The psychodrama method, which is 100 years old today, offers a somewhat radical, but extremely visual way to look at your life from the outside. We share the story of a man who praised his girlfriend, but found out that many complex feelings were hidden behind his admiration for her. And they managed to find out by playing, as in a theater, the history of their relationship.
How do we treat others? Good, bad, with love, with dislike… Who are these others? Our parents, spouses, colleagues, friends… “Relationship Sculpture” is a psychodrama technique that allows us to visually see our way of building relationships, to realize our feelings, to discover hidden meanings. And there are always hidden meanings.
For example, in a couple, one of the partners often has the feeling “I am not worthy of this person.” At first glance, an elevated and romantic attitude, but living with him is not particularly comfortable.
Here is an example from practice. With the request “I want to understand the relationship and fix something in them,” 24-year-old Oleg comes to the reception. He talks about his girlfriend: she has a good education, an interesting job, she reads a lot, understands art and music, she draws a little herself. They have been dating for six months, Oleg is interested in her, he admires her talents. It would seem, what else is needed for happiness? But it seems like something is always getting in the way.
We are making a sculpture of his relationship. Oleg puts a chair and shows how his girlfriend “stands” on this chair, as if on a pedestal. He himself takes a seat on another chair – sitting, so that he looks at the girl from the bottom up, throwing his head back. Then he goes into the “mirror” – this is the name in psychodrama of the situation when the client goes beyond the scene he has set and looks at everything from the side. And now, looking in the “mirror”, Oleg notices that he really does not see his girlfriend well. Just like her…
In this situation, the therapist usually asks the client: “What do you want to do now?” – and often receives the answer: “I want to throw the other off his pedestal.” What looks like admiration contains repressed aggression. But the one who stands on the pedestal is also uncomfortable: he needs to follow his role all the time, not to make mistakes, this creates tension, and it’s also scary to fall from a height. And up there, it’s pretty lonely and cold!
Psychodrama works at the neurobiological level: at this time, neural connections change in the brain
Psychodrama clearly shows that relationships are not created by themselves, independently of us. We create them. But then why and how do unions appear in which we experience discomfort?
It often turns out that we took the model of such relationships from the parental family. The parent was inaccessible, attractive, great, big, important, I wanted to and could not get closer to him. And this habitual “alignment of forces” is then reproduced in adult life in relations with a partner.
In this case, the client builds a scene with the parent, lives it over again (see point 4 in the box below), bringing into it everything that he lacked in childhood. And after that, with a new emotional experience, he returns to the scene with a partner. So, 26-year-old Yulia’s father is a successful businessman, tough and decisive. She chooses men like him and each time suffers from a lack of warmth and understanding.
When her relationship with her father was staged on psychodrama, she crawled on the floor while he was broadcasting something important from unattainable heights. As a child, she agreed to “grovel” – it seemed to her that such behavior guaranteed that they would communicate. In the “mirror” she saw that she wanted to change. Of course, the biographical story will not change, but the relationship will change.
Sometimes clients act on their own, sometimes they call for help from real or fantastic heroes. Someone calls their more mature and stronger “I” to the children’s scene, and someone calls Ilya Muromets or Batman, who help them gain those strengths and qualities that they lacked before.
Psychodrama works at the neurobiological level: at this time, neural connections change in the brain. A new experience of feelings allows you to change the usual ways of responding and create new, more favorable ones.
Psychodrama allows you to bring to the surface of consciousness what remained unexpressed, hidden
The creator of the psychodrama method, Jacob Moreno, metaphorically suggested “insert the eyes of another.” When a client takes the place of a cold, detached parent, he is often surprised to find that the reason for the coldness is not at all a lack of love for his child, as often imagined by the children themselves. This coldness is the result of overload, fatigue.
Taking the place of her father, from his role, Yulia turned to herself in childhood, the girl Yulia:
“Daughter, you don’t remember this, in the 90s you were only five years old, and our familiar world then collapsed, and we had to start everything from scratch, without any experience. I left the institute where I worked, started my own business, worked from morning to night, slept for three hours, and sometimes did not sleep at all. I needed to support my family. I made sure we had money for food, for clothes, for education for you and your brother.
They tried to deceive me every day, rob me every week and kill me once a month, I just didn’t have the strength for tenderness, but know that I love you and am proud of you.
Psychodrama allows you to bring to the surface of consciousness what remained unexpressed, hidden. To hear what was never said, to say what someone wanted to say, but could not or did not have time. Since psychodrama involves living feelings in action, the method itself excludes the possibility of delusion or deception: action is more frank and sincere than our thoughts. In the staged scene, each double bottom is revealed and unconscious feelings are manifested.
How psychodrama has changed in 100 years
1. There was a monodrama – individual work with one client. Unlike most other methods, which went from individual work to group work, psychodrama appeared as a group method. In it, different members of the group were assigned to the roles in the scene of the client-protagonist (the main character). But now the psychodramatist can work with one client, helping him to become in turn all the actors in his scene.
2. Psychodrama began to be used in teaching and training, and not just in psychotherapy. Due to its nature – role-playing – psychodrama is very dynamic, learning takes place through live action, and not through stories about anything. As a result, any material becomes personal, lived and well remembered.
3. Zerka Moreno, the wife and successor of Jacob Moreno, introduced a transcendent level of roles into psychodrama. Psychodrama looks at any action as a role: I am interviewing – I am in the role of an interviewer. I study – I am in the role of a student, and so on. Zerka Moreno suggested asking the question: what meaning do I attach to this action, why am I doing it? This level of roles allows you to experience yourself as an active subject, the author of your life.
4. “Time travel” appeared and became widespread: initially, psychodrama unfolded in the present. Zerka Moreno brought the idea of being able to psychodramatically go back and rewrite the past (as described above in the article). There was also an opportunity to go to your future and influence what will happen in it.
It is interesting to note that despite all these changes, the basic principle of the method has not changed. Additions can be called tuning, but the basic mechanism remains the same and still works successfully.
On June 11-14 this year, Moscow will host an anniversary .
Olga Malinina – psychologist, art therapist, psychodramatherapist, co-chairman of the anniversary Psychodrama Conference.
Stanislav Efremov – psychologist, psychodramatherapist, presenter of the training “Relationships with money”, co-chairman of the anniversary Psychodrama Conference.