Jacob Morena, the inventor of Psychodrama, described a “surplus reality,” where much of the deep work takes place. By surplus, he meant that the enactments occur anywhere the imagination invents, in fantasy, on strange unearthly worlds, as symbolic representations, in...

Playing at Love suggests a person looking for a hookup perhaps, or “playing the field,” not willing to commit. They seem to be playing you, which results in an inevitable heartache if you are looking for something serious. But I mean Playing at Love as an attachment...

The Shadow is not necessarily always an opponent…like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love.      Marie-Louis von Franz Still in the bathroom, one moment I was yelling with the voice of...

Drugs are a window but not a door. Ram Dass I will assume you know psychedelics have been used in trauma research recently, which might seem a radical idea but in fact it’s a really old idea. As a therapist, being able to bill for such work as a regular part of our...

This fox might seem without motion, frozen, but her stillness is not passive, and her animal silence is not mute. I see her as a feminine spirit, but she can exist in all of us   Riveted yet open to the Heart-dramas we enact, she sees us without fear, without...

We observe certain constellations of family interactions which we have epitomized as the pattern of family interdependence, roles those of destroyer or persecutor, the victim of the scapegoating attack, and the family healer or the family doctor. Nathan Ackerman, 1968...

Alas, we Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness, Could not ourselves be kind. But you, when at last it comes to pass That man can help his fellow man, Do not judge us Too harshly.     Bertolt Brecht  1938   I would recommend Richard Schwarzes’ new book, There...

POWER He is not here to tell us something. Humans make everything about themselves. So of course, some people will deprive him of his Power, see no value in this creature, declare he is inferior because he lives fully without our chattering mind, largely silent in the...

The Beginning (Part 2), Looking with Curiosity. I see that when the protagonist is just beginning, the drama still speaks through them, especially when the familiar dances kick up in their lives. You hear them enact well-worn ways they turn resentfully away or...

But the Beginning is not the End. (Part 1) Assessing where we are in the Work can be difficult, especially as we begin. How ever earnest we are, like any change we move forward and back, in and out of moments of sanity, then back into the misery again. Yet our Persona...