Sunday, June 17, 2012
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
On Being a Drama Therapist during Days of War
Heat waves across the asphalt in the San Francisco Bay area as July 2005 is turning to August. Ink from the Sunday Chronicle smears my hands. The fingerprint on the page is evidence that implicates me in relationship to the front page news. The President of the United States is pictured under the mast head and top of the fold, addressing a sea of Boy Scouts at a jamboree, urging their young restless souls to “be prepared” for military service. News the day before featured a photo of barefoot children, playing games in a sandy summer camp sponsored by Hamas in Palestine, where propaganda about the infidels and the virtues of suicide bombing come with the fun and fellowship of camp. My own children are away at camp in Idaho, where a day of peace is featured and the campers become activists, demonstrating for changes in the cook’s menu and drawing rainbow peace signs on paper with aphorisms like “there is more to life than power.” How intentional and conscious all of this summer youth advocacy is remains unquantified.
What is clear is that dramatic/theater processes are at work. Consider, for example, how roles are being played and costumes are being used to concretize group identification. Group cohesion is invited or coerced, the chorus exercises its power over political agendas and nationalist scripts and new behaviors are being practiced for choosing violent or non-violent means.Personal and collective visions join and/or separate one mother’s son and daughter from another mother’s child.
It is the intentional use of these dramatic processes as therapy for both individual and community that offers an antidote for the proliferation of propaganda and hate. Indeed, the symptoms in the human body and the global body politic, experienced as manipulation and degradation of human and ecological resources point to a splitting: uncontained aggression split off from our open hearts. Our capacity to tolerate uncomfortable feelings in the face of the other that is not like us cries out in The last cries and utterances of dying soldiers, children and women raped by the war in Iraq, or any war, bemoan intolerable feelings in the face of the other who is not like us.
Drama therapy hones tools for emotional and physical integration of our post-modern experience with the traditions of our ancestors. To grow personally and to remain in contact with one’s family and culture requires therapy to heal old wounds and dare to face the world without the images and masks that separate us in our narcissism. It is in this context that I choose to work as a drama therapist and make my imprint from the ink that has stained my own hands, indeed my own psycho-biology with greed, my “15 seconds of fame,“ affiliation, nostalgia for a new deal and a peace corps, along with a culture of narcissism that distracts my soul’s striving to be part of the interconnected web of life with the siren’s call to self-enhance with whatever resources are at my scratching and clawing fingertips.
No one carries the disruptions and disjunctions of the culture like the mentally ill and disabled. Character and personality disorders magnify the disturbances in our capacity to integrate our human nature with our highest inspirations, as well as the collective grandiosity of mistaking our analyses and interpretations for the Grand(iose) Design. It is my privilege to work with the deep sorrows and confusions that present themselves as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Work in a community mental health clinic provides the opportunity to serve our ancestors whose intentions were thwarted by poverty of mind, body or spirit, resulting in contortions of defenses and affect that strangle oneself and threaten the next generation.
My goal is for a practice that intentionally brings drama therapy into an activism for co-existence that is dedicated to violence prevention, whether working with the small violences among couples or the violence of greed in capitalist-gone-bad board rooms or the insidious violence of imperialist public policy and fundamentalism. A mother and former meth dealer, who can only meet with her daughter once a week in court order conjoint therapy holds a meditation cushion as her shield as the daughter uses a rubber sword to pierce the shield for every time she was abandoned, embarrassed or slapped by the mother. In the “play” with the improvisation, the child releases herself from the grip of unexpressed anger, while the mother shields herself from the rage fostered by her painful limitations. Working with individuals, I hope to offer a safe presence that encourages authentic contact to emerge in the therapeutic relationship and to be celebrated in creative expression; thereby, offering trauma symptom relief.
A woman client has rescued herself as a child just the moment before her irrevocable trauma. A narcissistic personality disorder is guided through a meditation on the bonsai tree in the office. A fundamentalist Christian mother and her young adult son seeker hold hands and pray. A group of women embody characters in a sculpt that comes alive: a bitch nursing pups, beside a wicked witch, beside a she-doctor, beside a businesswoman, beside a vamp, beside a duck and her ducklings, beside a women with a parachute.
What I’ve come to witness as epiphany in the work of a drama therapist expresses itself at the ever repeating groove along the spiral of growth where the therapeutic alliance makes a transition from Kohut’s self psychology and object relations toward authentic contact; that is intersubjectivity of the kind described in the theory of Jessica Benjamin. That’s a full-throated way of saying “awesome” when the therapeutic alliance sustains a glimpse or longer of our interpersonal contact between separate and boundaried bodies and recognizes simultaneously the other as other and as the same. I appreciate the psychodynamics of the therapeutic relationship. Classical psychoanalytic theories of transference and countertransference, as well as the somewhat illusive interpretations given to the working of projective identification in psychoanalytic literature inform the therapeutic relationship and guide my work with the projections and introjections that skew the client’s and or therapist’s capacity for presence and contact.
My business plan is influenced by a study of Yalom’s “therapeutic factors” of universality, altruism and the instillation of hope in group psychotherapy and Boal‘s public uses of drama therapy for social change, I am in the process of producing and directing an international youth project. Teens in various parts of the world will gather in drama therapy workshops to create performances grown out of strong feelings and reactions to violence that has touched their lives, and this generation will see themselves connected through a documentary film. The project’s activism at the community level, as well as the distribution of the final film project use public spaces for performance activism. I am also inspired to bring social consciousness and drama therapy into the same picture and for youth to voice their visions for diversity and deep ecology.
I figure, my imprint as a drama therapist will be unique as the fingerprint made when the ink absorbed from front-page news is mixed with human oil and sweat, then pressed up against the times. Like the swirling pattern that is unique to each human hand, may the impressions made by my work as a drama therapist bring small dignities to the suffering of generations before me and instill hope among the young whose lives will share the destiny of a generation long after summer camps are over.
What is clear is that dramatic/theater processes are at work. Consider, for example, how roles are being played and costumes are being used to concretize group identification. Group cohesion is invited or coerced, the chorus exercises its power over political agendas and nationalist scripts and new behaviors are being practiced for choosing violent or non-violent means.Personal and collective visions join and/or separate one mother’s son and daughter from another mother’s child.
It is the intentional use of these dramatic processes as therapy for both individual and community that offers an antidote for the proliferation of propaganda and hate. Indeed, the symptoms in the human body and the global body politic, experienced as manipulation and degradation of human and ecological resources point to a splitting: uncontained aggression split off from our open hearts. Our capacity to tolerate uncomfortable feelings in the face of the other that is not like us cries out in The last cries and utterances of dying soldiers, children and women raped by the war in Iraq, or any war, bemoan intolerable feelings in the face of the other who is not like us.
Drama therapy hones tools for emotional and physical integration of our post-modern experience with the traditions of our ancestors. To grow personally and to remain in contact with one’s family and culture requires therapy to heal old wounds and dare to face the world without the images and masks that separate us in our narcissism. It is in this context that I choose to work as a drama therapist and make my imprint from the ink that has stained my own hands, indeed my own psycho-biology with greed, my “15 seconds of fame,“ affiliation, nostalgia for a new deal and a peace corps, along with a culture of narcissism that distracts my soul’s striving to be part of the interconnected web of life with the siren’s call to self-enhance with whatever resources are at my scratching and clawing fingertips.
No one carries the disruptions and disjunctions of the culture like the mentally ill and disabled. Character and personality disorders magnify the disturbances in our capacity to integrate our human nature with our highest inspirations, as well as the collective grandiosity of mistaking our analyses and interpretations for the Grand(iose) Design. It is my privilege to work with the deep sorrows and confusions that present themselves as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Work in a community mental health clinic provides the opportunity to serve our ancestors whose intentions were thwarted by poverty of mind, body or spirit, resulting in contortions of defenses and affect that strangle oneself and threaten the next generation.
My goal is for a practice that intentionally brings drama therapy into an activism for co-existence that is dedicated to violence prevention, whether working with the small violences among couples or the violence of greed in capitalist-gone-bad board rooms or the insidious violence of imperialist public policy and fundamentalism. A mother and former meth dealer, who can only meet with her daughter once a week in court order conjoint therapy holds a meditation cushion as her shield as the daughter uses a rubber sword to pierce the shield for every time she was abandoned, embarrassed or slapped by the mother. In the “play” with the improvisation, the child releases herself from the grip of unexpressed anger, while the mother shields herself from the rage fostered by her painful limitations. Working with individuals, I hope to offer a safe presence that encourages authentic contact to emerge in the therapeutic relationship and to be celebrated in creative expression; thereby, offering trauma symptom relief.
A woman client has rescued herself as a child just the moment before her irrevocable trauma. A narcissistic personality disorder is guided through a meditation on the bonsai tree in the office. A fundamentalist Christian mother and her young adult son seeker hold hands and pray. A group of women embody characters in a sculpt that comes alive: a bitch nursing pups, beside a wicked witch, beside a she-doctor, beside a businesswoman, beside a vamp, beside a duck and her ducklings, beside a women with a parachute.
What I’ve come to witness as epiphany in the work of a drama therapist expresses itself at the ever repeating groove along the spiral of growth where the therapeutic alliance makes a transition from Kohut’s self psychology and object relations toward authentic contact; that is intersubjectivity of the kind described in the theory of Jessica Benjamin. That’s a full-throated way of saying “awesome” when the therapeutic alliance sustains a glimpse or longer of our interpersonal contact between separate and boundaried bodies and recognizes simultaneously the other as other and as the same. I appreciate the psychodynamics of the therapeutic relationship. Classical psychoanalytic theories of transference and countertransference, as well as the somewhat illusive interpretations given to the working of projective identification in psychoanalytic literature inform the therapeutic relationship and guide my work with the projections and introjections that skew the client’s and or therapist’s capacity for presence and contact.
My business plan is influenced by a study of Yalom’s “therapeutic factors” of universality, altruism and the instillation of hope in group psychotherapy and Boal‘s public uses of drama therapy for social change, I am in the process of producing and directing an international youth project. Teens in various parts of the world will gather in drama therapy workshops to create performances grown out of strong feelings and reactions to violence that has touched their lives, and this generation will see themselves connected through a documentary film. The project’s activism at the community level, as well as the distribution of the final film project use public spaces for performance activism. I am also inspired to bring social consciousness and drama therapy into the same picture and for youth to voice their visions for diversity and deep ecology.
I figure, my imprint as a drama therapist will be unique as the fingerprint made when the ink absorbed from front-page news is mixed with human oil and sweat, then pressed up against the times. Like the swirling pattern that is unique to each human hand, may the impressions made by my work as a drama therapist bring small dignities to the suffering of generations before me and instill hope among the young whose lives will share the destiny of a generation long after summer camps are over.
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