An ode to the psychodrama modality

In the past four years on this journey, I've had the honor of entering the veil of Psychodrama Structures, a form of psychotherapy featured in Chapter 18 of The Body Keeps the Score. This all started when I started my consulting business at the beginning of the pandemic, connected with Sunni Brown for my podcast, and was mutually connected to Linda Thai, a psychotherapist in Alaska who was also a Vietnamese Boat People refugee.

She invited me to join her at a psychodrama training in Denver to which I said yes, I don't know what this is, but I'm open to finding out. Gus Kaufman, a senior trainer of the Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP) taught the workshop to a room full of therapists, and me.

Over the course of several years, I began to join Linda's version of psychodrama structures, which brought the group therapy retreats and incorporated family of origin, social and cultural origins, and the broader societal context into the work. At some point in the Summer of 2024, I'll have participated in nine psychodramas, either as a protagonist (working on my own issue), or as an assistant, helping others in doing their work.

Here's three things I learned along this journey:

1. The Community is the Medicine

So much of therapy as I traditionally understood it is patient on a couch and therapist with a clipboard taking notes, and this was most of my experience early on. I show up to the office, I talk, and I go home. We think about the problem, and we think our way toward a solution.

We comply with HIPPA, keep the work confidential and behind closed doors. No one but me and my therapist knows what we're doing, in a shadow of shame and the stigma of mental health.

In the work of psychodrama, a group comes together and forms the "container." In my business lingo, we form the group, create the charter, storm, and norm.

In my experience, it goes beyond this. We cross the veil, between kronos, the world of clocks and calendars, to kairos, or soul time, a space where time as we know it doesn't exist.

When the group clicks, there's a special moment when we put down our thinking brain, and we co-exist together. As each individual works on their family of origin issues, the group is there to hold it, to witness it.

I found that with my individual therapist, there's a part of me that always holds back, that I'm too much for this person. No matter how good the therapist, I never really reveal what really happened.

The group can hold this.

With each challenge the group witnesses, every individual takes the medicine, that we're not alone, that we're not that different from one another, and that our pain is not too much.

2. The Father Wound is the Source

Most of my early work started with the mother, we place the emotional weight onto women in our society. As I progressed in my own healing, I had the strength to focus on the father's wound. This isn't literally just my own father, but the line of broken men passed on from generation to generation.

In being with nearly 100 people, and seeing the work being done, the origin leans heavily on an emotionally absent father, an abusive man, rape and molestation, violence. It becomes what forms around this, the silencing of, the avoidance of, the disconnection from.

At first, I show up and I say, I'm not this. I distance myself from it.

But as I witness more and more, and as I do my own work, my own armor and mask starts to show cracks. The foundation starts to crumble. My world starts to fall apart, and I see my part in this system of oppression and suffering.

My liberation is tied to everyone else's liberation, that I, cannot do it by myself. The dissolving of the ego, the belief that I am the solution, fades away, and I becomes we, because we are.

3. The Witnessing of Suffering and Resilience of Humanity Brings Us Home

And in the witnessing of each person's suffering, I see a reflection, a projection of my own suffering, that I am not I, but I am part of something greater than I.

Modernity demands that we each numb ourselves to carry out the tasks required, to build and feed the machine that demands MORE.

It blames us so we feel guilt and shame for who we are, that we are not enough, that we should strive to accomplish more. If only I do this one more thing, if only I get this thing, if only.

So my participation in the machine, the air I breathe, the water I drink, I am blind to my environment. In my early therapy days, I described it as being in the infinite rat race and I cannot get off.

I don't know what my job is at this point, other than to witness the suffering of others, to see it, and to feel it in my being, and be reminded by the resilience of humanity, that amist all the horrors of the world, we are here.

On Being

It is my consulting brain, my logical mind, my problem solving education and training that wants to know now what? Where do we go from here. How do we scale this?

Instead, I'm learning to just be with myself, and to be with the peace I found.

My being is enough, I am enough.