Psychodrama from the Inside Out

By Kathy Campbell, LMFT

It was a case of famous last words. I had just described my mood as “a calm lake on a clear, sunny day.” Sitting in the main room of the old Victorian with familiar smells of coffee, wood, and the mildew that never quite surrenders in upstate New York, I am surrounded by my psychodrama training cohort. The invitation to check-in by describing my mood as a landscape and weather pattern seemed simple enough, and my description of the calm lake seemed genuine in the moment. Then my psychodrama trainer, Rebecca, pulled out an empty chair and placed it in the front of the room, stating “This is someone to whom you have something you need to say. Who is it, and what do you need to say to them?”

As others spoke in turn, I stood at the end of the line, with no idea what I was going to say, only knowing as I got closer towards the front that there was something roiling beneath the calm surface. It wasn’t until I stood in front of the chair and burst into tears that I knew who it was:

“It’s my mother.”

My beautiful, sunny mother, who over the past year seemed to have her body invaded by an alien as she sank into a psychotic depression, followed by symptoms of dementia. I was losing the mother I had known all my life, and my family was confronted by an angry, frightened stranger to whom we could no longer connect through logic and reality. My grief had settled below the surface, out of awareness and inaccessible until that moment.

I was the protagonist that day: the person whose individual work would serve as a conduit of healing for the group, my individual story tapping into the universal story of grief, loss, and aging. In the ritual of psychodrama, I walked around the designated stage area with Rebecca, and we talked about what I wanted to have happen in the ensuing work: to make some level of peace with my mother’s illness. I brought the group into my inner psyche by first setting up the scene where the action would take place (my parents’ home), and choosing members of the group to play important roles in a scene that captured my dilemma.

Over the next hour, I was given the gift of being able to do what I so desperately needed to do: be witnessed and supported as I played out what it had been like on my last visit with my mom, trying to convince her that there really wasn't mold or mouse droppings in the food and it was safe to eat. Trying to engage her in old familiar things like making cookies, only to rush into the bathroom and turn on the water so that she wouldn’t hear me sobbing over how lost and confused she was doing something she once taught me to do with cheerful confidence. My dear friend, Susan, played my mother to a T, looking lost and confused, but with moments of her own warmth and love bursting through. My other friend, Paul, stood in as a support person, feeding back to me the lines I had given him: “You are strong enough to handle this. Sometimes you just have to bend with the wind.” Later in the scene, Susan stood back behind the chair she had occupied as my mother, and I spoke with her as the spirit and essence of mom, the core of her that I knew was still buried somewhere inside the “alien mom.” At the end of the scene, Susan intuitively picked up what I needed to do to complete the scene: she slowly backed out of the room, waving goodbye and calling in a fading voice, “Goodbye. I love you.” Without my telling her, she knew exactly what the essence of my mom would say and do, giving me the chance to say what I could not say to the real current version of my mom.

Goodbye. I love you.

After the scene was over, the group gathered in a circle for the closing part of the work. With me sitting close to Rebecca, one by one, group members shared what the drama had meant for them. For Susan and Paul, that included not only their own experience with grief and loss, but also feelings and information they tapped into in the roles they played in the scene. I let their words and support wash over me and envelope me like a warm blanket. I feel it’s ripples, even to this day.

I cannot fully explain why standing in front of an empty chair connected me with such powerful immediacy to my buried grief; nor can I put words to the tremendous gift and profound healing I experienced through speaking with my mother and her spirit through Susan in the scene, witnessed and supported by the group. I can only say that, time and again, I connect with feelings and knowledge in action that I cannot connect to when I’m sitting in a chair trying to find feelings and sensory information through words alone. Bessel van der Kolk often says “the body remembers what the mind forgets.” Our three-dimensional memory is locked into our bodies; so is much of our wisdom. I have found that most of us know more than we think we know. Both the fullness of the problems and the rich possibilities of the solutions lie in our bodies, in our creative minds, and in our spontaneity.

Jacob Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, believed that helping people access their own spontaneity is the key to healing and empowerment. He described spontaneity as “an adequate response to a new situation, or a new and adequate response to an old situation.” I love the word “adequate:” not perfect or brilliant; it doesn’t even necessarily have to be good. Good enough will do just fine. Since feeling safe and feeling warmed up to one’s own creativity are prerequisites for spontaneity, he and psychodramatists since have emphasized creating action structures that warm people up to their own creativity before moving into action, and strategies that keep the action within the optimal window of challenge for real change to take place. A phrase I often used to describe psychodrama: it is both playful and profound.

I am passionate about this work. Through my cross training in EMDR, sand tray, and hypnotherapy, I can see similar thought processes at work. All involve moving into the liminal space, what Jacob Moreno refers to as the “surplus reality.” This space lies somewhere between concrete reality and the imaginary realm, where there is both grounding and freedom, allowing us to see things from a new perspective, gain new wisdom, and make profound and lasting changes.

Kathy Campbell will be offering a number of psychodrama groups starting this fall, including groups for trainees, interns, and therapists, as well as groups for clients and the general public. For more information or to receive updates on upcoming groups, please contact Kathy Campbell at (916) 550-5065, via email campbellkathy45@yahoo.com, or visit www.kcampbelltherapy.com.

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