Facilitating personal growth and promoting health
What is dramatherapy?
You do not need to have previous experience or skill in acting, theatre or drama to access dramatherapy. Dramatherapy works with creative processes which include symbols and metaphor, movement, play, storytelling, mask work, puppet work, character development, dramatic enactment, improvisation, creative writing.
In dramatherapy the issues you want to work on are expressed and explored through creative forms. I will suggest ways of working and be alongside you in this process, offering supportive reflections.
Our working therapeutic aim is to support you to further develop an awareness of self, confidence, anxiety and stress relief, relational awareness, increased focus and a capacity for emotional growth and lasting change. As with psychotherapy, the underlying aim of dramatherapy is to help you develop a sense of mastery and control over the problem situation.
Dramatherapy can help with issues such as:
- Attachment
- Confidence
- Depression
- Eating and food-related themes
- Family breakup
- Identity
- Overcoming trauma
- Peer relationships
- School difficulties
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers self”
Winnicott
‘Stevie played with the dinosaurs in the sand and I made gentle enquires about their world. ‘How long had the dinosaurs been there? What was in the landscape? What was their day like?’ Stevie told me that there was nothing in their land;there wasn’t any food or water so the dinosaurs were often hungry and this made them really cross and they fought each other all the time. He also told me that a big volcano was going to erupt and that all the dinosaurs were going to get hurt by the lava, he said that he didn’t want the little dinosaurs to get hurt but the big dinosaurs were too busy fighting to help.’
A description of moving into metaphorical engagement
Stevie and the Little Dinosaur. A Story of Assessment In Dramatherapy Chapter 23 pp235 by Sarah Mann Shaw – In The International Handbook of Dramatherapy Ed Jennings and Holmewood Routledge 2016.
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