Friday, November 18, 201:   7:30 PM
Boughton Place
150 Kisor Road
Highland, NY 12528

Peter Pitzele is a renowned psychodramatist who developed Bibliodrama a method that allows readers to bring the bible to life.  It allows participants to explore the deeper universal themes and make sense of them in their own lives.  (For those of a less religious bent, this technique can be used with other texts as well). Peter will guide participants in action through the Story of Ruth and give them the opportunity to explore Ruth’s relationships and choices as well as their own relationship to the story.

This is a must attend event for anyone interested in creative education, psychodrama, theater, and the creative arts.

This event is presented by The Hudson Valley Chapter of the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama

Contribution: $8 / $5 for those on limited income. No reservation needed!
For more information, call us at (845) 255-7502 or e-mail hvpi@hvc.rr.com

What you won’t find on the website is how impressive Rebecca Walters and Judy Swallow are as trainers and counselors.  They are internationally know and regonized for their training and groups and workshops.  I have been in HVPI workshops with psychodrama students from all over the United States as well as from India, China, Japan, the Netherlands, Korea, Australia, Israel, Bangladesh, Brazil, Columbia, Peru and Guatemala.  And they live up to having such a wide following.  They provide excellent didactic training about the theoretical underpinnings of psychodrama and experiential exercises designed to help participants and students put the theory into action.  Every workshop provides something participants can take home and put to use.

Psychodrama, conceived and developed by Jacob L. Moreno, MD, helps people clarify issues, increase their physical and emotional well being, and learn and develop interspersonal skills.  Because psychodrama uses experiential methods that incorporate the entire body and is rooted an understanding of the significance of relationships to damage and to heal, psychodrama helps people not only change their thinking but actually helps participants build new neural pathways associated with positve relational experiences.  This process, ultimately, can help participants develop a sense of peace associated with mindfulness meditation.  Participants also have a chance to gain insight into their problems and issues and gain a clearer understanding of the impact that familial, group, community and social dynamics play in their lives.

At a professional level, the tools psychodrama provides are helpful for therapists and mental health counselors, personal growth and executive coaches, human resource managers, business leaders, and educators.  For more information see www.reginasewell.com/Psychodrama.html

Drama – the story

Psyche – the soul

Psychodrama – the story of the soul.

When facilitated by a trained and experienced director, a psychodrama session can help participants and observers work through the issues and stories that keep them stuck in ineffective patterns of thinking and being.

Protagonists – group members selected to work – get an opportunity to put their lives on stage.  They are able to slow down the action of life, make sense of the roles they are playing, give voice to their perceptions and projections they attribute to others, step into others’ shoes to test their perceptions and projections and try on new roles and new ways of playing old roles.

Auxillaries – people chosen by the protagonist to play roles in their dramas – get a chance to try on new roles or modes of behavior and gain insight into their own roles and modes of being.

Audience members get a chance to see a universal theme played out before their eyes, connect with the protagonist’s struggle and with others in the group, and make sense of their own lives in a different way than before.

And if you are anywhere in the Hudson Valley area of New York this Friday, June 17th, you can experience a psychodrama in action – not for $500, not for $300, not even for $199.95.

This Friday, at 7:30 PM, the Hudson Valley Chapter of the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama invites you to experience  an Open Psychodrama Session at Boughton Place, 150 Kisor Road, Highland, NY 12528, for a small donation of $8 ($5 for those on limited income).

This month’s director is  Phoebe Atkinson, a licensed clinical social worker, Board Certified Psychodramatist and Trainer with a successful private practice in New York City.  Beyond the counseling realm, Phoebe and has helped Rutgers University design their Senior Leadership Program for Professional Women and currently works with them providing professional coaching to women executives.

For more information, drop me a line or contact the Hudson Valley Chapter of Association for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama c/o Rebecca Walters  Phone: (845) 255-7502

Open sessions are a great way to experience psychodrama without having to join a group.  They are 2 – 2 1/2 hour psychodrama sessions facilitated by board certified psychodramatists and offered to the general public.  Attendees can participate at whatever level they are comfortable with.  This month’s open session will be directed by Anath Garber, a psychodrama trainer who lives and works in New York City.  She will direct a full psychodrama, including a warm-up, protagonist selection, piece of work in action and sharing.  After the session is over, attendees are invited to stay to chat.  Juice and cookies will be provided.

These open sessions take place at Boughton Place – 150 Kisor Road ,Highland, NY 12528.  The chapter asks for an $8 donation ($5 for those on limited income)  and no reservations are needed.  If you’d like more information about the open sessions or about psychodrama, you can contact me or you can call the Hudson Valley Psychodrama Institute (845) 255-7502 or e-mail them at hvpi@hvc.rr.com.

The standard advice is to meet the challenge head on – to climb over it, go around it, move it out of the way or blow it up.  Unfortunately, real-life roadblocks don’t go away so easily.  You usually have to a good deal of introspection and soul-searching to get past them.

When you hit a roadblock, the first step is to determine the source.  Is the challenge you face really an insurmountable external challenge, or is it just a story you’ve been telling yourself?  And if it is really an insurmountable external challenge, is it something that you might be able to overcome or do you need to revisit the drive behind the goal?  For example, given the fact that I am just over 5 feet tall, female and almost 50, unless the world changes dramatically overnight, there’s no chance that I’ll ever play for NBA.  The reality is that I can’t very well change the world.  In order to move through the roadblock, I have to accept reality as it is without giving up.  This means that I have to ask myself, “What’s my motivation to play for the Spurs?”  Maybe it’s the fact that the San Antonio Spurs are my mother’s favorite basketball team and I imagine that she’d be proud of me if she saw me shooting hoops with her boys.  Maybe I really love basketball and just want to be able to play.  Or maybe I think that being a professional basketball player would be a great way to make a lot of money.  When I figure out my drive to play for the Spurs, I can find a different way to meet the deeper goal.  I might be able to find a way to make my mother proud of me, or find a way to play basketball a lot, or make a lot of money.

It’s a little more tricky when the roadblocks are internal. These roadblocks often lie in deeply rooted fears and unconscious beliefs.  When you come up against one of these roadblocks, ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?”  For example, maybe you set a goal to change careers.  Perhaps every time you ponder quitting your job to become a freelance writer, you fall into a pit of despair because some part of you is certain that you’ll never be able to make a living as a writer.

You can start dismantling your roadblocks by sorting out the beliefs you have about your ability to accomplish your goals.  Give yourself a few moments and write down every negative belief you have about your ability to accomplish that particular goal.  Leave some space at the end of the page so that you can come back and add beliefs that pop up later.  Once you have a decent list of negative beliefs, go through them and write down the source of that belief.  For example, if your dream is to write for a living, you might find the following negative beliefs on your list:  1) I’m not a good enough writer; 2) Many are called but few are chosen (very few people actually make a living as a professional writer) ; 3) No one cares about the things I want to write about; etc.  If you go back to the list, you might realize that you got the message that you weren’t a good enough writer from a third grade teacher who didn’t like the short story you wrote about Halloween, or from your brother who told you that you’d never be able to do anything right.  You might actually hear your father saying, “Many are called but few are chosen.”  You might believe that no one cares about the things you want to talk about because the popular people in high school convinced you that you were a total geek and that your thoughts are irrelevant.  The beauty is that you don’t have to hold on to other people’s negative beliefs about yourself.  You can give them back or let them go.

After you have located the source of the negative beliefs, challenge them.  Is it really true that you aren’t a good enough writer?  No really, have you read some of the crap that gets published out there?  And is “you’re not good enough” terminal or can you work with a teacher, tutor or coach to improve your writing?  Is it really true that very few people make a living as a professional writer or are you just setting the “make a living” bar to the level of income Stephen King and J. K. Rowling make?  Have you really looked at the statistical data on this?  Are you willing to spend a few hours in the library to find out how many professional writers there are and how you can join their ranks?  Is it really true that no one cares about what you want to write about?  If so, can you expand your topic area to be more inclusive.  For example, there may not be a huge market for articles about female pirates off the coast of North Carolina in the 1800′s, but there may be a huge market about adventurous women who defied the cultural norms of their day.

Next, what are you afraid might happen?  Are you afraid you’ll fail?  Are you afraid that people will be disappointed?  Are you afraid of the consequences of success?  Once you’ve laid out all your fears, scrutinize them.  If you’re afraid you’ll fail, what do you think will happen?  Are you afraid you’ll end up homeless?  If you fail, so what?  What’s the worst thing that can happen?  Will people laugh at you?  Will people reject you?  Will you die?  No really, will you die if you fail and people laugh at you or reject you?  If you’re afraid of losing everything, is there something you can do to make this less of possibility?  Can you work with an accountant or a coach to help you build a safety net?  Do you have to leave your job immediately and start a writing career or can you build your writing career gradually, on the side until you are able to sustain yourself? What would happen if you took baby steps towards your goals?

The good news is that you don’t have to face your roadblocks on your own.  You can work through them with a friend, or work with a coach or counselor to overcome them.

The first thing you need to know is that the most important factor in determining successful outcome in treatment is the relationship between the client and counselor/therapist.  In the last analysis, this is the only factor that really matters.  It doesn’t matter what degree the counselor has or how much training they have, if you can’t feel them, you can’t heal with them.  

 Here’s a rough guide to assessing a good fit. 

• How does it feel to sit with them? 
• Do you feel like they “get you” when you’re talking? 
• Do you feel comfortable? 
• Do you feel safe? 

If you have a lot of anxiety or a lot of shame, it may take a while before you feel safe.  You may not even know what “safe” feels like.

Here are a few questions to help gauge safety. 

• Do your words flow easily about your story or do hesitate to share even the most mundane details? 
• Do you feel like this person shows interest in you or does he or she seem bored, distant, or somewhere else? 
• Do you feel heard and seen – or at least have the sense that they are interested in your world? 
• Can this person accept feedback? 
• Do they graciously admit when they are wrong or when they make a mistake? 
• If you tell them that they did or said something that hurt or offended you, how do they respond? 
• Are they able to hear you or do they get defensive and become critical of you?
•   Do you have a sense that they are there for you, in your corner, cheering you on even as they let you make your own choices? 
• Do they create a safe enough container to allow you to explore your deepest pain? 
• When you share your shame and pain, do you feel held in your vulnerability or rejected and shamed?  Do they talk too much about themselves? 
• Do you trust that what you say in the room stays in the room?

 When you feel seen, heard and accepted, you can develop the trust you need to explore the issues that you bring to work on.  And when you feel safe enough to explore your issues, you know you’ve got a good fit.

If you’ve ever invested your heart in a relationship that crashed and burned, you know how devastating a break-up can feel.  It’s like someone took a wrecking ball and smashed your life.  The difference is that when a wrecking ball hits, the devastation is over in a few quick swings.  The debris left behind is nothing but meaningless trash.

With a break-up, the blows keep coming.  Your social life takes a hit as friends you had as a couple often can’t deal with maintaining a relationship with both of you.  Odds are that at least some of them will choose your ex and others will simply delete both of you from their social circle.  Social events that you used to attend as a couple often feel odd or off limits.  Even if you parted on decent terms, it can be incredibly awkward to run into your ex when you’re out and about in the first weeks or months after the break-up.
The time you used to fill with or thinking about your sweetheart throbs like a toothache, reminding you of the hole the breakup left in your life.  Simple things like shopping for groceries, listening to the radio, and watching movies trigger memories that remind you of what you lost for weeks, months or even years to come.

If the two of you lived together, the wreckage goes even deeper.  You have to sort through everything into yours and theirs.  You have to sort through and divvy up houses, cars, appliances, furniture, CD’s DVD’s, pictures, and even clothes and jewelry.  This process can get ugly.  A friend of mine who is an attorney told me someone who took a chain saw and cut the hot tub in half so that their ex couldn’t use it.  Pets and children are even more difficult to divvy up.

All of this hurts, but the pain that cuts you to the core of your being isn’t about your ex or any of the subsidiary losses at all.  Let’s face it.  By the time you and your sweetheart broke up, things weren’t all that great.  Those friends who dumped you weren’t really your friends.  And stuff is just stuff.  The thing that cuts you to the core, the thing that breaks your heart is the loss of your dreams.  Even if you never admitted to yourself, you imagined some version of happily ever after.  You created a wonderful story about what the relationship could have been and who you could have been in that relationship.  You probably even imagined that “if only _____, then everything in my life would be ok.”  The reality of the break-up completely shatters those dreams.

The problem isn’t that we dream.  Dreams transport us to what is possible.  The problem is that when we hold dreams too tightly, they imprison us.  Dreams are fluid, even after they’ve been shattered, perhaps especially after they’ve been shattered.  So when you’re ready to break out of the prison you’ve made for yourself, take out those old dreams and rewrite them.   Just remember that they are guidepost to what is possible, not a window into what has to be.

If you’ve ever invested your heart in a relationship that crashed and burned, you know how devastating a break-up can feel.  It’s like someone took a wrecking ball and smashed your life.  The difference is that when a wrecking ball hits, the devastation is over in a few quick swings.  The debris left behind is nothing but meaningless trash.

With a break-up, the blows keep coming.  Your social life takes a hit as friends you had as a couple often can’t deal with maintaining a relationship with both of you.  Odds are that at least some of them will choose your ex and others will simply delete both of you from their social circle.  Social events that you used to attend as a couple often feel odd or off limits.  Even if you parted on decent terms, it can be incredibly awkward to run into your ex when you’re out and about in the first weeks or months after the break-up.

The time you used to fill with or thinking about your sweetheart throbs like a toothache, reminding you of the hole the breakup left in your life.  Simple things like shopping for groceries, listening to the radio, and watching movies trigger memories that remind you of what you lost for weeks, months or even years to come.

If the two of you lived together, the wreckage goes even deeper.  You have to sort through everything into yours and theirs.  You have to sort through and divvy up houses, cars, appliances, furniture, CD’s DVD’s, pictures, and even clothes and jewelry.  This process can get ugly.  A friend of mine who is an attorney told me someone who took a chain saw and cut the hot tub in half so that their ex couldn’t use it.  Pets and children are even more difficult to divvy up.

All of this hurts, but the pain that cuts you to the core of your being isn’t about your ex or any of the subsidiary losses at all.  Let’s face it.  By the time you and your sweetheart broke up, things weren’t all that great.  Those friends who dumped you weren’t really your friends.  And stuff is just stuff.  The thing that cuts you to the core, the thing that breaks your heart is the loss of your dreams.  Even if you never admitted to yourself, you imagined some version of happily ever after.  You created a wonderful story about what the relationship could have been and who you could have been in that relationship.  You probably even imagined that “if only _____, then everything in my life would be ok.”  The reality of the break-up completely shatters those dreams.

The problem isn’t that we dream.  Dreams transport us to what is possible.  The problem is that when we hold dreams too tightly, they imprison us.  Dreams are fluid, even after they’ve been shattered, perhaps especially after they’ve been shattered.  So when you’re ready to break out of the prison you’ve made for yourself, take out those old dreams and rewrite them.   Just remember that they are guidepost to what is possible, not a window into what has to be.

Here.  It’s the point we use to measure our journey in terms of how far we’ve strayed from our intended path, how far we’ve come, and/or how far we’ve got to go to get to our destination.  We use it as a point on a mental yardstick that usually shows us coming up short.  We look around  at here and don’t like what we see.  We want to be somewhere else.  We want to be someone else or with someone else.

Even if we do reach our destination, we can find fault:  “I should have gotten here sooner.”  “Great, I’m finally here, but now I think I should have been going there.  Oh, and by the way, because I spent (wasted???) so much time getting here, I’m never going to get there.”

When you measure yourself against impossible standards, you miss the reassurance that You Are Here can provide.  You forget that the fact that being here means that you are alive, that where ever here is, there is still time to get there, still time to make different choices and live differently.  Ebeneezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol reminds us that even if we’ve been a horrible excuse of a human being, as long as we’re still living and breathing, there’s time to change.  If you take stock of where you are and realize that you really have gone off course, that you let yourself spin out of control due to an addiction to food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping or whatever takes you away from creating the life you want to live, the fact that you are here means that you still have the opportunity to get back on track.  It may not be easy.  It may hurt like hell to face the pain you used addictive patterns to avoid, but if you let yourself be here now, if you let yourself feel the pain and release it into the past, you may find that the new path you wind up on takes you to a place more amazing than anything you every imagined.

You Are Here also reminds you to look back at your accomplishments — all of them  — not just you’re deficits.  To be here  means that you have made choices.  There was a reason you made those choices.  Maybe you are here and not there because you had children and poured your love and attention into them and didn’t much left over to follow your dreams. Or maybe you took care of aging parents and put your dreams on hold.  Maybe you are here because you spent the last year (or 5 years, or 15 years) healing from trauma and tragedies of the past or over coming an addiction.  It’s quite possible that you couldn’t have possibly gotten there without first doing this work.  Or maybe you are here because you spent your time in school and didn’t have time for anything else.  Whatever it was, you made choices and those choices were important.  They were significant.  Be gentle with yourself!  Celebrate the path you chose that got you here.  Remember, as long as You Are Here you can still follow those other paths you’ve dreamed about!

You Are Here reminds us that here is all there is.  When you stop using here as a yardstick and think of here as the place to be now, you’ll start to understand the truth of the ages.  The destination is the journey, not some place on the map.