John Mark Hicks

In the recent past I read an amazingly insightful book by Tian Dayton entitled Heartwounds: The Impact of Unresolved Trauma and Grief on Relationships. Dayton is a leader in experiential therapy or psychodrama. While her work is not explicitly Christian, it is spiritually-based. It has been extremely helpful to me as it has opened my eyes to much of my own life, especially in the aftermath of my own participation in some psychodramatic experiences based on my own life. [If you are interested in the therapeutic technique of psychodrama read Dayton’s The Drama Within: Psychodrama and Experiential Therapy.]

The power of psychodrama is that it brings body and soul into relation with unresolved trauma or grief. It is not merely cognitive, but somatic and communal. When there is unresolved trauma in our unconscious, we revert back to that trauma when we are triggered by an analogous experience. We then react to the present trigger as if we are again experiencing the original trauma. Consequently, we tend to intensify feelings which may not be appropriate to the situation, or transfer feelings from the past event to the present which is totally confusing because the present does not objectively warrant those feelings. This confuses people in relationship with us, and somestimes we withdraw emotionally in order to protect ourselves from those horrendous past feelings.

Psychodrama provides a way to re-experience the past trauma in a safe environment in order to reconfigure its meaning. Psychodrama confronts the past in a concrete somatic and spiritual experience so that we symbolically but nevertheless authentically relive the past trauma. This confrontation undermines attempts to flee (escape) from the trauma, fight the trauma with intensified feelings or freeze our feelings (a kind of numbing).  While those strategies are helpful in the initial moments of grief as they protect us, if we are stuck in any one of them then the unresolved trauma will negatively affect our sense of peace and relationships with others.

Psychodrama offers an occasion for resolving the trauma. It resolves it by reorganizing a memory.  By entering the past drama through role play, one is able to gain perspective and assign new meaning to the experience.  The drama creates a new narrative–it is a redoing of the past through undoing the past. The new narrative provides a new frame of reference for drawing meaning from the event as we reconstruct the past with new awareness, perspective and insight.

Through one psychodrama last week I was able to re-experience the grief of Sheila’s funeral on May 2, 1980. I had not grieved like that since May 2, 1980. It opened again for me the floodgates of tears which I had unconsciously held in reserve through numbing and withdrawal. Psychodrama, as a therapeutic technique, was a blessing to me. Re-entering the narrative, I was able give it new meaning and see what I had not seen previously due to the overwhelming grief.

As I reflected on the meaning and process of that experience (and it was not my only dramatic reliving), I began to more deeply appreciate the psycho-dramatic nature of the sacraments themselves. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Assembly are dramatic re-creations of divine redemptive events; they are dramatic narratives that provide a frame of reference for meaningful lives within the story of God. They are interpretative events that somatically and spiritually root us in the redemptive story.

This is not only so at an individual level as we individually participate in the sacraments–we each have our own personal experience of God through these dramatic events, but it is also a corporate or communal experience. As we gather around or beside the waters of baptism, we re-experience our own baptism and we participate with the one who is being baptized. Thus, I do not particularly like private or familial baptisms–it robs the community of the psychodramatic experience. As we gather around the table, we experience the reality of community through eating and drinking together. As we assemble before the throne of God, we participate in the reality of “heaven on earth” as we worship with the saints in a way that transcends time and space.

The sacraments are divine invitations into redemptive pyschodramas. They are no mere symbols but actual means of divine encounter whereby we somatically, pyschologically, concretely and spiritually relive the story of God’s redemption. Sacramental experiences are both cathartic (a cleansing) and rehabilitative (reconstruction); they reconstitute the present for us so that we have a renewed narrative for living with meaning in the story of God.

I assemble with the saints to experience again the sacramental drama that provides meaning for my life in the place of futility, hope in the place of despair, and communal support in the place of isolation.