Experiential Therapy

Reading Tian Dayton's The Living Stage to preparation for a full week long internship in experiential therapy and psychodrama. I am not totally sure how I feel about it yet. I mean, I have a theatrical background and I love role play. I think it is such a powerful tool for integrating ideas into actions. You can talk forever about what you might do, could do, but until you try on how it feels in your body, your brain, on your tongue, it doesn't feel real or realizable.

(link to watch a little preview of The Process video for a sampling of what psychodrama looks like)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4trcAVp1Zc

There is an entire language to psychodrama. Its a totally foreign language of sociometry and social atoms and protagonists. I am cramming the book before I start on Friday. Watched the 13 minute version of The Process. I am curious to see how people go through this work, re-enacting their traumas without being re-traumatized, without fueling their pain. I want to see if the catharsis is effecive. In the book, she talks about concretizing emotions and experience. I want to understand this (so I can explain it here, right now its all foggy in my head.)

I can see that this process could be very empathy building through role reversals. In this therapy, you stage scenes from your life, with the help of the director/therapist. You can be the protagonist, or if the scene is too painful, you can have someone else stand in for you. You can also have a 'double'--someone who stands by you and helps you voice your feelings. Then you cast the other members of the ensemble, the other characters from this scene in your life. Sometimes you do a role reversal, where someone else plays you and you experience being the other person in the scene,exploring what it feels like to be them in the scene.

This will be in some ways a stark contrast to my other internship in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (I promise I will address this copiously in future posts.) Though we do role playing in the skill building groups. I feel as if I am about to leap into another world--one that may arouse some of my skepticism, but may also open doors of insight and techniques and orientation that were previously unknown to me.