Introduction ''We do not have to be victims of our experiences or in the way we tell our stories. But interestingly enough, stories are the only way out, and it is us who creates those stories. We hold the power to change our stories and what they represent. I invite all of you to consider whether it would serve you well to create a new story and a new path. And to please remember, the things that held you down will one day hold you up.'' --Sammy Rangel, The Power of Forgiveness As a young therapist I struggled, as many did, with how to think about what it was I was supposed to be doing for my clients. I happily realized that the mere fact that someone had actually been motivated enough to seek out help had already headed them in a positive direction. It also became obvious that those who were in Twelve-Step programs were also significantly ahead of the game.

They were often times truly engaged in an active process of self discovery. Still, what is health? What is it that we''re really going for? Ultimately, I think there are a few things that I can give clients. One is an emotional language that begins with the ability to expand their inner container enough to actually feel their emotions, without trying to shut them down or numb them out, so that they can then translate them into words, think about them, and share them. Then there is the relational piece. Clients need to learn how to listen to someone else doing the same thing, to empathize, to put themselves in another person''s shoes and imagine how life might look to them. Another thing that clients often look for help in facing and working through is what Carl Jung would call their ''shadow sides.'' They long to make conscious those parts of themselves they have consigned to a sort of emotional and psychological darkness. They have an awareness that in dealing with these parts of themselves they might grow rather than shrink from adverse experiences.

Therapists who work with trauma sometimes think that it''s about some grand insight, or finally understanding just why we came to think or feel this way or that. But, truthfully, what I have found to be more important and in fact difficult is being able to sit with another person''s raw humanness, to tolerate standing next to them when they''re actually feeling those emotions that they want to jump out of, those feelings that they have run from, shut down, or drugged out. Those that terrified them once and they fear re-experiencing. It''s that very moment that they can''t stand, that they couldn''t stand, that they thought they''d never be able to stand, where healing from trauma often lies. I refer to this as entering the trauma vortex--when the client is in the midst of reliving the emotions, body sensations, and sensorial images that trauma has dispatched or relegated to a quivering sort of frozenness within them. It is a moment that can be very hard to sit with for both therapist and group members; it is also a moment that can easily be missed, railroaded into easy solutions or somehow deflected. Experiential Therapy Having spent thirty years working in the addictions field, I am a great fan of psycho-educational approaches of treatment that empower clients to take hold of their own recovery. As I trained clinicians in treatment facilities across the United States, I was repeatedly told that while they very much wanted to use experiential techniques, they felt undertrained to do psychodrama.

Psychodrama in and of itself is not always contained and focused enough for a standardized model of treatment. It requires a great deal of training for clinicians to learn its full range of uses and to understand the theory that drives it. And even with training, it is not always a trauma- informed treatment. Forms of role-play and experiential therapy have nonetheless been organically embraced by the addictions field as a method of choice in treating the kinds of childhood and adult trauma that are often times part of the pain pump that fuels self-medication, or the collateral damage from living with addiction or dysfunction in the home. Working in treatment centers, I witnessed the miracles that were occurring through treating clients experientially. Role-based methods were allowing a sort of relational investigation to take place that reached back into the past, dealt with the present, and allowed for a future to be explored. They provided for a full range of mind-body emotions and physical motions to be part of the treatment process. I also witnessed the potential for re-traumatization, when psychodrama was not used in a trauma-informed manner.

Initially I felt that more training in psychodrama was the answer to better experiential treatment, and this notion motivated me to stay on the road, demonstrate the classical method, and then point people toward further training through the American Society of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy (ASGPP). However, in my second decade of traveling and consulting, and with an ever-increasing body of trauma research to draw from, it became increasingly clear that more training in psychodrama was not necessarily enough to enable the clinician to keep treatment on track, though it is of course very important. Psychosocial Metrics: Why Create a Model in the First Place? The stimulus for creating psycho-educational experiential exercises began in earnest for me when budgets were cut in New York State. I had trainees who were very discouraged; they had thirty people in group and were expected to provide some form of therapeutic experience. I felt especially sorry for one particular clinician who was very sincerely devoted to helping his groups, but ready to give up in the face of such high expectations with so little support. I thought that if ever there were a legitimate time to experiment with the ideas I had been germinating in my treatment and training groups, it was here, now. With so little being offered to clients, new approaches seemed necessary. What did we have to lose by trying? Nothing was working anyway for these huge groups and their overwhelmed therapists; the situation required a new approach.

In order to accomplish this I obviously had to access and rely on the healing power of the group itself as there was only one therapist for a large group. I leaned on one of Moreno''s basic principles that ''in a group each person becomes a therapeutic agent of the other.'' Additionally, the process I was evolving needed to have some very specific guidelines incorporated into it if it was going to be safe in the hands of those using it. I knew that Moreno''s triadic system of psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy was flexible and group-oriented, and I began to wonder if I could create an approach to experiential work that integrated research findings with sociometry into a psycho-educational approach that could put significant healing in the hands of group members. In my early twenties, I was certified as a Montessori teacher. Maria Montessori based her work with children on what she called ''the prepared environment.'' I often imagine what it might have been like to be alive in turn of the century Vienna. What appeared to have taken place was a creative explosion during which people in the Western cultures were taking on the mind, and developing new theories of psychological functioning.

Much like the Italian Renaissance, where a new reality-based humanism in art burst forth, Vienna around 1900 represented a Western renaissance in the scientific study of the mind. Another kind of art was evolving in the West, the art of studying what drives thought, emotion, and behavior. Sigmund Freud, who began his professional life as a neurologist in this same cultural and intellectual milieu, studied the inner workings of the human psyche and its relation to others. His honing in on how trauma passes down through the generations through reenactment dynamics, projections, and transferences has become a foundation for Western therapeutic thought. Montessori, being a lone woman studying medicine, was made to work in the middle of the night with cadavers so as not to mix with the male doctors. Once she became a doctor she took on childhood illiteracy. She was given populations of children who were thought to be uneducable--marginalized youngsters who grew up in poverty. She had no supplies.

She taught the children how to read by drawing letters of the alphabet in the sand proving that with proper instruction, or any instruction at all, for that matter, all children had minds capable of learning. ©2015 Tian Dayton, Ph.D. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Neuropsychodrama in the Treatment of Relational Trauma. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.