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ACTION EXPLORATION (3)
Adam Blatner, M.D., TEP
See a further development of this theme on Action Explorations 2.
Abstract
Drama therapy lays the groundwork for branching laterally and supplementing your income beyond the medical model, reaching beyond the sick role into education, spiritual development, business, organization, and spontaneity training. Action exploration is a category that includes these applications in non-clinical realms and also integrates elements from other fields such as drama in education, sociodrama, psychodrama, an applied improvisation.Presentation
I want many fields to combine under a more encompassing category I call "action exploration" that involves the integration of three things that most folks are afraid to do: Improvise, enact, and collaborate creatively (yes and rather than no but). There are a number of related endeavors:- applied improvisation, applications to business, etc. (Please check the Applied Improvisation Network for a forthcoming conference in early November in Austin, Texas, near where I live. I know many of you will go to Yosemite the previous weekend, but tell others to come to Austin.)
- spontaneity development (the Art of Play, “Lila” workshops of Leif Hansen in Seattle..., vitality enhancement, theatre games)
- theatre of the oppressed
- drama therapy
- playback theatre
- process drama in education
- play studies
- creativity studies
- simulations in professional training dealing with interpersonal skills
not just technical skills
- role training (similar to above, but even wider in scope)
- practicing inner voice sensitivity (called "doubling" by psychodramatists
and also role reversal, all to build empathy skills
- social and emotional skill development, social-emotional learning (SEL), anti-bullying
- sociodrama all kinds
- spiritual deepening interfaith dialog
- bibliodrama in religion and also for history or literature classes
- process drama in education
- drama therapy (non-clinical applications)
- psychodrama both clinical and nonclinical
- some sociometric exercises
and so forth. (Please email and suggest that I revise this by adding an item or revising what I say, or adding a link.)
How many folks do you know who realize that any or all of these activities in other fields are mirroring what y’all are learning in drama therapy? Admittedly, your training invites you to dig a bit deeper, go into the personal more, and the pathological. But part of what you’re learning is also more general. At any rate, my suspicians are that few in any other fields recognize this commonality of method—improvisation, enactment, creative collaboration.
It's more than clinical, or educations, or anything other than consciousness raising. It's for individuals and collectives, groups, continuing education. It's a new synthesis, an idea whose time has come.
In a few days from now—Sunday morning in Oakland—Cort Worthington will co-present with me on applied improv at the annual ASGPP national psychodrama conference in Oakland, CA, and again I'll plant seeds, with psychodramatists that time.
Let’s open to this.
How many of you were mainly in the theatre arts a few years ago? So you branched laterally into therapy. Now other colleagues also began to branch into consulting, coaching, towards business. Andrew Gaines who will be teaching here Monday is more into a liaison with drama in education, and a number of drama therapists have branched laterally into that arena, and into social and emotional learning.
You may know of a few people who have already pioneered in these various directions and I would appreciate your helping me to link up, but I don’t think most folks in the various fields yet see their common denominators.
Psychodramatists tend to be a bit stuck on the entitlement of their being the first, of their leader being the pioneer, as if that entitles them to continue to be the holder of the flame. Mistake. Others who advance a field—never mind who started it—often ecologically get the benefits, occupy that socio-economic niche. In the case of psychodrama, yes, those methods were applied by Moreno and other early pioneers in business in the 1940s and 50s. But psychodrama rested back into the main economic thing going at the time, which was psychotherapy. Meanwhile, folks from the theatre branched laterally starting in the 1970s and they have scores of toe-holds as consultants with businesses. Most of them either don’t know or don’t care that much that Moreno was a significant pioneer of this.
Ditto with the whole creative arts thing—Moreno carried several pioneers of dance and poetry therapy in his earlier journals— but the fields have gone on without psychodrama, which for various political reasons in trying to be more professional and scientific established board qualifications. This had good and bad results—the bad being that the field distanced itself from the merely creative arts methods. Good for those fields, which reacted by organizing their own boards and certifications, all in the 1970s and 1980s.
Other fields are just getting started, so they’re consolidating their identity. One of my missions is to let them know that they’re related. I guess I feel like one of these DNA analytic businesses. Hey, did you know you’re 34% Slavic? That sort of thing.
Meanwhile, psychiatry was trying to get even more scientific and the body-mind is more open for research than the mind-spirit or mind-group. That is, it’s easier to do research and get significant effects, forgetting that there may be ten things that are not even addressed!
- levels of health positive psychology
- co-morbidity and the way one pattern, habit, addiction, mode reinforces if not the roots then the elaborations of addictive disorders, character or personality disorders, post-traumatic disorders, not to think of the economic and social crazies these conditions operate in..
- temperament
- levels of types of ability, vocational counseling, feelings of not being good at what one thinks one should be good at while yet ignoring one’s natural talents which rightly or wrongly one things are devalued or ignored by relevant society
- levels of loneliness, disconnection,
- spiritual strength, resilience, faith, vigor of belief, support availability, transitions
- etc.
The basic theme of accentuating the positive is relatively new and drama offers a channel for several positive experiences that many had never experienced:
- validation of imagination, others enjoying it, playing with and building on it
- non-competitive group all seeking to support one another
- honest talk
(These may seem obvious, given, to some, but in fact they are enjoyed by a minority of the population)
- freedom to be irreverent, to question, to articulate assumptions, the better to discriminate, by some parts, reject other parts. Again, these are not experiences enjoyed by the mainstream of the culture, by the poor, by other subcultures, by middle America
- the experience of creating anything rather than spewing back what was taught. Bracing.
There is a cultural transition implied in therapy, more explicitly, I think, in Drama. What of that role definition do you want to accept? In the bad old days, this was a non-question. One accepted what one was given. A mild slave mentality was a virtue, a given, unthinking obedience, reverence for duly established authority at all levels. No matter that a mid-level authority was a jerk. He— not always but often a ‘he’—was entitled to respect, which remained undifferentiated from blind credulity and obedience.
Group work—and drama tends to be group work—is even more radical in letting one know that questioning assumptions is not taboo but rather healthy. What a flip! One-to-one can do this but it comes on far slower and more indirectly.
Some Other Things Ignored by Many Approaches to Psychotherapy Developed in the mid-late 20th Century:
Just go to http://blatner.com/adam/blog/?p=1714 orhttp://blatner.com/adam/blog/?s=Some+Facets+of+Depth+Psychology&x=0&y=0
1. Illusion: This involves a tendency to think along lines that follow our habits and interests as well as fairly basic neural patterns. No ulterior deep motives are needed. Even if people could be exposed to years of depth analysis as young people, they would still be prone to slipping into these illusions. Research into critical thinking, semantics, and the processes of illusion have produced hundreds of books that speak to these patterns of self-deception and rhetoric.
2. Social Sensitivity: a growing awareness of the impact of relationships, groups, groupthink, the influence of others, wanting to appear attractive and smart, etc.—all of which are for the most part unconscious. Saying it another way, the mind is an exquisitely social organ, highly responsive to subtle cues that relate to status, rank, numbers of other people, and nonverbal communications. Social psychology, in other words, needs to be recognized as overlapping with depth psychology. I call this arena “social depth psychology.”
3. The Cultural Worldview. People do pick up on what seems like “common sense” to everyone. We value what others value and ignore, dismiss, trivialize what “everyone knows” deserves such “marginalization.” For example, play was only for kids in the early 20th century and before, but gradually became re-cognized as a basis for playful exploration, and that in turn was a basis for creativity and innovation—most relevant in the 21st century!
However, cultural influences are coming more into explicit consciousness due to advances in psychology, and also less obviously, literature, philosophy, and because of improvements in transportation, publishing, communications, etc., the postmodern world is becoming far more complex and inter-cultural. As a result, we in turn are becoming more sharply aware of the relativity of many beliefs.
In addition, as liberty and other values become more widely accepted, there has been a rise in human expectations among women and various minorities, previously almost ignored or relegated to stereotyped roles (e.g., races, cultures, different sexual orientations, gender identifications, different abilities, etc.).
There’s also an expectation of more psychological awareness from other adults, from managers, parents, teachers. Gross ignorance and cruelty is less forgivable. What used to evoke murmurs of “what a jerk!” among subordinates now can get someone behaving badly fired.
4. Spirituality. It’s not a matter of beliefs being true or not. That’s a 20th century concern. It’s rather a matter of whether one’s religion or spiritual philosophy or secular philosophy works to sustain or lift that person in the face of stress. Many people don’t have this operating, even if the profess to be religious. So the realm of spirituality and religion, called “transpersonal psychology” or the psychology of faith or whaetever, is too often relegated to its own domain apart from psychology. More recently, it is being literally re-cognized, re-thought, as of course deserving psychological analysis. It was taboo to question spirituality from an atheistic psychoanalytic bias, but more people are realizing that spirituality and religion are so prevalent that any comprehensive theory must include consideration of the powers of this aspect of human experience. In addition to transpersonal psychology, this category includes recent writings and books about spirituality, such as Saphira Linden’s, about meditation, the power of myth, and a deeper philosophy of life— much of which is unconscious, part of depth psychology.
5. I mentioned a sharper recognition of the need to take into account differences in temperament, ability and interest. There are scores of different scales here and it is not necessary to enumerate them. The point is that trying to assess temperament can be as shallow as astrology or as deep as Jungian work on psychological types.
The main point to make here is that many people have been thinking about such differences and their implications, and this should definitely affect any theorizing about psychology and sociology. Different types of people have not only different reaction patterns, but also different underlying dynamics.
6. It’s time in our postmodern situation to challenge norms. This is happening more obviously politically regarding gay rights, feminism, racism, and so forth. Passover’s coming. My interpretation of passover is a rejection of all forms of slave mentality, assuming someone else sets the norms, the rules. Imagine that God never made any rules. How many here are parents of children –more than one—of older than 4 and younger than 14? Do you ever find yourself saying, “Work it out,” when faced with their appeals in a squabble?
So what we’re talking about is an emerging worldview that life challenges are socially constructed. Think about it in a different frame and the situation is different, the therapy is different. Right now it’s part of the “sick” role, covered in part by “health insurance,” a spin-off of the dominance of not just psychoanalysis, but the way it was coopted by the field of medicine in the USA in the 1930s. The problem is that although there is a blurry middle area, a great deal of why people sought analysis and psychotherapy had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with ordinary challenges of living in an era of rising expectations.
I”m daring to say that much of what used to be called “neurosis” as if it were a real problem is in fact no more an illness than “drapetomania” —a mid-19th century term coined to “medicalize” (and thereby validate the “abnormality” of) slaves who wanted to escape from slavery! Saying it another way, the implication is that if one were well-analyzed one would be free from neurosis. This is patently untrue, and psychoanalysts are certainly no testimonial for that field’s endeavors. Saying it another way, many conditions associated with neurosis are simply exaggerations of cultural tendencies and rules, not adequately tempered by not taking these rules too seriously..
7. Health balances out illness. Positive tendencies compensate for negative tendencies. Many people aren’t really no more caught up with negative thoughts and tendencies as those who are less afflicted, but they don’t have anywhere near the same amount of resilence, health, with which to control those negative tendencies.
The forthcoming psychodrama conference features a couple of speakers who address the new professional trend towards “positive psychology.” It’s a corrective to the excessive focus on the negative, or on viewing quirks with excessive negativity. Often what is needed to correct a negative problem is to cultivate the capacity to enjoy more positive skills, resilience, counter-measures.
8. Doing rather than Talking About. Here’s another approach to healing, one which empowers people, helps them feel themselves being creative, taking initiative, doing stuff. Drama, the arts, anything that involves people in experiencing themselves as the agents of their own change increases the healing process. Action approaches, constructive work, feeling oneself as active, perhaps even a degree of playfulness, all adds to the positive balance alluded to in the previous paragraph.
Related to this, certain anxieties and troubles are absolutely impossible to work out rationally, existential challenges, such as the fear of death. On the other hand, people have been and are in fact coming to terms with death, hardship, loss, and so forth, not through rational talk, but through any of the arts, poetry, not having to make sense of the experience, but finding that others can empathize and validate that it doesn’t make sense. No one else can explain such things.
Enough for now. Please email me and help me make this webpage even better.
Other links: Action Explorations