Guide To Training: Training

Psychodrama training is largely concentrated upon the skills of the psychodrama director. A classical psychodrama involves a protagonist whose life events, experiences, fantasies, dreams, and interpersonal relationships provide the material of a psychodrama, and a director who serves as chief technician and dramaturge. Linda Frick (in Hale, A., 1985, Conducting Clinical Sociometric Explorations, First Workbook Edition. Roanoke: Royal Publishing Company) has analyzed the director's role into five functions, each of which calls for a number of specific skills. In her analysis, the director is a producer, analyst/guide, social investigator, as well as group member. Among other things directors must learn how to attend to their own personal warming up processes as well as to the warming up processes of the group as a whole and to the warming up process of the protagonist. Directors must have mastered the uses of the various psychodramatic techniques so well that the selection of a specific technique for a specific purpose is second nature. They must be able to facilitate the expression of the protagonist's emotions as they arise, and that may include the expression of profound pain and fear or raging anger. Directors must also learn how to make protagonists feel safe in exploring those life experiences which may hold scary feelings.

These are skills which, like writing or painting or sculpting or riding a bicycle, can only be learned through practice. Psychodrama training workshops therefore consist largely of psychodramas in which workshop participants are given opportunities to practice as directors or to become protagonists. Being protagonist is an integral part of training because it is necessary for directors to have experienced what it is like to be a protagonist, and because directors must thoroughly understand their own internal responsiveness; they must know themselves as completely as possible, a ever-continuing project, by the way. Since psychodrama is usually a group endeavor, it is also important for directors to develop skills as group leaders and to learn to read and use group structure, the sociometery of the group.

The psychodrama training workshops of The National Psychodrama Training Center are residential in nature. They are held in conference centers where meals and bed are provided. Living together, working and playing together allows group process to proceed in ways that non-residential workshops cannot provide. Workshops typically start on a Thursday evening and end Sunday at noon. This permits eight three-hour sessions.

The training process, following the precedents initiated by J. L. Moreno, is non-linear. In practice this means that any workshop can serve as an introduction to the newcomer to psychodrama who has no previous experience, and can simultaneously serve as the completion of a long period of training for the advanced student who is ready for certification. At any workshop one will find participants with a wide variety of experience with psychodrama training. Experienced participants help newer ones learn the method, and enhance their own training by learning through training. This non-linear approach gives the maximum flexibility to the training process. Everybody proceeds at their own pace. Being unable to attend a specific workshop does not hamper your progress.

This model assumes that a participant learns something new at each workshop, something which the individual which practices during the interval between workshops. This inter-workshop activity serves to prepare the participant to learn something new at the next workshop attended. The training process is self-regulated by each participant who decides whether to attend one workshop a year or five.

The first session of a workshop is usually a group-building session in which established interpersonal relationships are recognized and renewed and new ones are begun. Information about the group, each of which is a unique event, begins to emerge. The agenda that group members have brought in, the individual and collective warming up processes and the workshop goals of the participants, start surfacing. Making this information known to all assists the group to maximally satisfy the needs of the group members.

Many of the subsequent sessions feature the production of classic psychodrama sessions in which participants have an opportunity to be protagonists, directors and auxiliary egos, who take the roles of absent significant others. A large workshop group may divide into smaller groups so that two, three or four psychodramas may occur during a single session. After it has been produced, each psychodrama session is processed. This is a special training event in which the group discusses how the elements of the psychodrama method were utilized in this specific drama. Techniques, method, theory and philosophy may be examined during processing.

Some of the workshop sessions may be devoted to special training exercises aimed at preparing the newcomer to psychodrama to take on the highly complex role of the director. Other sessions may feature variations of the psychodramatic and sociometric methods such as role training and sociodrama. On occasion the group may engage in formal sociometric exploration.

Most workshops address psychodrama training in a global or generic way. Some workshops, however, are dedicated to specific topics of interest such as dealing with guilt and forgiveness, managing rage, exploring the meaning of existential issues such as life, love and death. Specific psychodramatic issues such as catharsis, strategies of directing, and auxiliary work have been the focus of a training workshop. All workshops provide the participant an opportunity to be an active part of the group process, indeed insist upon active involvement, and all workshops take into account the needs and desires of those attending.