YAACOV NAOR TEP, MA, CAGS
yaacovn@gmail.com Tel: +972-522-649155 Email
1) Life and Death Concept
During our life we experience the dynamic tension between the life factor and the death factor. We are in a constant struggle to find the right balance between these two inner voices. The appearance of death in life, like the fact of death of feelings, can affect us no less than the death and loss of a person close to us.
A very important therapeutic question in family therapy can be: how to make these family members more alive, more vivid and more present, how to help this family member become more connected to the inner life force, how not die while being alive. And this is true also about the whole family. As family therapists we encounter too much death within families. Psychodrama can help us win in this war against dying and control more this meaningful process.
2) The Phenomenological Approach
Family therapy can become more effective if we, as family therapists, create an atmosphere of openness and respect to the different. This is done by trying not to ask family members to conform, by respecting family members' right to be different. This is how they can learn to be loyal to themselves, how to live from their inner center rather than trying to appease others. A family is a group and as such it needs sensitivity and awareness in order to contain the indidividuality and uniqueness of each member.
3) Psychodrama and Action
The use of Psychodramatic Techniques and other action tools can make the family therapy session and the process become more alive, more exciting and more effective. The action approach in therapy encourages the use of creativity and spontaneity (which are the major aims of psychodrama) in order to become more present.
Psychodrama can be used as an effective diagnostic technique. The social atom map, the social atom in action and the interview on the stage can be good ways of getting hidden information about the client or the family.
Major elements of the psychodramatic practice: Protagonist, Group, Auxiliary Egos, Director, Group member. The stage as an action space is a focal place for the protagonist (the identified client, the main actor). The psychodramatic stage is a place where people can feel free to tell the truth, express their feelings and do and what they have difficulty doing in real life with their family members and others.
Main phases of the traditional Morenian Psychodramatic Process: Warm –up, Action, Integration, Closure and Sharing.
Major techniques: group theater games, self presentation, empty chair, role reversal, role playing, improvisation, role training, mirroring, encounter, double, sculpting, sociomemtric configurations, spectrograms, social atom map, action social atom, social atom with objects, psychodrama on the table, family sculpting, psychodramatic letter, surplus reality, playback theater, behind the back.
4) Positive Psychology
In our professional life as family therapists we lean too much on the pathological situation and background of our clients. The approach of positive psychology can add a use of resilience, ego functioning and strength as an additional source of hope and curative factor.
5) Emotional Expression
Expressing Feelings without anxiety and fear in a safe environment should become our aim as family therapists. Psychodrama and other action techniques can help us create such a space for emotional expression. The stage, the group, family members, the therapist can become more effective in their role by learning to accept expression as a basic human need. Expression is not done only by the use of theater and drama but also by the use of other arts such as: visual arts (drawing, sculpting, instillation art), movement and dance, story-telling, writing, music and photography.
We can learn to increase our ability to listen, to be emphatic, to contain and at the same time to work with boundaries. The psychodramatic process allows us to feel free to express our inner feelings but at the same time psychodrama can be very helpful in teaching people how to control themselves. From this point of view psychodrama can be used as a behavioral family therapy.
6) The Inner Child
We are adults but at the same time we are children. Each of us has an inner child inside of him or her. This inner child is very often neglected and stepped on. Many of us and many of our clients chose to focus on staying connected to the adult part in us. But the inner child continue to live by claiming attention from the inner adult, by asking difficult and painful questions, by encouraging us to tell the truth, to express feelings, to imagine, to dream and to play.
Psychodrama can give family members permission to experience their personal and family life as inner children and get in touch with the truth. The psychodramatic approach can give them the chance to get connected with their unexpressed pain. We all know that pain is the main source of hope, change and growth.
This process can help our clients change the way they treat their inner child or inner girl. Many times we see how people become their own enemies. This is part of the process of why people become violent, sex abusers, alcohol abusers, drug abusers and other forms of self destruction and self aggression. Self aggression manifests itself subtly, at times, as self denial, lack of self gratification, lack of ability to enjoy life, lack of self respect and even disassociation.
Psychodrama can help our clients deal with their inter relations between two parts within themselves: the aggressor and the victim. Through the psychodramatic active, unmasking process, they can explore different ways they internalize experiences in the role of the aggressor and the victim and uncover and discover the interplay between these two roles. This is how people become the parent they had, or the parent they did not have ,to their inner child. This is not what this inner child really needs. Psychodrama is a great way to teach people how to become better "inner parents" to their "inner children".
7) Empathy Education and the Dialogue Approach
In many families we experience the lack of open communication. This is part of the way many people grow up, not knowing how to respect the other, how to listen to the story, the narrative, of the other, how to be more emphatic. Many try to control the other (and many times it is the man in the family who take this attitude)
Our aim as family therapists is to teach family members that they have the right to be different. There is no way to compare between people, since each of us is a completely different context. We can only compare ourselves to what we were in the past in order to examine what is possible to achieve in our future and what is not.
Psychodrama can help us teach group members to be witnesses to the story of the other family member. Each family member has the right to present himself or herself, and his or her way of seeing things subjectively, while the others watch and learn to listen and respect the individuality of the other family member.
Instead of power struggle and the negative energy people put in order to show and prove how much they are stronger and better. Instead of blaming we can use psychodrama in order to create a dialogue. The dialogue approach is a new way of solving problems, unfinished issues and conflicts in the family as a substitute to judgment, criticism and violence.
8) The Therapeutic Double
Through the double role in psychodrama we can enrich our effectively as family therapists. While standing, or sitting physically behind (in the blind spot place) the protagonist or the family member, we can express what the family member, or the protagonist, is not saying or not able to express.
Our role as doubles is to help our client to focus, to be more accurate, to be more self presented and to be more loyal to them. This is our chance as therapists to show our clients empathy and support. The double approach is a very safe therapeutic tool. The aim is not to be right, but to help the family member listen, agree or correct the double.
The roles of the double in a therapeutic session of individual, group or family therapy, are to:
- Wake up the client.
- Help the client become more trustful and create a better therapist-client rapport.
-Bring the client out of his/her frozenness.
-Overcome shyness, inhibition and resistance.
-To help the client be more alive, more involved and more present.
-To encourage the client to feel and to express feelings.
-To create a safe space for the client to tell the truth.
-To help the client to discover and be aware what is the clients' part in creating the situation he/she is in.
-To help the client find out the illusion aspects in his/her life.
- To help the client find out links to his/her past emotional history.
-To give the client a chance to listen to different inner voices.
The double can take the following approaches:
-Echoing, repeating what the client is saying,
-Asking questions ("What do I mean by this?" or "How do I feel right now?" Or: "What is it that I am not saying, revealing or expressing?")
- Body language recorder (" What am I doing now with my hands?" or:" My hand is blocking my mouth. One side of me wants to tell the truth, but another side of me does not allow me to do it")
- Overcoming resistance: (' I will continue to speak in a monotone and dry voice. This way I can make everyone not know exactly how I really feel and what is happening inside of myself")
-Making interpretations (" I am saying this so to satisfy you, but I really feel differently..."),
-Using humor and satire (" I like it when I am humiliated")
-Using contradictive and even provocative statements (" I hate you, but I need you")
-Self double. The client can be asked to be his/her own double, by going to sit in the chair which is behind him/her. Another possibility is to give the client a chance to present the different inner voices which are alive inside him/her and translate it to action by having him/her
present these voices in dramatic roles portrayed by him/her.
9) Warm Ups and Action Methods with Families
Some ideas to be used mostly in mixed groups of families:
-Disco dancing: in small groups; by yourself; with someone you chose in the large group as a group dance.
-Family Atom Map: make a list of members in your family with whom you have meaningful relationship; translate this list to a map, placing yourself in the center of the paper and around you members of your family according to how you feel about them (someone you like will appear closer to you in the map and someone you have unfinished business issues with will appear further away from you) when you finish share your map with one and later with your family or group. This map can be done about all social relationships; about areas of interest; parts of my body; group I belong to; the wished map compared with the reality map.
-Creating a mutual drawing or mutual art sculpture; with one person; in small group; as one group; with one member of my family; with all the members of my family. For the art sculpture art materials can be used but also objects brought from nature.
- Children Games: creating an arena and space to play together known children games; adults in the group teach the children the games they favorite from their childhood; the children teach the adults the games which are played today.
-Empty chair on the stage: introduce yourself as the positive part of you and then as the negative part. Introduce yourself from the role of other (while standing behind the chair) as someone who have unfinished business with you; as someone who likes you; as another family member. Introduce another person by being him/her. Introduce a family member by being him or her.
-Sociometry: form groups according to color of eyes; family status; profession; your birth place; your present home town; your age group and your sign. Spectogram: having members of the group place themselves on an imaginary line from the smallest to the tallest; from the youngest to the oldest; from the one who cannot express anger to the one who is high tempered; from the one who keeps secrets to the one who share his/her secrets easily and more.
-Cocktail party: be there as one of your parents; as a hero of yours; as an inventor of something which does not exist in this world but is needed; as children who are trouble makers; speak a nonexistent language (one invents the language and the other translate him/her freely, then role reversal and then everyone speaks this new language without translation) etc.
-Sculptures: In a small group a machine sculpture in movement and sound; a free sculpture with a title such as: peacemaking factory; anger; the best family. In groups of three: sculpt the relationship between your parents; between you and another family member. The sculptures can include movement, sound and words.
-Role Playing: in small groups, they have to create scenes from their family life such as: "everything was good in my family till…"or: one is the parent and the other is the child, or adolescent.
-Drumming: in groups of three: one is the drum and the two others drum on him/her. Everyone has a chance to be a drum and a drummer. The drum is encouraged to open mouth and use sound.
- Follow the leader: in small groups (and later in the big group) moving to flowing unrecognized music; each time someone else from the group is the leader and the rest have to follow his/her story in movement; after few moments the leader chooses someone else from his/her group to be the next leader.
-Guided fantasy: all are in a relaxing situation. The group leader takes the group into a new imaginative situation: a dream while I am awake; a place I want to be right now; a documentary movie about my childhood; what scenes from my childhood will appear in this movie; then translate this into action on the stage.
-Home visit: The director takes the protagonist into his/her house; show the way to the house; the entrance, the different rooms; interview of the protagonist as a picture; photo; object; furniture in the apartment.
-Environments: the leader takes the group into imaginary spaces through movement and action: into a crowded bus; out to the rain; walking in mud; in snow; in the desert in the heat; swimming in water; diving; climbing a mountain; when reaching the top of the mountain meeting there an old wise man who knows the answer to three questions I have; who can fulfill three wishes I have.
-Behind the back: one member of the family turns his/her back to the rest of the family who are sitting in a circle. They have around 20-30 minutes to "gossip" (giving feedback; not blaming or criticizing) about the one who turned his/her back to them. Everyone in the family have a chance to experience this.
10) The Family Therapist' Self Development
Psychotherapists usually are sitting during the therapeutic session and the use of body is limited. Through the use of psychodrama and other action and expressive techniques we, as family therapists, can start using our own body and become more flexible, move and get out of self freezing and burnt out situations.
This is also a chance for us to become more alive, more present and become more spontaneous and creative in our professional role and also in our personal lives. Many of us complain about the fact that the emotional burden on us, as family therapists, is big and that we do not have enough ways to refresh and re- energize ourselves.
Psychodrama can help us develop the following attributes as family therapists: sensitivity, awareness, ability to recognize and express feelings, clarity of boundaries, empathy, non judgmental approach, listening capabilities, focusing, humanistic approach, interaction and communication abilities, dialoging, the use of the body, create new ways of finding more effective therapeutic solutions for families and family members, becoming more centered change agent.
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