Healing Family Trauma through Psychodrama

Why a Mind/Body Approach to Treating Trauma is Important

Psychodrama is a role playing method developed by J .L. Moreno in Vienna and the United States . Its mind/body focus makes it unusually successful in treating issues of trauma and grief and helping to strengthen autonomy, motivation and resilience.  It has therefore gained wide popularity in the addictions field. Additionally, psychodrama acts as a sort of intervention into both the self system and the internalized relational network of the individual being treated, helping clients to clarify both their intrapersonal and interpersonal issues.

Moreno felt that, “the body remembers what the mind forgets,”  understanding, far before his time, that there is such a thing as somatic memory and that the body, as well as the mind, needs to participate in therapy for full healing to occur. Talk alone, according to Besel van der Kolk, author of  Psychological Stress, is not enough to knit together the disparate fragments of memory and sensorial data that trauma leaves in its wake. We need a method that allows the body as well as the mind to come forward into the therapeutic milieu and tell the trauma story. Psychodrama uses role play to mimic the body’s and mind’s natural way of relating; we are not talking heads in our real life, rather our natural movements and interactions are what lead us to feel and then search for the words to describe what we’re experiencing. As clients participate in a psychodrama, the body begins to wake up from its emotional numbness and reveal the pain and confusion that it’s holding. For example, as a  protagonist in a role play participates in an interchange she finds frightening, her stomach might tighten up or become queasy, her throat may suddenly go dry as she struggles to speak or, as she begins to stand her own ground, her muscles might constrict or her legs begin to shake or shiver. All of this is the body/mind beginning to reveal the subtle nuances of the experience that it has been storing, perhaps for years; the body/mind showing us what relational dynamics she found frightening, frustrating, upsetting or enraging.

How Fear Shuts Down Memory

One of the challenges in treating trauma is that intense fear can shut the body and brain temporarily down. Later in life, when clients are asked to “describe” their traumatic experiences they may find themselves uncomfortably agitated or even shut down and blank.  They may be unable to draw their disparate fragments of memory and sense impressions together and present them to the therapist as a coherent whole. This can put them at risk for adopting another person’s version of the story as their own either in order to please someone, like a therapist, authority figure or even peer group or to feel less anxious and crazy themselves.

Here’s how this trauma reaction gets set up. People, when overwhelmed with fear, temporarily shut down more elevated or “human” ways of thinking and making sense of a situation and hunker down, just like any dog or reptile, until danger passes. Nature doesn’t want us to be thinking about running from a charging elephant (or car) but just running from it,  so she has evolved a system whereby our thinking mind can temporarily shut down while our feeling or limbic mind goes into high alert. We go into a state of hyperarousal when we’re frightened.  We experience increased blood flow to our muscles, our hearts quicken, we’re hyper alert and we spurt adrenaline; all this so that we can stand and fight or flee for safety. If we can do neither we freeze.  Eventually we return to “normal” but the body memory of the charging elephant can linger in our unconscious in an unprocessed state. Because our thinking was shut down, we may not know why we carry these fears as we never made sense of them to begin with.  We never integrated the experience into a coherent whole and placed it into context. We might dream about elephants, fear circus elephants or even not like circuses at all. Or we might be unduly fascinated by any of these things, the mind is tricky when it comes to handling and attempting to master leftover unprocessed, frightening traumatic imagery. But we won’t necessarily be able to talk about what actually happened because our memory is fuzzy and filled with unconscious fear and anxiety. That’s why traumatized people so often self medicate, in order to manage this disturbing and confusing state of hyperarousal when it gets triggered.

Traumatized people wait for the other shoe to drop; they live as if the stressor is still present long after it has been removed because their body/mind “remembers what their mind has forgotten”.  According to van der Kolk, in order to make traumatic memory conscious, so we can see and heal it, we need to bring the body back into a feeling state. We need a method that can allow that state of hyperarousal that results from trauma and gets retriggered over and over again causing us to over react to situations that are in some way reminiscent of earlier pain, to emerge and be managed and brought back into balance safely. In psychodrama clients learn how to manage their hyperarousal themselves by witnessing themselves in this state in a controlled and safe manner. Their feeling of safety allows them to begin to think about what they are feeling rather than just react or act our their painful emotions unconsciously.

As a role play is entered into, protagonists begin to remember how they felt or what they wanted to say or do that they could not say or do at the time of a trauma perhaps because they were too scared, too small or trapped by circumstances. They also begin to wake up the emotions or the unfulfilled actions (thwarted intentions) that they may have numbed out, medicated or shut down at the time(s) of the trauma or throughout subsequent years. As they do this, the thinking mind which was also shut down at the time of the trauma, witnesses and makes sense of the relationship and situational dynamics being role played.  The protagonists are increasingly able to understand how and why their own complexes and conflicts got set up to begin with. Light dawns. Pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together.

Healing in a Relational Context

Psychodrama is not only mind/body but also relational.  It allows the full relational context in which one has experienced disruption or pain to be part of the therapeutic milieu. Moreno understood that “by the group they were wounded and by the group they shall be healed.”  When we treat family trauma we’re treating emotional pain that was set up in a relational context. If there was an imbalance of power as is the case between parent and child that relational imbalance becomes evident in the psychodrama. Some of the reasons that children experience threatening family dynamics as traumatic is because they are small, vulnerable and dependent upon parents for survival. Had they been big enough to fight back, had some larger person defend them or been able to get out of the situation and take care of themselves they may have felt less at risk and, hence, less traumatized. Through psychodrama the protagonist revisits that early vulnerability and, through role play, “corrects” some of the imbalances that have become psychically glued into place and recreated in subsequent relationships. They can finally shout back and defend themselves, run for safety or simply stand their ground.

Triggered: Revisiting and Re-experiencing Early Pain

For better or worse we tend to carry our early relational templates with us throughout life and recreate them. The healthy aspects of those patterns are all to the good and help us to create healthy adult relationships, but the painful, unresolved aspects also tend to get recreated.  These painful fragments of memory and sensory details are associated with trauma and in some way banished from consciousness (numbed, shut down, split off). As a result we may tend to project, displace or transfer unconscious pain onto people, places and things surrounding us, seeing it as belonging to them and not us. To complicate matters even further, we may have made distorted meaning of them as a way of maintaining our emotional equilibrium in the face of scary relationship dynamics. (Dad’s not drunk just happy.  Mom’s not depressed and dissociated just creative.  My little sister’s overly sensitive.  I’m stronger, better). Sorting out these distortions can become a bit mind boggling in the therapeutic process.

But as afraid as the traumatized person is to re-experience the “forbidden” feelings that he shut down out of fear or even terror, he needs to re-experience those emotions and disparate fragments of sensorial memory in  order to knit together the bits and pieces of memory that became fragmented through the traumatic, splintering experience. When people have been traumatized they may become afraid of action; action becomes bound up with fear or a sense of danger. As adults, when they become triggered by some relational dynamic that is reminiscent of earlier trauma (e.g. when they feel humiliated, scared, vulnerable, dependent, belittled or abused) their whole body can once again become the body that they inhabited at the time of the trauma. In other words, they get triggered and shaky inside but all too often don’t know what’s going on with them. (van der Kolk)

Why Words are Not Enough

Psychodrama allows the client to re-inhabit her own body, to “live in her own skin” in a safe and clinical manner along with therapeutic witnesses and allies who can buffer, support and encourage. It allows the client to shift from being a in collapsed, animal brain state to a state in which she is remembering unfulfilled actions. If done carefully following the lead of the protagonist imposing no agendas, psychodrama can allow the protagonist and all involved to fumble their way through their own nonconcious memories in body as well as mind. It helps to re-occupy their own body in space and in relationship to others at the time that it may have shut down. Before they are asked to talk about what happened and describe things that they themselves hardly remember, they can allow their bodies to organically take the actions that they feel impelled to take and to let sound, gesture and word follow. They can feel what they need to feel, do what they need to do and say what they need to say.

When clients are asked to “describe their pain or trauma” simply through words they are faced with a real dilemma, “Should I admit to myself and the therapist that I barely understand the question let alone the answer?” or “Should I just piece something together and give it my best guess?” or worse, go along with the therapist’s best guess and adopt it as the truth of my own experience. Psychodrama allows the protagonist more latitude in connecting with their own truth as it emerges through the body as well as the mind.

“Fundamentally, words can’t integrate the disorganized sensations and action patterns that form the core imprint of the trauma….[because] the imprint of trauma doesn’t ‘sit’ in the verbal, understanding part of the brain, but in much deeper regions such as the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus and the brain stem, which are only marginally affected by thinking and cognition.” (Ibid)  Because psychodrama incorporates the body into the healing process the body can, in a sense, feel first and words can then grow out of the feelings that have been woken up through role play.

One common misconception of psychodrama is that it is necessary to recreate the traumatic scene in order to access traumatic memory. This is not the case. It is only necessary that client revisits themselves, their own sense of vulnerability or helplessness or rage or whatever they are carrying from the time of trauma. Revisiting the scene can be re-traumatizing and is not necessary for healing. What does get revisited most often are relational dynamics that are part of a model scene, one that may not have taken place in reality, but is representative of underlying qualities and dynamics of a particular relationship or situation.
For further information on the “how to” of using psychodrama to treat issues of addiction, grief, trauma and childhood abuse see the two training tapes listed below that can be used in treatment centers, educational settings or homes to 1) learn about psychodrama and 2) illustrate the intergenerational dynamics of addiction and abuse.

JL Moreno, Psychodrama Volume One, 19___, Beacon House Publishing, Beacon, NY.

Solms, M., Turnbull, O. (2002). The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. New York

van der Kolk 2004) “The Limits of Talk: Bessel van der Kolk wants to transform the treatment of trauma by Mary Sykes Wylie Jan 30 2004, in The Psychotherapy Networker).

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