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Why is psychodrama so effective?

We all play roles in our lives, the role of mother, son, sister and so on. Thnking, feeling and behaviorare attached to the roles we play. When we mother, for example, we think, feel and act like mother. Playing our roles out in a psychodrama gives us a chance to explore how we live inside of them. Painful memories are stored in the body as well as the mind. Some are even preverbal. Role play allows a person to show as well as tell which means that they can actually see themselves in action. They can reflect on their behavior after theyve had a chance to witness it along witht he thinking and feeling that emerge with it.

Why is it so popular in Addiction facilities?

I think because people who’ve either been addicts or lived with addiction have experienced a lot of trauma. Trauma can store emotions related to traumatic experiences in your body and emerge again when something triggers them. Think of the combat vet who hits the pavement after hearing a loud noise. We remember, but not necessarily consciously. Psychodrama and other forms of therapy allow the unconscious to become conscious. Even physical movements like how we walk or hold ourselves are part of experiential therapy and emerge in role play.

So what do you mean by trauma?

Trauma can be defined as a rupture in a relationship bond the result of which is a loss of trust and faith in an orderly, predictable world or a dependable relationship or situations outside the norm that shatter our sense of an orderly, predictable world . Our common reaction to trauma is fight, flight or freeze. These reactions are coded into the old part of our brains, animals have them too. They’re about survival.The cortex is a newer development in evolution. So that means when we’re being traumatized, whether by 9/11 or but a drunk person’s behavior not much critical thinking is going on. In experiential therapy we see what hurt us, like Scott, Onika, Rick, Liz or Ned did, then we get a second chance to think about it and understand what happened and how it affected us.

Are women and men the same in the way they experience trauma?

Well, not exactly. Both have a fight,flight, freeze response but women also release oxytocin (the touch chemical) which encourages them to, as I call it, connect and nurture. Then the more they connect and nurture, the more oxytocin gets produced. This obviously was designed to get women to grab the kids and run to safety with other women. Men produce oxytocin, too, but testosterone sort of works against it. That’s part of why men seem to need space to calm down and women seem to want to connect.

How long would you need to do Experiential Therapy to get better?

There is no set time, it’s a therapy like any other and therapy takes time. Some people feel a lot of benefit and movement from even one session and some want to be in therapy for years. The important thing to remember is to have a good support network if your in recovery. A combination of one to one therapy, group (experiential or other) and twelve step programs seem to provide a strong network of support while working through deep emotional issues.

I stopped drinking but now I’m smoking and eating all the time, my life is less crazy but I still feel stuck.

This often happens. When an addict puts down the substance the feelings that were being medicated come up and they reach for another substance to get them to go away again. This is why a good network of support is so critical. We need some people who understand what we’re going through to help us learn to survive our own painful emotions. Research shows that relationships are very important for physical and emotional health. Eventually we learn to tolerate our powerful emotions and sit through them, experience them without acting them out in dysfunctional ways like self medicating, raging, sexual acting out and so on. We learn to “talk out” rather than “act out” our feelings.

I have trouble getting close to people, I just don’t trust them if things get too involved.

This is not uncommon for those who’ve been involved with addiction in one way or another, either by being with addicts or being addicts or both. Hopes have been dashed, needs have gone on hold for too long and dreams have been betrayed. We lose faith that we can ever get close to anyone and closeness makes us feel vulnerable and needy then we want to push the person away (at a "safe distance") or jump into their back pocket (for security). We distance or fuse (or both). We also don’t have a healthy working model for what to expect from relationships. We expect too much or too little, give too much or too little. We don’t know what normal is or how to modulate our emotional reactions.