Have you ever felt so overwhelmed with sadness or frustration that you could not speak due to fearing you’d start crying uncontrollably? Have you ever been so angry that you feel you cannot stop cursing or yelling when speaking? Or have you ever felt so anxious that you simply could not find words to express yourself?
In the therapy setting, it is often too painful to talk about emotions when in these states of mind. One of the things that I love most about drama therapy is its ability to help people contain difficult emotions and explore them in a way that often feels easier than directly talking about them in traditional therapy.
Containment in the Therapy Space
When I speak of containment in drama therapy, I am referring to two separate but related aspects of containment. The first is the idea of the therapy space acting as a sort of holding container for difficult emotions.
Therapists of all backgrounds do their best to create safe spaces for clients by providing privacy, decorating their therapy spaces in ways that promote peace and calm, and telling their clients that the therapy space is a place of non-judgment. Drama therapists often take these ideas further through drama and metaphors.
For example, a drama therapist may use colorful scarves to create a circle around the therapist and client to symbolize that the client’s emotions can be safely held and explored in the therapy space. One therapist I did a workshop with used rocks in addition to scarves by spreading out four rocks evenly along the circle that represented the North, South, East, and West and the Native American beliefs about strengths that correspond with each of the directions.
Another example is when a drama therapist might lead a group in pulling down an imaginary curtain around the circle of members when the group session begins. The metaphorical curtain acts as a reminder that the therapy space is a safe place to explore emotions, issues, roles, and behaviors. Because this sets up a metaphorical stage, it puts clients at ease because they get to explore these things through acting, which means the following: they get to play a variety of roles and thus get to figure out which ones to discard or strengthen in real life, they get to play different roles without others knowing which ones they play in real life and thus reduce the risk of feeling judged, and the act of dramatizing allows them to simultaneously release emotions while also learning mastery of emotions. This latter point is our next focus.
Containment through Dramatization
The second aspect of containment is that of the balance of emotional release and emotional mastery that dramatization allows in sessions. While the word containment may conjure up the idea of suppression for some people, the term is more akin to control and mastery in this context.
Drama allows an actor to simultaneously experience strong emotions while experiencing mastery over the emotions. This occurs because playing roles allows one to tap into real emotions while feeling emotionally safer because the roles allow one to feel distance from intense emotions. One feels that the roles are “not me”, which causes one to feel less vulnerable about exploring herself.
For example, a client in traditional talk-based therapy may feel so emotional that it is difficult to speak and may get so caught up in emotions that it is hard for her to be objective. Thus, she may be stuck in the emotion, which may even be a pattern for her outside of therapy. This feeling of being too close to emotions is referred to as being underdistanced in drama therapy.
The opposite of being underdistanced is being overdistanced, meaning that one is too far removed from emotion. One may not easily be able to access emotions, which may cause problems such as repressing emotions (to the point of experiencing anxiety, depression, or eventual outbursts from bottling emotions), being too rigid, or lacking deep connections in relationships.
Thus, one of the goals in drama therapy is to find a balance between being underdistanced and overdistanced. This balance is called aesthetic distance. A drama therapist aims to help clients achieve this through dramatization.
Dramatization provides distance by helping clients externalize issues to examine them from a more objective perspective and then reintegrate and internalize the solutions that are discovered.
Clinical Examples
I have worked with many clients who feel that their anger is out of control. Dramatization helps them by letting them explore angry feelings through roles and characters. While they get to express and thus vent genuine angry feelings through role play, they also get to learn mastery over anger through role play.
On the other hand, I have also worked with many clients who are not in touch with their anger or who fear losing control if they let themselves express anger. Dramatization also helps them explore angry feelings through roles and characters. They may either get to explore unconscious anger or may explore safe ways of expressing conscious anger.
For many of my clients who are easily angered or aggressive when angry, I often choose to have them explore the angry part of them through role play. An activity that demonstrates this is when I have clients make a collage of an image that represents their anger and a few images of “anger helpers” (things that can help calm them when angry). I then have the clients identify the characters behind each image (e.g. the anger image might be called “Fire” or “Storm” while common helpers are often “Music”, “Family”, or “Nature”). Clients then create monologues from the point of view of each image. We explore when the anger role is awakened, what messages it may try to be sending when activated, what feels good and bad when it is allowed to express itself, and other aspects of the roots of anger. The helper roles provide comfort, hope, and reminders of self-care and healthy coping skills to utilize when clients feel angry.
Such an activity takes the intensity of anger away by allowing the angry feelings to be explored somewhere safe and making the angry feelings feel more playful since they are being expressed through roles as opposed to being expressed directly. Because the angry person has gotten some distance from the anger through this activity, she can better understand the anger and can better control it. She can then internalize the solutions of being more aware of her anger’s purpose and knowing how to soothe herself when angry.
For clients that are too far removed from angry feelings, I may offer them a chance to explore anger through dramatization in ways that bring them closer to angry feelings. I may choose to have them create a mask that represents what anger is to them and may then invite them to experience that feeling by trying on the mask and acting in that role. I may ask clients to use a monologue to describe the role, such as the positive and negative aspects of it and what it feels like when in that role. The hope is that by bringing them closer to the emotion that they are not in touch with or feel they don’t have mastery over, they will learn what they do and do not like about the emotion and how to feel in control of the aspects of it that are uncomfortable.
For clients that are uncomfortable with these kinds of dramatic activities, I often use creative writing instead. I sometimes have clients write monologues or dialogues to explore different parts of themselves, or we explore issues through poetry. As demonstrated above, I also use visual arts at times. Other times I might use sound and movement instead of language. I always do my best as a therapist to find creative ways to help clients explore issues that balances the clients’ comfort level with exploring issues in new ways.
Summary
Roles and other dramatization provide emotional safety by providing distance from intense emotions while also providing opportunities for people to safely explore emotions that are not easily accessed. This is one way that drama therapy may help clients in a way that talk-based therapy does not.