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• W2025754080 abstract "The use of dramatic forms to communicate, teach, and heal is as old as history; our natural urge to act out the contents of our inner world is inborn. Ancient Greeks used drama to illuminate issues close to the human heart. Through role-play, the stage became a safe arena in which to explore and explain psychological and emotional themes. Audience identification with the characters portrayed (Bentley, 1986) was one of our earliest forms of therapy. Today, psychodrama, sociometry, and experiential group therapy provide a controlled acting out in service of healing; they are a modern adaptation of an ancient form.Psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy is the three-tiered healing system developed by J. L. Moreno, who believed that what was learned in action must be unlearned in action and what was learned in relationship must be unlearned in relationship. Hence, the birth of healing through role-play. Achieving the goals of undoing problematic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving through the vehicles of action and role-play and then relearning new, more adequate ways of experiencing and expressing the self in a relational context is the work of psychodrama, sociometry, and experiential group therapy.Being able to attach words to feeling states is a cornerstone of developing emotional literacy and consciously regulating behavior. We need to think about what we are feeling to understand what is occurring in our inner and outer worlds and to use that understanding to aid in regulating our thinking, feeling, and behavior. According to Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School and author of Building Healthy Minds (1999), physical gestures and actions for young children become double coded with emotional meaning. Emotional learning is a mind–body phenomenon. The limbic system—that is, the brain–body system that is associated with the regulation of our psychological and emotional states—can become deregulated in individuals who grow up in less than optimal environments. Emotional deregulation can contribute to moodiness, depression, and even acting out behaviors, such as violence and addiction. The limbic system is associated with our emotions, and the neocortex is associated with critical thinking. Both of these systems are operative in processing emotions. While the neocortex can collect facts quickly, the limbic brain does not. Physical mechanisms and sense impressions are what produce our experience of the world, and we need new sets of physical impressions to change or alter those impressions (Lewis et al., 2001).In light of the neurological research that has given depth and meaning to the mind–body movement, an increasingly significant aspect of the experiential therapies is the ability to allow the body to be a part of the therapeutic process so that new sense impressions can be more easily created. Children who have not grown up having their emotions decoded for them by caring adults may lack emotional literacy. Later, as adults, they may have trouble describing, decoding, and understanding their inner world. Psychodrama allows clients to enter their limbic world actively in a less restrained way than occurs either in normal life or in talk therapy alone.Gesturing or action is our first language (Greenspan, 1999). It is the mind–body communication upon which all subsequent language is built. Before language formally enters the picture, we humans learn a rich tapestry of gestures and actions to communicate our needs and desires. The gesturing includes a nonverbal communication capability that informs our ability to express ourselves and understand others throughout our lives. The expression of concern or alarm on a mother's face, for example, causes the child to feel “held” or alerted to danger. The child's screech, accompanied by an arm motion, may signal a wish to be picked up, cuddled, or command the mother to hand over a favorite toy. All this body language is part and parcel of an action-oriented, gestural communication and contains important connotations. Each tiny gesture is double coded with emotion (Greenspan, 1999) and stored by the brain and body with emotional purpose and meaning attached. Through this interactive process of communicating our needs and desires, we build emotional intelligence and literacy as surely as we learn math in a classroom.Because gesturing is our first form of communication, much of this language becomes part of our unconscious and surfaces in the form of “automatic emotion.” In his research on affect regulation, Alan Schore (1991) describes that “automatic emotion” operates in infancy and into even adulthood at nonconscious levels (Hansen where it shapes subsequent conscious emotional processing. Our emotional unconscious, so to speak—this web of gesture, meaning, and word—is formed through our interactions in our environment with our family and caregivers (our first social atom), forms a foundation for later emotional growth and language development.What occurs between people as subtle exchanges of emotionally laden signals happens so quickly that we hardly know it is happening. Evolution has made the processing of emotions and their communication to others very rapid. Amazingly, the transmission of facially expressed emotion occurs in as little as two milliseconds, far beneath levels of awareness (Niedenthal, 1990). Nature has favored this speed sync for obvious reasons. The mother who could “feel fast,” sense danger, and communicate that to her child to get him out of harm's way was naturally selected to be the DNA strain that led to us. Because the unconscious processing of emotional information is so rapid, the very subtle relational dynamics that are involved in the “transmission of nonconscious affect” (Murphy et al., 1995, p. 600) and the spontaneous communication of “automatic emotion” cannot necessarily be consciously perceived (Schore, in press-a), one might liken this form of instantaneous communication between people to the hot sync between computers. Significant information gets transferred from one system to another, but it happens in what feels like an invisible realm.All these unconscious processes help us to walk, digest, self-regulate, and remain grounded within the self, in relationships, and our environment. They allow us to operate on automatic. This automatic operating process also has meaning, intention, and emotion already woven into it. Many people—particularly if they have had a lack of this gestural form of communication or grown up in environments in which feelings were not talked about—have a hard time identifying some of their emotions and their intentions when trying to self-reflect. They have a lack of awareness about why they do what they do or why they feel what they feel. They may be all action with little awareness of what is driving their behavior or going on underneath. They may withdraw into their own disconnected world, or perhaps they experience something in their body, such as chronic muscle stiffness or pain in their stomach, back, or head. However, they are unable to make any connections between their emotional feelings that may be being somatized rather than being felt. Further, they may misread or not pick up subtle signals from others that are a part of nonverbal communication (Dayton, 2005). Students bring these responses into the educational system, affecting their ability to have successful relationships and their ability to regulate themselves within the learning environment. These responses also follow us into our intimate relationships as adults and our parenting when we have our own children.The family is our first and probably most significant classroom on relationships, and the day care and school systems run a close second. The obvious emphasis on intellectual learning that is a natural part of the school system blurs the extent to which emotions inform and drive our ability to attend, learn, and have healthy relationships within our school environment. Emotional development is not only our foundation for important relational abilities, such as intimacy, trust, and attunement, it is also the foundation of our intelligence and a wide variety of cognitive skills. At each stage of our development, our emotions lead the way, and learning facts and skills follow (Greenspan, 1999).If the family has caused emotional and psychological damage through creation of an environment that either does not support healthy emotional growth or contains problems that actually traumatize children—undermining, interrupting, or interfering with sound emotional development—repair needs to occur after the fact. If a child has repeatedly mobilized the trauma defenses of numbing and dissociation, his or her genuine feelings surrounding a situation may remain out of reach, and those symptoms may lie dormant for many years. For example, by the time the traumatized child is even aware that problems from the past are interfering with the present, he or she may be well into adulthood. That makes all the more necessary a therapeutic approach that allows the child within the adult to reemerge. The child inside the adult will need to revisit the emotional and psychological milieu in which the early learning took place in order to resolve blocks and learn new emotional and psychological skills.Neurobiological research provides a much-needed window into working with those whose neurological systems have become deregulated through less than optimal relational experiences, such as relational trauma that comes from familial neglect, abuse, or living with addiction.Children do not have a fully developed capacity to understand what is happening around them and regulate their intense emotional responses accordingly. That is why children can get so excited when seeing a clown at the circus or so scared watching the trapeze artist. They depend on adults around them to help them contain their excitement or calm and soothe their intense fear. This limited brain development can put children at risk if they are living in a chaotic environment, especially if the adults to whom they would normally go for comfort or containment are the source of the stress. The amygdala, our fight–flight–freeze part of the brain, is fully formed at birth. This means that infants and children are capable of a full-blown stress response from birth on. When frightened, their bodies will go into fight–flight–freeze mode (Uram, 2004). However, the hippocampus—the part of the brain that interprets sensory input about whether a person or event is a threat—is not fully functional until between 4 and 5 years of age. So, children have no way of assessing whether or not they need to be scared or how scared they need to be. To make matters even more complicated, the prefrontal cortex, which is where we have the ability to think and reason, is not fully developed until around age 11 (Seifert, 1990). Therefore, when small children get frightened and go into fight–flight–freeze mode, they have no way of interpreting the level of threat or using reason to understand what is happening. Their limbic system becomes frozen in a sensory fear response—and can remain so, without intervention from a caring adult. Because of the child's natural egocentricity, the threat feels personal; it goes to their core self (Uram, 2004). Children are likely to interpret whatever is going on as being about them; they may feel they are either the cause or should be able to solve the problem. Because they lack the developmental equipment to modulate this experience themselves, their only way out of this state is through an external modulator—that is, the parent—who can hold, reassure, and restore them to a state of equilibrium. If this modulating takes place at the time painful circumstances are occurring, children are unlikely to become symptomatic because the parent is wooing them back toward balance and a sense of safety. If, however, the parent or family environment is the primary stressor and unavailable for reassurance, children live through repeated ruptures to their developing sense of self, fundamental learning processes, and relational world. They are left with little ability to make sense of what is happening, interpret the level of threat, or use reasoning to regulate and understand what is going on. Later in life, when that feeling of vulnerability or fear is triggered, their response is an unmodulated sensory memory that was locked down in their childhood (Dayton, 2005).The body cannot tell the difference between an emotional emergency and physical danger. When triggered by either crisis type, the body responds by pumping out stress chemicals designed to impel someone to quick safety or enable him or her to stand and fight. In the case of childhood problems in which the family itself is the stressor, there may be no opportunity to fight or flee. Children in those systems may find escape impossible, so they do what they can: They freeze. They shut down their inner responses by numbing or fleeing on the inside through dissociating. Though this strategy may help them get through a painful situation, it may also teach them, slowly over time, to foreclose on their emotional system, to deny and reject their authentic emotions. In so doing, they lose access to valuable information that can help them navigate their relational world, accurately evaluate social cues, and regulate their own responses.The ability to “escape” or take oneself out of harm's way is central to whether or not one develops long-term trauma symptoms or PTSD (van der Kolk, 2004). If escape can be possible, the person experiencing trauma is less likely to become symptomatic because he or she is actually able to act on the biological urge to flee. If escape is not possible, the intense energy that has been revved up in one's body to enable fight or flight becomes thwarted or frozen (Levine, 1997). Because the urge to flee is thwarted, it lives within the self-system as a thwarted intention, and symptoms may manifest after the fact, even well into adulthood, as a posttraumatic stress reaction. The contents of this unconscious memory can fuel problematic behaviors throughout life. Traumatized people live, in part, as though the stressor were ever present, as though a repeated rupture to their sense of self and their world lurks potentially around the corner—that is, they become hypervigilant.Adolescents may enter the school system and adults may enter their later lives without having developed the skills needed for sound emotional regulation; they are unconsciously living according to the meaning they made of early painful experiences, such as “I am bad . . . I cause trouble . . . I am at fault” (Uram, 2004). Because these emotions are painful to recall, people may develop defensive walls, rather like a hard shell designed to keep pain (which might be overwhelming to experience) from emerging within themselves. Consequently, they keep themselves from ever receiving the understanding and support they so desperately need and crave. Moreover, they further distance themselves from the kind of closeness that can lead to healing. This is one of the reasons that therapy can initially feel threatening to those who have grown up fearful in their intimate relationships.Dr. Stanley Greenspan (1999) has developed a set of activities that he calls “floortime” that occur between a child and an adult to consciously nurture, developing emotional intelligence and the six levels of mind as he outlines them. Greenspan describes how a developing child translates the raw data that he or she gathers from his or her senses and inner feelings into images. The child uses these images to create personal meaning and communicate with others. We can think of the data as the mind's deepest structural components, the foundations of emotional development and its later support. Floortime is designed to access and strengthen these levels of mind to facilitate sound emotional development. Floortime need not be only on the floor: Once the basic principles are understood, they can be incorporated into most activities and used throughout maturation.It is this author's experience that there is a natural interface between psychodrama's ability to revisit and revitalize the six levels of mind and the natural developmental progression followed by the developing child. In this way, psychodrama has the ability to repair the self at profound levels. Psychodrama and floortime have a lot in common.Comfortable engagement with a primary caretaker is core to sound emotional development. When children become traumatized by living with parents who are addicts, have untreated psychological disorders, or are physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive, the six levels of the mind (hence, the child's emotional development) can be negatively affected. Children need those they depend on to be, in fact, dependable and reasonably well regulated so the children can internalize those skills and qualities.Because the part of the brain that would normally organize sensory input—namely the pre-frontal cortex—gets overridden during traumatic moments in favor of the survival response, children (or adults) have painful experiences, and those experiences may not come to an adequate psychological and emotional closure. They do not get thought about, categorized, and made sense of before being tucked away and integrated with memories of other experiences on which to build clear-sighted learning. The contents of the traumatic moment or the pain and stress-filled experience does not get processed normally and thus may live instead as a sense memory within the body and psyche that remains jumbled and disorganized. Consequently, thought, feeling, and action may become detached from each other, which can contribute to a lack of emotional and psychological integration.When people recall memories of what has been experienced normally, they have an understanding attached to them. When traumatic memories get triggered or recalled, they have not been processed and understood in the same way. We might say that they have been nonexperienced and that the person was relying on trauma defenses of shut down (freeze) and dissociation (flight) or fight at the time the experience took place. In other words, the person was strongly blocking being present to what was happening. At the time of the painful experience, one's survival defenses were strongly urging disengagement. A traumatized child consequently gets caught in an emotional and psychological bind. In the same emotional moment, the child has an urge to engage to meet deep needs for emotional connection and disengage to avoid emotional pain. That can become the source of a lifelong conflict that gets played out over and over again throughout life. It is an emotional conundrum that naturally effects engagement and intentionality because the child has powerful urges to bond with and rely on the very people who are generating painful, stressful experiences. After all, the child cannot really disengage from his or her own parent—where would he or she go?The child's ability to distinguish between safety and danger may also become negatively affected when those causing intense stress and pain are the parents or primary caretakers. Naturally, the child's clear sense of purpose and interaction is influenced by the child's fear of the primary caretakers. When one is in a state of intense fear, the part of the survival brain that scans for danger is still fully operative (van der Kolk, 2005). In dysfunctional homes, a child learns to constantly scan parents' faces and the emotional environment for signs that the mood may turn sour or blow up. The child starts “people pleasing” and learns quickly that things will be easier if the child can anticipate a parent's displeasure and head it off at the pass with solicitous behavior or perhaps humor. However, that works only for a while and certainly not perfectly. Again, the child's sense of self becomes oriented outside of the child, and his or her inner world suffers. Along with highly honed people-pleasing skills, the child may internalize an unconscious feeling that he or she needs to deny his or her own authentic emotions in close relationships in favor of another person, or the child may feel unconsciously helpless to affect and manage an unmanageable family environment. Another pattern sears itself into place: The child learns the lesson, “I need to get it right outside of me first in order to let myself relax and be comfortable on the inside.” That reaction is codependency in the making.As I noted earlier, sensation, emotion, and thinking can be split apart from each other when, as children, we activate survival defenses such as numbing and dissociation. When we lose access to our natural and authentic emotional responses, our ability to form symbolic thought becomes affected. If we cannot experience our genuine emotions, we cannot name or label them. Consequently, we cannot use words to accurately describe our feeling states. Without the capability to label emotions accurately, we are not able to think emotionally, talk about our feeling states, or listen to the responses of others in a grounded, meaningful way. We cannot, in other words, use words to represent feelings symbolically, which is fundamental to emotional literacy. We lose track of our emotional compass. We become emotionally colorblind, unable to distinguish between subtle shades of hue, depth, and intensity. We are not good at thinking about what we are feeling because we have not made a strong enough connection between the feeling and the accurate word to describe it. Later, as adults, we feel lost and confused when asked to describe our inner world and our subtle motivations. Levels four through six in the six developmental levels of mind become seriously thrown off track through living with trauma. Our abilities to extrapolate organized, helpful meaning, think symbolically, and have coherent emotional thinking are all affected.The following is a brief description of Stanley Greenspan's floortime and how he, through meaningful interaction with the child, nourishes and fosters sound emotional growth. My thesis in this article is that psychodrama can offer a therapeutic milieu that can allow the adult to have an emotionally reparative experience by simulating the dynamics present in floortime through role-play.When children who have grown up in traumatizing homes become spouses and parents, they can feel that they lack the right emotional equipment to form long-term, intimate attachments. Their “emotional thinking” may be foggy or ineffectual in getting them to understand what is going on in an emotional exchange. Their ability to remain engaged on a deep level or balanced during emotionally laden encounters may be compromised. When they become threatened, they may rely too much on the defenses they used as children, such as numbing, disengaging, blocking, or exploding. They may find themselves in the emotional bind that was set up when they were children—simultaneously having powerful urges to connect and disconnect in the same emotional moment. Some learn to override their urge or fear of disengaging by becoming what family therapists refer to as “over close” or “overfunctioning.” Others become emotionally aloof or avoid the type of deep connection that they may find threatening, and they may underfunction. As a result, relationships may have either an over intensity to them or have a somewhat phony quality.These adults need to find a therapeutic approach that can mimic a body–mind engagement that is crucial to sound emotional development. Psychodrama allows the traumatizing circumstance to be, in a sense, relived in the here and now so that new sense and meaning can be made of it. Psychodrama can recreate a sort of adult floortime through which to revisit, heal, and facilitate emotional balance and regulation. During the psychodrama, Greenspan's six levels of mind are constantly being accessed and worked.Psychodrama uses the stage as the defined space in which emotional repair can occur. It invites the adult to reenter his or her intrapsychic and interpersonal world through role-play. Throughout the enactment, the director observes the protagonist as he or she enters his or her own internalized reality. It is the director's job to listen and follow the lead of the protagonist, entering and recreating the reality as he or she experienced it, constantly facilitating the protagonist's ability to open and close circles of communication with the role-players who represent either people from the protagonist's life or aspects of his or her inner world. The director is constantly aiding the protagonist in elaborating and extending the personal dramas in service of exploration and healing. Here, we might consider that part of what creates lasting conflict and tension within the psyche of the adult are circles of communication that have never been brought to adequate closure. Painful or stress-filled relationships can and often do leave children in the difficult, if not impossible, position of having to make child like and immature meaning of circumstances. Psychodrama allows the adult to revisit the world of the child he or she once was to repair what psychodrama refers to as “act hungers” (hungers for action), create act completion (bring closure to unresolved act hangers), and bring closure to open tensions (unfinished business that lives in the psyche as an unclosed circle of communication).Memory is state dependent. For example, the smell of lilacs may lead us to recall the lilac bush in the yard of our childhood homes. The smell acts as a trigger that results in our recollection of the fuller memory. When an adult who has grown up in a home where he or she has been traumatized enters the arena of intimate relationships with partners and children, the feelings of closeness and vulnerability that are a part of intimacy naturally trigger emotions and recollections surrounding one's childhood intimate relationships. But if intimacy has been paired with danger, what is triggered may be a confused jumble of images, numbed emotion, and body sensations that struggle to find their way to the surface but cannot travel by known routes. When we lose this much access to our authentic mind–body selves, therapeutic approaches that use words alone often cannot reach us. Forms of therapies that are nonlinear—such as poetry, art, music, drama therapy, and psychodrama—allow memories to emerge in their jumbled state and be sorted through after the fact. Psychodrama does not ask us to reflect until after we have experienced. Psychodrama has the advantage of simultaneously integrating emotion, thought, and behavior.Psychodrama offers a full opportunity for a concretized encounter with the self in all of its various forms. It allows for the child who lives within the adolescent or adult to emerge not only in words but also in action and in concrete form. The adult answers the question, “Who can play the child within you?” before being required to reflect with words. In this manner, words used to describe emotional states grow out of meaningful experience rather than coming before the experience. Allowing the child within to speak and act gives the child who may be living in frozen silence within the adult the chance to struggle towards more full and integrated self expression.Another advantage of psychodrama is that the natural regression that occurs when we contact these parts of self is well held and contained by the psychodramatic form so that a client can emerge from it and then leave it behind, so to speak. The protagonist can bring closure to the drama and then return to his or her adult ego state, looking back on who he or she was in that moment in the drama that represents another time and place. Clients can then, with the help of the therapist and other group members, use words to cross the natural psychic cleavage that any person faces in maturation. Words and the ability to conceptualize symbolically become the bridge that any child walks in order to carry the child self safely into adulthood. In a home that is not interrupted by trauma, this process occurs quite naturally; that is, aspects of the child self are naturally remembered and carried along within a coherent framework of self toward adulthood. But when the self has been traumatized, significant parts of the self may become split off and decontexualized, with access to the feeling self compromised. Significant pieces of self may become frozen in sense memories from the past that remain locked in fearful, voiceless silence. It is difficult, if not impossible, to reflect on these parts of self through words alone. These aspects of self need to be recovered and reworked through a form of therapy that allows them to these various “selves” to emerge into the here and now to be met and reworked and then translated from sensory to intellectual memory. Once they have been reunderstood in the light of today and new meaning is made out of old events and circumstances, they can be reincorporated into the unconscious and conscious self as memories that can be recalled at will rather than split off. They can be integrated into the self system with adult reasoning and understanding attached to them. They have been made sense of with the part of the brain that makes meaning, the cortical brain. The bridge between the reptilian–limbic and the cortical brain has been traversed successfully. The process is one of doing, undoing, and redoing.If we could simply leave significant parts of self behind in frozen silence and forget about them, life would indeed be much simpler. Unfortunately, in the case of trauma, out of sight is not necessarily out of mind. What we do not kn" @default.
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• W2025754080 title "Emotional and Developmental Repair through Psychodrama: Floortime for Grown-Ups" @default.
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