Book Description

This book examines how drama therapists conceptualize and respond to relational and systemic trauma across systems of care including mental health clinics, schools, and communities burdened by historical and current wounds. This second edition of Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms, and Communities offers a broad range of explorations in engaging with traumatic experience, across settings (clinical, educational, performance) and geographies (North America, Germany, Sri Lanka, South Africa, India, Belgium), and methodologies (Sesame, DvT, ethnography, performance, CANY, Self Rev). Each effort runs into obstacles, resistances, biases, and random events that highlight the authors’ passion and courage. No solutions are to be found. No grand schemes are proposed. Just hard work in the face of impenetrable truth: we are still at the beginning of understanding how to achieve an equitable, moral, accountable, healthy collective being-with. Confronting trauma, listening to victim testimonies, sitting with unsettling uncertainty, understanding the enormity of the problem, are difficult tasks, and over time wear people down. The chapters in this book belie this trend as they illustrate how the passion, creativity, faith, and perseverance of drama therapists the world over, each in their own limited way, can help. In each of these chapters you will read about people who have been pushed to the margins of existence, and then, how drama therapists have worked to remind them of their immutable, unique value that can transcend and transform those margins into spaces of care, power, and possibility. It will be useful for creative arts therapists, mental health professionals, educators, students and many others interested in the role of the drama and performance in the treatment of trauma.