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How Drama Therapists Use Embodiment in Treatment
Connecting body and mind: the role of embodiment in therapy.
Updated October 1, 2024 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Key points
- Drama therapy uses physical movement to express and enhance clients' emotional and cognitive insights.
- Role method, playback theater, and psychodrama use embodiment to holistically improve therapy outcomes.
- Embodiment rewires the brain, solidifying learning and enhancing skill application beyond therapy.
As a drama therapist, my favorite creative arts therapy tool is embodiment. The body holds a wealth of information, and most clinicians know that awareness of physical sensations is an avenue to ground and gain insight. Marsha Linehan (1993) emphasized the importance of mindfulness of the body because it allows clients to rely on qualities of “direct experience, immediate cognition, and the grasping of the meaning, significance, or truth of an event without relying on intellectual analysis.”
In drama therapy, the term embodiment specifically describes when a client’s experience is physicalized and expressed through bodily movement (Jones, 2007). This post will highlight how incorporating interventions where clients embody various concepts and roles can help these individuals better learn skills.
How Drama Therapists Use Embodiment
Drama therapists believe the “live, embodied enactment of new stories and new roles can promote hope and change” (Emunah & Johnson, 2009). Drama therapy sets itself apart from many other forms of therapy through embodiment: In order for an individual to take on a role, they embody the role. Many drama therapists believe that actively engaging the client’s mind and body increases the efficacy of treatment.
Playback theater also embraces the power of embodiment through the theory that using the whole body helps a person to communicate because it can lead to more intensity, propelling the individual into a new state (J. Fox, personal communication, October 30, 2015). In playback theater, for example, embodiment and enactment encourage the ability to express oneself, be open to others, feel self-assured, have self-respect, express creativity, work well in a team, and engage playfully with others.
Psychodrama also uses embodiment to achieve therapeutic aims. Though the protagonist is playing themselves in the enactment, the psychodramatic technique of role reversal provides opportunities for the protagonist to embody other roles. Role reversal is a very powerful tool because it can facilitate a perspective shift by expanding an individual’s version of reality when they step into a different role (Garcia & Buchanan, 2009).
Why Embodiment Helps Clients Learn
The body is crucial to understanding the self. Similar to the therapeutic use of metaphor and story, a different type of learning occurs through the body as an individual relies on kinesthetic and sensory information (Jones, 2007). As a result, embodiment facilitates learning because it generates a multisensory experience, which slows down the process of acquiring information and helps it to “stick.”
Embodiment in a therapeutic space incorporates movement, voice, sound, metaphor, and other techniques to engage the client in a holistic and multisensory way (Johnson, 2009; Landy, 2008) that unites body and mind in the process of discovery. Sharing information through the body, whether through physical gestures or within the context of taking on a role, results in a different learning experience when compared to verbal processing.
In Action-Based DBT, embodiment is used to help clients learn Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills and concepts. For example, when clients learn the skill of Wise Mind, they engage in a series of steps to take on this “role.”
One of the reasons that learning is improved through the process of embodying roles is that it requires the client to move through a series of experiences that involve both the body and mind. Daniel Siegel, a well-known psychiatrist and neuroscientist, explains that the wiring of the brain changes, and neural links are formed between every sequence of a specific experience, particularly novel experiences. The act of embodying the mind state requires a sequence of steps: setting the stage, enrolling the clients, engaging in the action, and de-rolling the clients (Emunah, 2019). As a client moves through a series of steps to embody a role, their brain is rewiring in a way that helps them better understand and ultimately generalize the skill.
In the next post in this series, you will learn how to apply embodiment to your therapeutic practice.
References
If you would like support in incorporating drama therapy into your clinical work, check out my Action-Based DBT program manual, which provides a comprehensive curriculum detailing how to use creative arts strategies to teach DBT skills.
Emunah, R. (2019). Acting for real: Drama therapy process, technique, and performance (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Emunah, R., & Johnson, D. R. (2009). The current state of the field in drama therapy. In D. R. Johnson & R. Emunah (Eds.), Current approaches in drama therapy (pp. 24-36). Charles C. Thomas.
Jones, P. (2007). Drama as therapy: Theory, practice, and research (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Landy, R. J. (2008). The couch and the stage: Integrating words and action in psychotherapy. Jason Aronson, Inc.
Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
Siegel, D. J. (2007). Mindfulness training and neural integration: Differentiation of distinct streams of awareness and the cultivation of well-being. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 259-263.
