Working with Metaphor - IDT October workshop (NYC)

[Guest guest]

The Institute for Drama Therapy

Presents

The Imperative in Containing Trauma:

Metaphor as Heroic Mediator

October 17, 2009

Facilitated by

Nash, LCAT, and Wise, MA, ATR-BC, LCAT

3,000 years or more ago, men had no conception of those limits which we accept as dividing the world of actuality from to world of imagination. The limits of human and superhuman, material and immaterial were but dimly realized. There was something in common between God and men and the beasts of the field and all growing things, and the pathway between the living and the dead...every stream and oak and mountain was the habitation of a spiritual being whose nature was on the borderline between the divine and partook of both. And so weak was the sense of identity, that with a touch of magic it was felt that the barrier might be passes, and a man might become a wolf or a serpent of a hoopoe or a purple lilly. He might renew his youth: he might be raised from the dead...like

Melampous, he might understand the language of all living creatures...In childhood, we know all these feelings.

- E. Bradford, (1963) Ulysses Found

While working with clients and patients who have experienced the multiple ruptures of attachment caused by traumatic experience, therapists often find themselves wrestling with a sense of overwhelm, disconnection, or extra-ordinary living. It is the nature of trauma to destabilize everyone in its path. Developing a safe environment for essential containment of affect and memory requires approaching trauma work within a multi-dimensional framework.

Engaging metaphor as the mediator between the devastating sensorial memory of trauma and the explicit verbal narrative of "what happened" allows a bridging between fragmented parts of the self to occur. Within the metaphor, opportunities for distancing, safe management of affect, expansion of possibilities, explorations of meaning and many other crucial aspects of psychological and emotional healing may develop. To leap directly form the sensorial to the cognitive is to bypass the necessary work of development which lends substance to transformation.

This work requires courage on the part of both the client and therapist, as there journey together does not rely upon formulaic devices, but rather, the open-ended engagement of imagination, empathy and creative expression. Metaphor heroically reaches into the heart of the trauma, symbolically transforms the unspeakable into a more manageable 'other' and provides psychic fuel for 'ordinary' living.

This workshop will provide the opportunity to explore the role of the use of metaphor as the mediating instrument between that which was lost and that which is found - a return to the wisdom of childhood when 'play' was our work.

Join Us AtJudson Church

239 Street

10:00am to 5:30pm

Professionals: $120

Full-time Students: $65CEUs: 6.5 hrs

To register email dramatherapy@... or call

_______________________________________________________

Unlimited Disk, Data Transfer, PHP/MySQL Domain Hosting

http://www.doteasy.com