Complicated Grief, Attachment, and Art Therapy. Группа авторов

of integration.

      Playing herself

      The embodiment of Maya, as herself, was by far the most challenging task. Maya experienced a sense of being stifled and speechless when playing herself. At times, she was completely dissociated from her own character and curious as to why this was occurring. The director, Dana, redirected this dissociation by reversing roles and taking on the role of Maya. This gave Maya the opportunity and the distance necessary to direct herself vicariously and have empathy for what she was experiencing. Playing the role of director in this rehearsal was essentially the first time in this process that Maya felt like the good enough mother. As the good enough mother in the role of director, Maya exhibited strength, empathy, and stability necessary to mother herself. At the end of the rehearsal process, Maya was the character she enjoyed playing the most as she discovered freedom in performing the integration of selected qualities of both her mother and grandmother.

      Saying goodbye

      One particular rehearsal stands out as a definitive moment in this process. This rehearsal emerged from the intent to place a movement piece at the end of the performance. This movement piece was an embodiment of the car accident Maya’s mother died in. Maya was unable to improvise and kept returning to rigid roles such as commander, boss, and fetus; all three of these roles were subject to the demands of others. While rehearsing this piece, it became clear that Maya was performing the trauma cycle. Rather than finding the necessary roles to move forward, she was pulled back in by the comfort of her inherited grief and trauma response. Additionally, the energy and arousal she experienced around performing the trauma was indicative of the unprocessed emotions Maya held towards the finality of her mother’s death. The act of playing out the passing of her mother provided Maya with a sense of thrill and control in that she was able to embody a scene that had been the most pivotal moment in her life and took place in her absence.

      Moreover, the physicality of playing in a car, the vehicle responsible for her mother’s death, was a performance of her own fear of driving, as well as frustration at, and resentment towards, being a passenger in her life. Control was the most evident element in this rehearsal and it manifested in Maya’s holding of the safety belt in several moments and fashions during the rehearsal. The director then suggested that she perform the movement piece in the car with the intention to exit it. This resulted in recognition that there was unfinished business and unprocessed grief. Through this enactment, Maya was able to say goodbye to both her mother and her grandmother, two women she never was privileged to say goodbye to in reality. Ultimately, it was decided not to incorporate the movement piece into the performance as the rehearsal sufficiently served its purpose of providing closure and promoting forward movement.

      The performance

      The performance was the culmination of four months of investigation and crafting of the script. By playing all three women Maya was able to find that the intergenerational trauma was not the transmission of mental illness or the fear of it, or sudden deaths. It was the attachments that were formed as a response to unprocessed grief. The performance gave Maya insight into the ways grief can be inherited when unprocessed and repressed. Additionally, the role of art as a coping mechanism used by all three characters was unveiled in performance: Florence’s painting and sculpting, Jane’s writing and music, and Maya’s theater.

      In summation, integration occurred after playing a multitude of roles and selecting the roles that best served the desired role as a good enough mother. The experience of playing all the roles facilitated the identification of roles that are needed as well as roles that do not serve the purpose of integration. The performance was the integration of all three characters, as well as three facets of Maya’s self that have been explored throughout this process. Ultimately, the integration occurred because the performance allowed the space for all three women to create a combined repertoire of roles that make up a good enough mother. And as Florence says in the play, “Put a frame around a wound and it has a different meaning.”

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