Drama Therapy

Drama Therapy invites you to play with the roles and narratives from your life to find new meaning and solve current problems. Our licensed drama therapists can support you in discovering parts of yourself that have been hidden or squashed due to trauma, stress, or other life experiences. Accessing the stories we hold in our bodies provides an outlet for discovery and healing.

Have you ever felt like you are often trapped in the same role? Like the peacemaker, or the truth teller? Do you feel like you are the one writing the narrative of your life? Storytelling and ritual are as ancient as the human experience, and are essential to making sense of it. Drama therapists use improvisation, performance, narratives, metaphor, and play to help you explore your issues. This way of working allows you to create the distance necessary to examine and contain personal and sometimes emotionally loaded material.

Drama therapists practice psychotherapy as NYS Licensed Creative Arts Therapists (LCAT). Most drama therapists also hold national registration as RDTs or Registered Drama Therapists. license. All licensed therapists in New York hold Masters degrees from accredited training programs and undergo professional supervision and yearly continuing education throughout their careers. For more information about the practice of drama therapy visit: www.nadta.org

Drama Therapy is an embodied, experiential mode of psychotherapy for adults, teens, and children

Drama therapy incorporates dramatic and body-based techniques into the therapy session.

With a supportive therapist as your guide, you can experiment with action and narrative-based interventions to support emotional expression and problem solving in your sessions. Discover different approaches like role exploration, sound and movement, improvisation, storytelling, monologue, scene work, and projective techniques. Drama therapy energizes the therapeutic relationship, allows clients to better engage and dialogue with different parts of themselves, and expand their range of behavior in their everyday life.

With drama therapy you can engage with different, sometimes hidden, parts of yourself to live more fully in the world.

Drama Therapy FAQS

What is drama therapy?

Drama therapy is a specialized form of psychotherapy that combines traditional talk therapy with improvisation and theatre techniques to help connect the client to action and lived experience in a safe and effective way. Trying out roles, situations, narratives and behaviors in the therapy space offers the possibility to rehearse and workshop real life. This allows you to enter into your life better prepared, and with more confidence.

Is acting experience required to do drama therapy?

No acting experience is required to do drama therapy. In fact, the less experience you have the greater the discoveries! All that is required is a willingness to take some (calculated) risks and maybe be a little bit silly or uncomfortable in order to develop the tools you need to be ready for whatever life will throw at you.

I am shy and introverted, can drama therapy help me?

Drama therapy is great for shy and introverted people. Your therapist will work with you to build a relationship of safety and trust where you can try things at your own pace and step out of your comfort zone without risk. Practicing how to be connected to yourself in the therapy space will help you face your life with more confidence.

What is drama therapy with a family like?

Family drama therapy is like having your own little theater troupe to create stories, improvise scenes and role swap. Drama therapists who work with families are trained to help each family member find their place, their voice, and their purpose in the group while addressing stuck patterns and scenarios and helping everyone learn new and more effective ways of interacting with each other.