After the Prescriptive Role connections, we then give an explanation about choosing someone to play their Trauma-based Roles. We acknowledge that in asking someone to play a wounded child or even Perpetrator role, they are honoring the other group member because they trust them to play these roles safely.
The director encourages the TAEs to announce that they are available to be chosen for Victim and Perpetrator roles and to actually “pull” for them by taking postures and making statements to encourage group members to see them in these roles. For example, a Team member wanting to be chosen for the Victim role would hunch over, hiding his or her face, and say, “Oh, I am so sad. I can’t do anything right. I am such a failure.” While someone wanting the Perpetrator role would project a bombastic or nasty element, saying, “Hey you, don’t be looking at me. I know what is good for you and everyone else in this room. I am in control. Don’t be messing with me.” In this way, TAEs encourage group members to pick them so that other group members do not have to hold these Trauma-based projections.
During these Trauma-based Role choices it is inevitable that people will begin to share bits of their trauma stories, so it is important that the director and Team do not let the sharings go on too long. The Team can also step is as Body and Containing Doubles to help people to stay present and in spontaneous states so they do not dissociate, go into uncontrolled regression, or become overwhelmed by triggered feelings during this exercise. If, in fact, one or more group members are overly chosen for one of the Trauma-based Roles, TAEs must step in to support them with doubling to contain the overflow of energy coming toward them. The director must also help the chosen group members to understand that this does not single them out for these roles, but that they are serving an important function for the group—that the group sees them as being strong enough to hold the roles.
As director it is most important to “de-role” any group member who has been chosen to hold a trauma role!
Since this exercise can quickly go very deeply, and to keep it well contained, it is important to ask for only one or two Trauma-based Roles. Two of the questions could be something like this.
•Whom would you choose to trust to be the role of your wounded, vulnerable self? The part you can honor who has carried your pain, loneliness, and now wants to communicate that to you?
•Whom would you choose to trust to play the role of the person who hurt you, who still lives inside your mind and heart, and who you would like to get rid of?
As a last part of the Hands-on-Shoulders sociometry, the director ends with two or three questions focusing on Transformative Roles in order to spiral up to positive roles and never to end in Trauma-based Roles. These questions may be something like the following:
•Whom can you pick to be your spontaneous sleeping-awakening child? (The director explains this TSM role in which a part of self lays safely sleeping (not dissociated) waiting for the adult self to make it safe enough to awaken and be fully alive to the creative, true self.)
•Who could play your good-enough mother or father? God?
The enactment of this Safety Action Structure often takes a good hour and contains many small vignettes as it progresses. For example, many protagonists emerge to connect with their wounded selves and rescue them in the moment; Perpetrators are confronted early on; vivid repair scenes spontaneously occur with good-enough mothers and fathers emerging with love, compassion, and healing. Our TSM dramas often start here, even though we have not formally moved in to the psychodramatic process. So it is also important for the director to manage time boundaries and not allow any one person to take the full protagonist role or to take over the group space. It is also important to remember that this Safety Action Structure is a group structure meant for all to experience as a warm-up.
Fifth Safety Action Structure: The Creative Arts Project
The Creative Arts Project was originally designed by Francesca (Toscani 1996, 1998) as a Safety Action Structure to be completed for weekend Personal Growth workshops. It is used to provide a body-based, right-brained experience for both creativity and trauma material to be expressed as a thread of containment throughout a TSM workshop. Continuing to follow the Prescriptive, Trauma-based, and Transformative Roles, the Creative Arts Project focuses on each of them in day one, two, and three of each workshop. By the end, the Creative Arts Project shows the progression of true integration of strength building and Trauma-based Roles into a full transformation.
A second purpose of this activity is its collective nature, since elements from an individual’s art project or sandtray can be added to a collective art project. These added elements change during the course of the weekend, just as the person’s project changes. At the end, we have a story that is personal and collective or transpersonal at the same time, helping each person feel less isolated.
Over the 20 years of TSM development and practice, teams have used a wide variety of Creative Arts Projects. They have ranged from simple representations of 17-syllable poetry called Haiku, to collages made from magazines, mask-making, Native American dream catchers, individual and community power shields, and on to more involved collective and personal sandtrays that are also used as warm-ups to full dramas.
Usually, the Creative Arts Project ends on the first day of a TSM workshop, designed to develop safety and containment, and then continues for the remainder of the weekend. It is a long, clinically structured warm-up, far surpassing the less structured warm-up of classical psychodrama. Based on our clinical observations, it is deliberately built upon what has been found subsequently in neurobiology to connect right- and left-brain exercises. The Creative Arts Project activates the entire brain so that experiential methods can be done safely, balancing cognition and emotion.
Sixth Safety Action Structure: Circle Similarities
The final Safety Action Structure is most often done as a warm-up to trauma work on day two of a TSM workshop. The clinical purpose of Circle Similarities is to continue to break the isolation that most trauma survivors feel and to help them see that they are not alone with their experiences. A second, very important, clinical reason is to assess whether group members can tell their stories in words before they are put into action. In this way, both group members and the Team can be assured of people’s readiness to move into action and to know what support is needed, before full psychodramatic action takes place.
Here the director and AL, with the help of TAEs, and even group members, ask questions of the group about traumatic experiences so that they can speak about them in the group. The procedure starts out with the TL asking everyone to stand outside the circle of safety. S/he then clarifies the purposes and procedure of the structure, as above, and continues to explain that:
•they will ask questions that apply to themselves and ask others to step in if they share that trauma or healing experience
•the Team members share their own trauma experiences without shame or blame so the group can see how this is done (sharing is a regular element of classical psychodrama at the end of a drama, but here is it used for role modeling at the warm-up stage to prevent shame and self-blame before going into a psychodrama).
Questions about trauma are balanced with questions about strengths, supportive persons, and transpersonal connections so that containment is always in place. Below is an example of a progressive set of questions beginning with positives, dipping in and out of traumas, spiraling back up into positives, and finally ending with transformative questions.
•Who is the oldest child in the family? Who is the baby?
•Who is married? Who has children?
These questions are simple and are used just to teach the structure of stepping into the circle if you meet the criteria. They don’t require much conversation and don’t usually carry much emotion.
The next level of questions begins to bring in trauma-related material.
•Who still carries around critical voices in their heads? If they are from your teachers, take one step further into the circle.