Psychodramatist Rashmi Dutt says that physically recreating certain situations and emotions of the past causes the re-alignment of old patterns inside the body and the mind. This is the manner in which the method of healing through acting works, discovers Ayushi Sharma

Did you know ‘drama’ can help people overcome personal challenges like childhood trauma, substance abuse or turf wars at work place? Well, picture this. A woman is very angry with her father because he was absent when her mother needed him the most. She remembers the time when she was 12 and her mother was being treated for cancer. Such memories and events from childhood could leave one scarred for life. The trauma didn’t leave her easily. The woman’s childhood misery was eventually healed through psychodrama, a form of psychotherapy, in which patients act out events from their past. The method has often been described as a scientific exploration of truth through drama.

Psychodramatist Rashmi Dutt describes the approach and how she helped the woman recreate those moments in order to overcome them. “Since the session takes place in a group, the woman chooses an individual from the audience to act as her mother and another person, who would have characteristics similar to her father. She, then, tells her acting father that she had been very annoyed with him because he was not present for his family when they needed him at a crucial time,” she says.

Now, before proceeding, there comes a role reversal, where she steps into the shoes of her father. This action helps the protagonist understand the other person’s role and situation at a given time, in turn, helping the director (therapist) better understand their relationship dynamics. “Doing so may also help increase the protagonist’s empathy,” says she.

Through recreating that particular phase of her life, the woman, perhaps, for the first time experienced what her father was going through. “The acting father then responds, ‘I was helpless and so over-burdened with work that the only option I had was to run away.’ The session hence proceeds further and takes a different ending this time, where the woman realised her father’s side of the story too,” explains Rashmi.

Following this, there is a sense of an immediate catharsis. And because psychodrama helps people see themselves and their situations from an outsider’s perspective, the sessions often become a safe haven for people to explore new solutions to difficulties and challenges, whether they are rooted in external causes or past situations. “Reliving those moments and giving a different end to it helps people overcome the trauma because the memories that one holds on to are not the objective memories, they are subjective ones. Here, you also understand the other’s point of perspective, which you wouldn’t have thought about before. This creates a big shift in letting go of the deep-rooted resentments,” says she.

It is human tendency that we imbibe certain rules while growing up which makes us have a fight-or-flight response to situations and as a result, the rational mind stops functioning. “We react instead of responding to it,” she says. These, she explains, are a result of our old experiences, which are so deeply ingrained in our brains that it might take forever to get rid of them. As Jacob Moreno, a 20th century psychiatrist, who developed psychodrama in the early 1900s, had said, ‘We get wounds in groups.’ By a group, he means the family of origin. ‘So the healing will take place in groups and in movements’. Therefore, in psychodrama, things also work in a group. “The group therapy approach was born out of Moreno’s recognition of the importance of it and his combined interests in philosophy, theatre and mysticism,” she tell us.

However, there is always the question that different people go through different problems in their lives, so how can one story or a single drama help all the members in the session? She says that here the problem of the protagonist of the story is taken up. “For instance, a woman’s relationship with her husband is very heavy because there is no flow in it. The play would start where she’ll take the centrestage and then create a sculpture with the people who are present around her. She will choose a team and make it very concrete by reliving the time when she had last experienced the trauma intensely. Imagine. It was the time when she was pregnant. So, we take that time and ask her where is she right now? She responds that she is in her drawing room. So who are the other people in the room? She probably says that it’s her mother. So we tell her to pick a person, who could be her mother for now. It’s not like we would pick anyone. It must be someone, who she could relate with and finds characteristics similar to her mother. The stage is now set with members of her play and then the role reverses with each person. The woman enacts as her husband to show what he was like at that point of time. Then the idea is to re-experience those emotions and re-look at the moment with a different lens and then with the help of the director (therapist), try and give it a different ending, which, in psychodrama, is a surplus reality. So that there is a sense of healing,” Rashmi explains.

She goes on to add that the beauty of psychodrama is that the people, who have been chosen to play those roles, themselves experience certain emotions and after the play is over, there is a sense of sharing, where people, who were in those roles, discuss the experience of what it was like to be in the shoes of that person.

There comes an interesting concept here, called ‘tele’. She tells us, “It is basically about what attracted you to call the person a certain name in the first place. Often the people, chosen for a particular role, share that they have faced or are facing similar issues in their life. So there is some kind of connect, which causes different people to come on stage and in that sense, everyone is able to find something from being in that role.”

While looking at usual therapy sessions, one might immediately imagine a therapist sitting in an office, scribbling notes while the client lies on a leather couch. Even those sessions include the concept of role-plays. So how is psychodrama different? Rashmi answers that when one just talks about the issue, it’s very cognitive. “You are engaging your thoughts but as soon as you get into movement and the body is involved, there is a certain neuro connection. When we deal with those emotions physically, it causes the re-alignment of old patterns inside the body and the mind,” says the psychodramatist. Sharing an interesting fact about role-plays, she tells us about the interdependence of two psycho-therapy theories, “Psychodrama is often based on family constellations process and the family constellations process is usually based on psychodrama.”