooten presents ...

Patty Wooten: Annette, you are a "Laughter Therapist." Can you tell us your perspective on the therapeutic potential for laughter?

Annette Goodheart: I believe that laughter is a healing mechanism. Humor, on the other hand, is an intellectual, thoughtful process. Laughter is an innate characteristic we are born with. Humor is learned. Just because someone has a sense of humor, it doesn't mean they laugh. Depending upon what we learned as children about what's laughable and what's not, we develop our adult sense of humor. As a therapist, I believe it's dangerous to use humor to elicit laughter in a client, because it makes an assumption about what they need. They may really need to cry.

All laughter comes out of some form of pain. Either light pain such as surprise or excitement, or deeper pain which in our culture is called stress.

My therapeutic perspective was inspired by something Charlie Chaplin once said, "In order to laugh, we must be able to play with our pain." I believe my job as a therapist is to, with the client's permission, help him play with his pain. And I don't separate physical, emotional, and spiritual pain. I try to help the client pinpoint, as accurately as I can, where the pain is. The more finely that pain is pinpointed, the quicker the healing occurs.

When I refer to healing, I don't mean cure, I mean balance. Laughter rebalances the chemical changes that occur in our bodies when we have painful emotions. During the experience of painful emotions, our bodies get chemically out of balance to prepare us for certain kinds of action. If we don't cathartically resolve this in the way nature intended us to, then that chemistry gets stored and we become more unbalanced. If this situation is prolonged it can lead to disease. More and more diseases are being linked to primary emotions.

I recently read of a study done at University of Southern Michigan where they found that people who use ridicule and put down humor spend more time in the hospital than those who are into wit. I believe that using ridicule does damage to the ridiculer because it keeps him in touch with unhealthy feelings like hostility.

I work with not only laughter but also with tears and raging. All are cathartic processes. Laughter is the most acceptable form of catharsis in our society, so it is easier to access and it can help facilitate other cathartic processes.

Laughter in and of itself is very deep work. Many people have profound "aha's" after laughter bouts. The classic psychodynamic view of laughter is that you are avoiding or hiding something. This is a very western view. In eastern philosophies, laughter is considered to be next to enlightenment.

Laughter has also been a way of punishing people. It's a way of separating someone from the group. In Native American societies ridicule has been used to punish individuals, by emotionally separating them from the community. In a small tribal community, if one is physically separated from the group he could perish. This creates a very primal threat and is therefore a powerful weapon.

AG: Really, it's just a matter of tapping into what they already know. As infants and children, we laugh all the time. We don't need to tell racist jokes to access our laughter.

Essentially, I give people the tools to play with their pain and help them regain the ability to hold the world in a light fashion.

I have many techniques which are too complex for this short article. I offer a week long workshop to help nurses and therapists learn and practice these techniques.

I also have a new book to help people learn to laugh about difficult moments in their lives.

Goodheart, Annette. (1994).
Laughter Therapy: How to Laugh about Everything in Your Life that Isn't Really Funny. Santa Barbara, CA: Less Stress Press.

AG: To roll it all up into one word, it has to do with disconnection. Even though we say we're all connected in our society, we don't experience it very often. We walk around feeling alienated and isolated. All cathartic activity stimulates a chemical rebalancing, which creates the experience of connection within ourselves. When we laugh together or cry together we feel reconnected with ourselves and with each other.

If you can pinpoint your pain, that's where the healing takes place. It rebalances the chemistry that prevents us from thinking clearly. Our emotions are not meant to produce thinking, they're meant to produce action. With each emotion, chemicals are released to stimulate us into specific actions. If we don't take that action, we then have a hangover. That's what the cathartic activity resolves.

PW: Do you have any stories which demonstrate your philosophy?

AG: I was working with an AIDS patient who'd just been diagnosed with meningitis. Naturally, he was terrified. He came for his regular appointment on Thursday and we spent one hour laughing, screaming, and crying. I realized that he still had more to release, so I sent him out to the beach to continue. He went to the hospital on Monday and his meningitis was gone, and the physicians had no explanation for it.

We don't know yet how much influence our emotions and beliefs have on our bodies, especially on our immune system. If you think about it, the immune system is the way our body relates to the outside world. It is the key to how we interface with our environment. It interprets what belongs and what doesn't, what hurts us and what doesn't.

PW: Do you mean that perhaps these cathartic activities help remove or protect us from emotions that could have a harmful effect upon us?

AG: Yes, and people in dire circumstances can come up with the most magical and wonderful statements to help themselves laugh and to heal the way they've been relating to their situation. That's what laughter does. It shifts the way we relate to what's happening to us, things that we don't always have control over. That's the healing part of laughter. It alters how we relate to something.

Our attitude, viewpoint, and belief system are the keys to how we interface emotionally with something outside us, and laughter and other cathartic processes change that relationship.

This article was originally published in "Jest for the Health of It", a regular feature in the Journal of Nursing Jocularity.

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