How Drama Therapy Supports Emotional Wellness

There is so much to learn about drama therapy as a part of the creative arts but first let me tell you how I got here ! I come from an interdisciplinary arts background. Before I became a drama therapist, I was making interactive, improvised performances rooted in community engagement. When a mentor told me about drama therapy, I saw similarities between where my practice was headed and what was happening in the field. The more I learned, the more excited I was, and I was in graduate school studying drama therapy within the year. 

I received my MA in Drama Therapy from New York University. During graduate school, I was able to work with and learn from many amazing organizations including Kings County Hospital, AHRC, The Animation Project, and Breaking Ground. My undergraduate education is in journalism, communication, and design, so finding different ways to tell a story is a significant part of my background. In the decade plus gap between undergraduate and graduate school, I spent time facilitating and working in education and was also able to participate in several non-hierarchical, horizontally organized spaces like School of the Alternative in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and School for Poetic Computation in New York City. All these experiences helped form both who I am and how I relate to my practice as a drama therapist. 

I have worked with folks across age, race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, diagnostic, social, and class spectrums. Currently I work with people living with severe and persistent mental illness in an inpatient behavioral health setting. I work in acute care which means our team focuses on stabilization and helping patients get back to their lives as quickly as possible. 

Drama therapy uses performance and theater processes to support people in moving towards their goals. It can help people find new ways to frame or reframe personal and collective stories, express feelings, process emotions, heal from trauma, and improve overall wellbeing. Drama therapy allows people to try out different behaviors, engage with creativity, explore new ways of communicating, increase cognition, and forge deeper connections with themselves and others. 

The most common misconception I run into as a drama therapist working in inpatient behavioral health is that because the interventions, I do tend to be dynamic and engaging, the purpose of drama therapy is to keep patients entertained. While drama therapy can be fun, it is also an evidence-based, credentialed, clinical profession. When Licensed Creative Arts Therapists work with groups and individuals, a lot of care, skill, and training go into everything we do. 

Another assumption that people sometimes make when I tell them I am a drama therapist is that I only work with children, perhaps because they associate drama or acting with “play.” Play is a language that we are often taught to stop using as we grow, even though it’s one of the first tools we have to understand and make meaning of the world around us. Play has an immediacy in terms of accessibility that can mirror the nature of thought itself, making it a powerful therapeutic medium for people at any age. 

In groups, I use a lot of storytelling, roles, and improvisation. I design my weekly group schedule so that one group builds on the next, starting from “Flip the Script,” where we read through and discuss a popular script, to, once the group is more warmed up, “Role 

With It,” where we engage in Improv based exercises that build towards the creation of collaborative, two-minute-long scenes. 

In “Flip the Script,” patients get to step into a role as an actor or audience member, sometimes even as the director! The group practices being in a relationship with one another in a safe, structured way while having the communal experience of creating something together, a powerful source of self-esteem. We also use the script as a basis for discussion, pausing after each scene to consider what the characters might be feeling. Finally, each group member shares one thing they related to in the script as well as one thing they didn’t. These last two interventions are designed to support emotional awareness and integration by allowing group members space to explore and gain insight into their own feelings and situations without emotional overwhelm or detachment. 

In “Role With It,” the group again engages with a shared creative endeavor. Improv-based exercises help build spontaneity, flexibility, and resilience. The scaffolding of the script is removed, and now participants are tasked with creating a scene together using elements chosen by the roll of a dice. Improvisation requires listening to and building on what your scene partner is saying and staying with the present moment without trying to completely change or control it, which allows participants a chance to practice mindfulness skills. Acting in front of a group can be stressful and exciting, so engaging with scene work in a time limited and contained way gives group members the chance to practice self-regulation techniques in a potentially dysregulating situation and then reflect on that experience in a supportive setting. 

There are so many examples I have of patients struggling to interact with peers due to their symptoms who are able to step into a role and play the social butterfly with ease, or who are not ready to join in the action their first few days on the unit but are quickly integrated into the group through the role of witness or director. But mostly, I notice that healing 

occurs in the small moments when we let things unfold in the communal here and now; in the awkward, unresolved complexity of creation where we practice sitting with the uncertainty of "what happens next”. When we expand our capacity to tolerate and move through the discomfort of the unknown, we grow. 

Creative arts therapies are important for overall mental and emotional health because they are accessible, providing therapeutic services via the universal languages of art, dance, music, storytelling, drama, and play. They support patients in exploring and defining their own healing goals while fostering relationships, community, and care. Creative arts therapies facilitate the exploration and reconstruction of personal narratives through creative expression, helping people make sense of their experiences and find meaning in their journeys. 

All Licensed Creative Arts Therapists, including drama therapists, need your support! Currently in New York state, Licensed Creative Arts Therapists are working to improve access to our services through legislative action at the state level by adding Licensed Creative Arts Therapists to the Medicaid Provider List & commercial health insurance plan panels in this year’s state budget. Check out LCAT Advocacy Coalition at www.lcatcoalition.org to find out more.