Get ready to unlock the transformative power of drama therapy with our enlightening conversation featuring the insightful Krista Verrastro. As we traverse the realms of emotional healing and personal growth, Krista, a dedicated drama therapist, joins guest host, Courtney Romanowski, to share her expertise in helping individuals confront relational trauma and societal disconnection. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge, spotlighting how drama therapy's innovative techniques, like storytelling and puppetry, offer a vibrant alternative to traditional talk therapy.
Embark on a captivating exploration of aesthetic distance and its synergy with the 'window of tolerance'—a cornerstone in trauma work. We delve into the delicate balance between thought and emotion, a crucial aspect for genuine emotional processing. Krista and I discuss the enchanting world of drama and dance therapy, where the body is integrated into sessions to deepen emotional expression. By debunking common misconceptions, we illuminate the universal accessibility of creative arts therapies, inviting you to discover their profound impact, regardless of your background in the arts.
As we wrap up our journey, we reflect on the harmonious relationship between creative arts therapies and the challenges of daily life. Role-plays that mirror personal struggles and strengths become tools for empowerment, allowing individuals to reinforce their inner resilience and foster a sense of gratitude. With insights into the importance of working with a registered creative arts therapist, we guide you through the possibilities that await in your own therapeutic adventure, encouraging trust in the process and the unique path every client walks towards healing and self-discovery.
You can follow her on Instagram here.
Get ready to unlock the transformative power of drama therapy with our enlightening conversation featuring the insightful Krista Verrastro. As we traverse the realms of emotional healing and personal growth, Krista, a dedicated drama therapist, joins guest host, Courtney Romanowski, to share her expertise in helping individuals confront relational trauma and societal disconnection. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge, spotlighting how drama therapy's innovative techniques, like storytelling and puppetry, offer a vibrant alternative to traditional talk therapy.
Embark on a captivating exploration of aesthetic distance and its synergy with the 'window of tolerance'—a cornerstone in trauma work. We delve into the delicate balance between thought and emotion, a crucial aspect for genuine emotional processing. Krista and I discuss the enchanting world of drama and dance therapy, where the body is integrated into sessions to deepen emotional expression. By debunking common misconceptions, we illuminate the universal accessibility of creative arts therapies, inviting you to discover their profound impact, regardless of your background in the arts.
As we wrap up our journey, we reflect on the harmonious relationship between creative arts therapies and the challenges of daily life. Role-plays that mirror personal struggles and strengths become tools for empowerment, allowing individuals to reinforce their inner resilience and foster a sense of gratitude. With insights into the importance of working with a registered creative arts therapist, we guide you through the possibilities that await in your own therapeutic adventure, encouraging trust in the process and the unique path every client walks towards healing and self-discovery.
You can follow her on Instagram here.
Hi and welcome to Finding your Way Through Therapy. A proud member of the SiteCraft Network, the goal of this podcast is to demystify therapy, what can happen in therapy and the wide array of conversations you can have in and about therapy Through personal experiences. Guests will talk about therapy, their experiences with it and how psychology and therapy are present in many places in their lives, with lots of authenticity and a touch of humor. Here is your guest host, courtney Romanowski.
Speaker 2:All right, thank you. Yes, I am obviously not Steve Besong, the host of Finding your Way Through Therapy, but I am his friend and colleague, Courtney Romanowski. I am a licensed mental health counselor, registered dance movement therapist, and I am back for a second guest host appearance. I was on for episode 126, discover the Therapeutic Potential of Movement, with Audrey Albert King. Audrey is also a dear friend of mine. She is a licensed mental health counselor board, certified dance movement therapist and a certified movement analyst, and she as my first guest, we explored and discussed dance movement therapy as a form of mental health counseling.
Speaker 2:My hope is to, with these special episodes, bring the different modalities, the different creative arts therapies to the forefront. They are becoming a little bit more known, well-known and used, but I think there's still a lot of questions out there and a lot of info that can be shared. So here we are. I am here today with Krista Verostrov. She is a registered drama therapist based in Maryland, and we're going to be talking about drama therapy today. Hi, krista, thank you for coming on. Hello, thank you for having me, absolutely, so I thought I would just kind of let you introduce yourself and share more about what you do, sure.
Speaker 3:So yes, as you mentioned, I am in Maryland. I am a private practice clinician since 2016. I actually worked the longest in my career in domestic violence and sexual abuse and assault and that turned into when I went into private practice. My niche has become abuse. I always say my little tagline is I work with people who feel used, abused, neglected or rejected, so really a lot of relational trauma. I like that work and just people who feel different in other ways. I've always been kind of a weirdo myself and I love it about myself and I love it about my friends and the people in my life. It's something. Being a creative arts therapist is part of that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of my niche is people who had that relational trauma and also just kind of don't fit in the mainstream in certain ways. Yeah, and I see people online and in person. I'm outside of the Baltimore area and I also do things like vision board workshops that people can take from anywhere during the pandemic. I move those online. So, that's fun that people can. If they're interested in doing something with me and Arton Maryland, that's open usually, at least January.
Speaker 3:Sometimes other times of the year it's a great time to do that, obviously yeah, and I do other workshops too, like what we're going to talk about with drama therapies, but I do other things that incorporate self-care and drama therapy, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, awesome, yeah. So right off the bat wondering how would you define, describe somebody who doesn't know what drama therapy is? How would you describe it to them?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I basically say you know how there's talk therapy and you talk your problems through and I always use a starting point of most people know art therapy and music therapy.
Speaker 3:And I understand a little bit more about how that works and I say well, drama therapy is lesser known, but it's the same idea of instead of just talking, you do things that are drama theater oriented. So storytelling, mask making, puppetry, whatever kind of drama techniques to bring into the therapy. So that's kind of the gist I give, but I also came prepared with definitions, so I will share those that. These are from the North American Drama Therapy Association. Drama therapy is the systematic and intentional use of drama, slash theater processes, products and associations to achieve the therapeutic goals of symptom relief, emotional and physical integration and personal growth. And then another one is drama therapy is an active, experiential approach to facilitating change through storytelling, projective play, purposeful improvisation and performance. Participants are invited to rehearse desired behaviors, practice being in relationship, expand and find flexibility between life roles and perform the change they wish to be in the world. Very lengthy, but I think I love that end.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very gondy right there, like be the change you wish to be in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so here's one thing I like to say about drama therapy To me it is expressive arts therapies, because drama does incorporate movement and music and visual arts and all that. So to me fun fact when I was young and I discovered this, I discovered it as a teen and knew I was going to go to undergrad and grad school right away to become this thing.
Speaker 3:But music was actually well and I'd say even before music, visual arts was my first love. Then it became like more school oriented. I was very talented in music, that sort of thing, but then when it came to discovering this I was like drama makes sense because we play roles in everyday life.
Speaker 3:There's not everybody considers themselves a visual artist, not everybody considers themselves musically inclined. So to me it felt more natural that we do play roles and we do things that are dramatic in everyday life, and it does incorporate the other ones. So I'm not alone in that thinking. A lot of my fellow drama therapists say that, that we're kind of like express arts therapists Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know there's a lot of overlap between creative arts therapies, as it is Definitely a lot of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so interesting you say that I mean. That makes so much sense to me. We do play roles, whether we're aware of them or not, so drama therapy does for me, feel like a very natural place to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it can be subtle, which I'll get into. It doesn't have to be like people are like are you on a big stage and acting your traumas out, and it doesn't have to be something as big as that. It could be something more subtle. So something I'll say about the different kind of techniques we use Play, role play, storytelling, puppetry, mask making, sand tray work yeah, various types of visual arts music, dance, poetry, photography, rituals. Which is one of my favorite aspects of it, and one I throw in there is performance, because there are drama therapists that do performance based work, meaning it might be plays that are already written, like Shakespearean plays, and have people therapeutically perform them.
Speaker 3:There's famous people who've done it in prisons and different things like that, or some of the work I did in the earlier part of my career was to help people I would work with create their own play and put that on. So when I started my career, I worked at a mental health facility, a day treatment center, and so part of the programming there was they would put on a play at least once a year and I got to do some cool stuff with them. Like one of the plays we did was and this was generated by them and I was like what kind of theme do you want to explore? They said we want to have a play where we switch positions with the staff. So I love that. In the end they came to the conclusion that there is a reason, the rules are in place and if they got to play out, what would happen if there was chaos and they didn't follow the rules and they got to be the staff and they were like, ah, free for all.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's a reason, their structure and that keeps us safe and it was so lovely. So that's one way that performance can also help. So, yeah, written stuff already or writing stuff with a group and performing it that way but not every drama therapist uses that kind of stuff. Like in my work. Now I'm largely individual therapy based. I don't have the opportunity to do that kind of work anymore, so it's very flexible. There's some drama therapists who spend most of their careers doing plays and that sort of thing. There's a lot of groups that do that kind of work with developmental disabilities and that sort of thing, and so, yeah, it can be kind of different. It can be more group oriented, it can be more individual oriented. But that's some ideas about what it entails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I love the that you're acknowledging the flexibility of it because, just like talk therapy, you know we don't well, I should say I speak for myself. I don't talk with each client in the same way, or you know, our, our sessions don't look the same as another client, and so dance therapy, drama therapy, is going to be flexible, depending on who the client is and what they're ready for and interested in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so I know one of the things we we mentioned we might talk about is like what's valuable about it, and I don't know if this is a good segue. If you have any other questions about what it is, well, let's segue, and then we'll, we can move around with it if we need to.
Speaker 3:So one of my favorite concepts from drama therapy so interesting because I feel old. I got my master's 2003 to 2005. And the language we used is aesthetic distance and I'm going to explain that. But what's fascinating to me is the language around trauma work these days matches that, but we didn't have that language back then, from my understanding. I mean, I hadn't heard of the window of tolerance and these things back then.
Speaker 3:So aesthetic distance it is a term that was created by the person I studied under in my program and the idea is it's a space where you think and feel simultaneously, like it's balanced, okay, right. So you're thinking and you're feeling equal. It's not like one outweighs the other. So your cognition, your affect, it's all even Right. So this idea of being over distanced is when you're too far away from your emotions and you're too in the cerebral. And being under distanced would be if you're too in the emotions and too far away from the cerebral, right, right. So over distanced, too far, under distanced, not far enough.
Speaker 3:So the idea with why this is important in creative arts in general, the therapies, not just drama therapy.
Speaker 3:So for drama therapy it'd be something like if someone is too close to their emotions, you would want to use techniques that take them further, right? So projective techniques like masks or puppets or, you know, sand trays something that takes them away, like pick an object that represents you is taking them further from their emotions. So that gets a little more balanced into the thinking, right? Whereas if somebody is really cerebral, they're in their brain and they're like I could talk about this stuff, but not really connecting to the emotions. You would do something that's like okay, now this empty chair is going to be your dead mother or something like like we want to really kind of pull on those emotions, bring them up and make them like easier to access and work with. Yes, right, so that's part of what we as creative arts therapists do and my understanding I'm, you know, not actually sure I have ideas of how it would work and dance movement therapy I'm more familiar talking to a lot of art therapist friends about how it works in art therapy right.
Speaker 3:So, for example, using, say, finger painting is not something you'd want to do with someone who's not very regulated, because it's so wild and there's no borders and there's Right, it's messy and it's childlike, whereas somebody who you're trying to get them to have more emotions, you might do something like that.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Yes, so you know same. All of our creative arts therapies have this idea. But again, that was the language we were given back in the day and now we have this window of tolerance language. It's the same idea that we are in the sweet spot where we can think and feel okay and we're like I got this you know, hyporous, hyperrous fall out of the window. How we get back to the window. So it's very similar and I love that it all aligns and they have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and we we had mentioned briefly before how close drama and dance therapy can be, because it really utilizes the body, so much of the body, and so so interesting to just, as you were saying, like mask making for somebody who's thinking, yeah, like how how would I help somebody ground in their body who's experiencing like too much emotions, as opposed to using that their body to find where that emotion is. I don't know if it making sense, but it's just the playing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's interesting. And again, I imagine all the creative arts therapies have this sort of idea to them, but with, for example, the mask making, there's this beautiful idea of getting to subtext, into freeing things that might not be easy to access without projective techniques. So, for example, if I have a mask on my face, I'm hiding a part of me, but my body is more available to express myself.
Speaker 3:Right. So it's a different kind of expression. Something might come out that we're not necessarily often tuning into, because we're kind of focusing on something different. So I love that idea too.
Speaker 2:And so this is actually kind of segueing my mind to. Another thing that I wanted to get to was you have some blogs on your website which we will definitely reference later in the episode. How to find them, one of them being about different myths and beliefs that people have about creative arts therapies and a few of well, they all stood out to me, but a few.
Speaker 2:That's sorry. One of them that stood out to me was like Well, okay, so I don't what if I don't consider myself a performer like I've never done that before. I'm not talented enough. You know how somebody like that.
Speaker 3:How would you introduce trauma therapy or yeah, so one of the misperceptions and I know again, this is common across the creative arts therapies is for me, it's oh, so does that mean you work with actors? For you, it's probably, oh, do you work with?
Speaker 3:dancers or art therapists, do you work with artists? And no, that's not obviously only what we would do. What I tell people is kind of what we started off saying is that all of us play roles in everyday life and I am a fan of parts work. I am not of any particular school, I'm not like an IFS or anything. I think I like the general approach and I was always taught in my training Every role has its purpose, which is the same as any of the other schools of thought with parts work, and so I do help clients look at, like, what's the function of these roles? What would it be like we let go those roles? How is it helping? How is it hurting? How can we have more peace with that role? That's one way that's more subtle. Like even if a client is not super into the body stuff and the acting stuff, we can at least have the language of. Let's look at those different parts that arise.
Speaker 2:And by parts and roles you mean like wife, mother. Yes, profession, you know those different times.
Speaker 3:And us as creative arts therapists is a role like maybe you and I have done teaching or something that's a role. So, yes, all our social roles, all our professional roles. Interestingly, one of the things I was trained in, we have this thing called role profiles, which is a fun tool, and it's an assessment tool where you get categories. It's I am this, I am not this, I don't know if I'm this, I want to be this, and the creator of this was the same person I studied under and you get a deck of archetypes right. So some people listening might be familiar with, like youngy and archetypes. So the way that the creator of this came up with it was looking at plays in Western history and seeing which archetypes appeared the most. So, yes, there's like mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother those again sort of social, family roles. And then there's things like helper, leader, angry person, wise person.
Speaker 3:There's different sort of Joker. Right, there's different roles warrior, warrior so there's lots of different things that we can fall into and it's helpful to observe. And our roles change, right, they shift. We identify with certain ones heavily at certain points of our life, we let go of some completely or we don't identify as much with it.
Speaker 3:We might have ones we want to practice because we want more of them. So that's like one way into the world of drama. Therapy is just naming those different parts and having better. I do like the IFS, like we should be friending all the parts. All parts are welcome. So I do like that idea of you know what are they all showing up to do for us? And even if they go overboard sometimes, how could we listen to their messages and see how we want to use that or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know it's funny besides, oh, you must work with dancers. I get this. So are we going to be doing like a dance class or what is this going to look like? I'm like, no, no, I mean we can do ballet if you'd like, but that's not the point of dance therapy. And so for the folks who are new to moving in any sort of way or just open to starting to explore dance therapy, I start with the breath and I start with just naming. You know how to become a little bit more in touch with the body. And so when you said, you know, just building that language and using it, that's that can be what a beginning session or use of dance therapy, drama therapy could look like, Not necessarily throwing people right up on stage and expecting to perform.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it can be subtle like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or like some ways along the lines of the park stuff is if someone talks about an emotion, I might be like let's give that emotion a name, let's draw it, let's make a mask of it. What would it say? What does it feel most powerful? What is it again? What is it trying to serve you? How is it harming you and how? When it harms you, when is it overstated? It's welcome, so to speak, like how can you have a better relationship with it?
Speaker 3:So those are some easy ways to get into it for sure. Another one I mentioned earlier is ritual, and I love this concept. My thing has always kind of been to at least end every session with clients with their own ritual, so each person having something that feels fitting for them. So I have things like in my office, affirmation stones where they have pretty images and things on the back like I am strong, I'm peaceful, I shine bright. I have advice from nature cards where it's different things in nature and they have little pieces of advice.
Speaker 3:I have merriment making cards, which would. My friends created a deck of cards where it's like leave a gift on a neighbor's doorstep or read a story to a pet. It's cute little things that are kind of the idea again, as we now know as trauma language in polyvagal theory world. It's like being in that ventral, vagal state, leaving in a positive, connected arm okay, that window of tolerance idea again, and so you know we get activated during sessions and just kind of tuning into one of those rituals and sometimes even with the affirmation stones, being able to say where do you feel that in your body when you say I am powerful, where do you feel I am peaceful?
Speaker 3:in your body, are those pieces of advice from nature, that kind of a thing. And some people I often say, you know, these are the ones that are common, like a lot of people, like those. But and I'll give them options in the first session and I'll say, hey, if you want to make something up, there's other things. I also have a worry box. It's like a, you know, like a suggestion box, but leave your worries behind. So if you want to write that, I do get out the door. You leave your worry in the box. Some people just like to do gratitude practicing, so I'll have them name something during the week that went really well they're proud of and just feel that in their body. It really take a moment to savor what it feels like.
Speaker 2:So having those rituals is a good practice for yeah, rituals, not just in session with you, but I encourage rituals outside the session.
Speaker 3:I tell clients whether it's wake up and use affirmations and, to the night, do some gratitude practicing. Yeah, I'm a big fan of talking about how to use that in everyday life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too. And especially like in sitting with it. Right, not just it's great to make note of something that you were grateful for, but to sit with it and let it come into you.
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Speaker 2:So I wanted to get to as well. You had mentioned the vision boards that you do. You offer workshops here. I was saying Yep.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so 2017, I started them and I don't even know what possessed me to do it, because a lot of people have done come make a vision board, make the collage of a vision board, and that's great. But something in me was like I could do so much more with this. I could take it to the drama therapy level and actually have people acting out like, test their future selves, see what it's like to feel their future self. So I have them do things like we do some guided imagery, some Qigong, letting go of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we do. You know movement again and we do. There's an activity I do, magic box, where it's like getting rid of stuff and we burn it together and that kind of thing. We do imaginations, and so it's. The first part is letting go. The second part is, if I do it in person, we do make the boards in person. If it's online, I'll have people make boards in advance and just split into breakout rooms on Zoom and share with partners about, like, what are their goals and talk about it and then the.
Speaker 3:Then we get into some drama therapy of getting to enroll people in the group as their obstacles and testing out what it feels like to enroll other people as resources, like whether that be family members or partners or friends, and going up against the obstacles, like getting to practice. Uh-oh, here's time management. Or here's social media, sucking me in again where my insecurities are talking back to me.
Speaker 3:And then they get to have these people play the parts of their resources and say I'm with you in this and we can talk this thing down. And then they get to test their future self and see how that feels to step into that part. And then we do some strength role plays where they get to develop their inner strength characters and get in touch with you, know how to hold those in mind with them more often. And we do end with some gratitude practicing, because I like to say we focus so much on what we don't have that we want, or what we do have that we don't want, and we don't focus enough on what's already working well. So I like to cover all those pieces.
Speaker 2:That sounds amazing. I'll definitely have to check that out. It's only something I would really benefit from. Ah, and everybody. And so you know these things that I know as somebody who works in trauma, with trauma, you know. You've just mentioned a lot of day-to-day things though time management or, you know, getting sucked into social media, and so kind of reminds me to mention that the creative arts therapies aren't just for one sort of thing or one sort of need. It's really can be. They can be used for anybody, for anything.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, and same as I do EMDR therapy, and it's the same as, like people think, oh, it's for trauma, no, like you could use it for anxiety, depression, yeah, any kind of issue really. So I think these things both are great. Yeah, and it's I mentioned earlier, it's not just for groups, it's not just for kids, because people think, oh well, kids, because play therapy. Even people have that misperception and anybody who's willing to just be expressive and use these things is going to benefit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, anybody and everybody. And it is a different experience I have found working with individuals, but just as powerful, just as useful as with in group, as a group use.
Speaker 3:And same, you know, interestingly, when I wrote that I think it was pre-pandemic, I think. But another one I would add to that list of misperceptions is it can't be done online, because even I, having trained in EMDR in 2017, and having only learned how to do that in person when the pandemic hit, you all had to go online.
Speaker 3:I was like oh man, having to learn to translate drama therapy and EMDR therapy online. It was a lot at once. Absolutely, and I'm happy to report that, like once I figured it out, it's golden and it still works and I would say, like, for example, my vision board workshops online. The only things that are lacking are things like, for example, in person, I have scarves where, when people take on roles and give other people roles, I'll say do you want to pick a scarf that helps? You know you could put it on the person, like if it's an obstacle, you want it like over their head or around their shoulders, I give them opportunity to make it more expressive, right, whereas online I can't do that kind of element. Really, like, there's not much that hasn't translated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think at this point we've really figured it out in some capacity of how it translates over the screen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, part of our creative art therapy, brains, right, it's like we're creative folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can figure this out All the problem solving that we can do just by practicing some creativity. So again, you know, I don't mean to maybe be a little bit repetitive, but I've had some folks who, like I, don't have a creative bone in my body, you know, I don't have rhythm, I, you know, I just, which is fine. People don't want to use dance movement therapy as a modality. Absolutely fine. I don't force it on anybody, but there is some trickiness to easing people into it. Because I think there's still this even as adults, there's need to be good at something, or have to have a final product that looks nice, or to be good at something.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite things to say to anyone who listens. I love talking about this stuff honestly, I'm like I'm a nerd.
Speaker 3:It's great Process, not product right. It's about exploring, expressing. It's not about the products created. Sometimes there are products created, Sometimes not really. Sometimes it's more improv in different things. But yeah, it's really about just the process and the uncovering ourselves and that sort of thing in the process. So I definitely emphasize that with clients when they're like I messed this up and I'm like this is just for us to explore, it's not going into a museum or a gallery.
Speaker 3:So that's important, that anybody can be creative. And I know, like some of the things some of my clients I love over the years. You know they say that the more you can advertise to your ideal client, the more like they come and that sort of thing. I get a lot of ideal clients and I get people who are willing to play and be spontaneous and that kind of thing. So I'm thankful. But when there's somebody who's less sure of those things, I'm just like hey, you obviously trust me. So far and my clients know like I'm always, like I'm science minded, I will tell them you know all day long about the evidence based kind of stuff with.
Speaker 3:you know again brain science, neuroscience stuff. But I'll be like, just you know, take a gamble here. If it starts to feel uncomfortable, you could always shut it down. But play with me in this for a moment and let's see how this feels. I have a reason I'm doing this. I have lots of years of education and experience to back this up. So I know it might sound silly, right, and I've never had anybody be like yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's like, yeah, just try it. And see Dip your toe in.
Speaker 3:And again, even just being able to use the language of parts. Another thing I often do is use metaphor. Like just yesterday I was talking with a client about the Kessel metaphor and letting people in Like your drawbridge gets lowered.
Speaker 3:You know if you see someone who's safe and you like you can lower it a little bit and kind of peek out there and test the waters and like your moat is still keeping you safe and you got your big walls, can you say you can take a peek and you can let it down all the way and let them in and have your little party in the castle for the people who are safe. And that resonated for them. Yeah, so it's like using just metaphors to kind of make sense of their world in some ways.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah, I think too. It's important maybe to point out that we are just pulling this stuff out of thin air. We, as practitioners, are trained. We went to school for this. There's a whole science, dance therapy association, drama therapy association.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not just some made up thing which gets me ticked off when there's people who say we're not as legit. And I get that. We don't have the studies because we all know there's a lot of BS and bureaucracy and all this stuff, but there is a lot and I love that more and more. Bessel Andrikul talks about.
Speaker 3:Zoma as healing and other creative arts therapies. It's happening. There are more and more people who call me saying I read about this thing, but it really bothers me when people say we're not as legit and we're not as evidence-based.
Speaker 2:Come try it and then you'll know. You'll have the evidence, right yeah.
Speaker 3:But again studies are catching up. I liken it to we've known for years about why meditation. We knew it was helpful. We didn't know the why it was helpful necessarily. Right now we have brain scans that show that the amygdala gets calmed and the run-alove gets calmer and all this stuff. So same thing is like. We've known these things since at least the 1900s and now we're getting the language of why it is all the window of tolerance and all this language we have now. But we've known it intuitively, we've seen it for ourselves before we even had the language to catch up to it.
Speaker 3:It's exciting to see it's kind of exploding.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's happening like you said. Yes, and yeah, like many of us I won't assume that all of us, but as kids colored or even got into music, whether it was playing or just listening and taking it in. As babies, we bounce around and we play roles. As kids, we play make-believe. So these creative juices are there and, I think, being given the opportunity as adults again, all the creative arts therapies available to anybody of any age, but to be given an opportunity as adults to use the creative arts both therapeutically and in therapy. I don't know, maybe something that you could speak to like drama as therapy and drama therapy being yeah, that's a big question.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, yeah, so it's interesting and, oh boy, yeah, opening a can of worms here, oops so a lot of people. One of those misperceptions I have is about anybody who uses the arts in their therapy can say they're an art therapist or drama therapist or anything. No, we are trained folks. We have our masters, our required CEs and different things that make us specifically unique. But yes, there are any therapists who can use some arts and some drama and some things in there.
Speaker 3:What I say when I present to people who I've often done trainings for people who are just counselors and social workers and psychologists and that sort of thing and I'll say what I present is pretty comfortable as far as where you can go with that. I don't really get into role reversing and different things, where there can be more things wrong if you're not trained to have your eye on it.
Speaker 3:So I know that, talking to other creative arts therapists, we're all kind of mindful of that, that like there's a level that we don't necessarily want to go to for somebody who's not trained in these specific modalities. But yes, of course there's certain things people can use. You know they're light enough and that kind of thing. So that's, that's something. There are, you know, issues in terms of title protection and lack of licensure in a lot of states and all these things I'm sure you're familiar with.
Speaker 3:I don't know how many listeners might know about the ins and outs but the creative arts therapies again, because even though we've all been around since 1900s, most of us, I think, really became organizations like 1970s.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But you know, it's been a long journey for a lot of us in terms of still small numbers and not being able to have licensure for our unique fields, a lot of people ending up getting right like generic counseling and stuff, to have a license, all this stuff. And there are still people who do therapeutic theater or they're, like I see a lot of times, artists I don't know exactly what they call themselves, but like healing artists or something like that there are people in this world who do therapeutic things like it's nice, it's fluffy, leaves people feeling a boost to self-esteem all great things, not criticizing it.
Speaker 3:And thankfully, I think, most of the time those people don't call themselves creative arts therapists.
Speaker 3:But yeah, once in a while I've had a correct people and be like are you really, Whether it's drama therapy or art therapy or anything I've had, a kind of be like unless you're actually trained, don't be saying that, which is frustrating because they could technically get away with it, since there's no title protection without licensures and stuff. It's kind of annoying, but I think the difference would be so. For example, even my vision board workshops are therapeutic but not therapy. Right, there's only a surface level we go into with anybody's you don't really get into past at all.
Speaker 3:Even when we're talking about the obstacles, it's really just like it might just be generic unhealthy relationships in my life or something. To me that's an example of it's therapeutic. People feel really great and inspired and connected to the people in the group, but we're not getting into like, hey, tell me about your traumas and we're working on anxiety, depression, you know, if not deep. So that would be to me, the difference in terms of therapeutic versus therapy and, like you said, both are valid.
Speaker 2:It's great to be doing something that feels like somebody wants to go take a dance class because they have fun and it's a way for them to connect with others. Wonderful, go do it. Again, not the point of what we're doing together in a dance therapy session and, again, very important, to be working with somebody who is trained and registered, and I know too just to cite another blog that you have on your website is how to find somebody, a creative arts therapist, which I think you know. Yeah, google is wonderful. We can Google anything and everything nowadays but there are other ways to find providers who are creative arts therapists.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and at the time I wrote that there was a directory which was so lovely Like psychology today but for creative arts therapists, and it didn't last too long, I think a year or two.
Speaker 3:But you know you can. Even when you're on sites like, say, psychology today you can look to see the somebody have the license creative arts therapists license next to their name or do they have? Again, a lot of us don't have licenses that speak to our names. So looking for the national credentials. So for me, registered drama therapist, for you Registered dance therapist.
Speaker 2:Yep, dance movement therapist. That's right yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the art therapist. I know it's ATR and ATRBC, so looking at all those things. That's what I tried to include in that blog, to let people know that there's a lot of different titles to look for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know I, from what I know, each modality, each forum has its own national board and website. So if folks are interested, you can look up drama therapy and I'm sure the website will come up and there are plenty of resources.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for drama therapy. I know it's those that are listed for find a drama therapist are pretty much private practice people, which I guess makes sense, and I think that's a good thing. So if you're interested in those people at agencies you can be able to see anybody you know outside of it necessarily.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so we definitely do have that kind of a thing. Yeah, so it's out there. Folks, go out and do a search for yourself and find a creative arts therapist. Dance and drama is highlighted today, definitely great forms. I guess. A general, just a general, open question of Off the bat, good question.
Speaker 3:I guess one of the other, since we talked about most of them, I'll throw out to that that we didn't talk about that. I like yeah, so one of the misperceptions is creative arts therapist. Analyze what you create in the sessions that, oh, you use this color, oh God.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 3:Like that. People are worried so we do not write. Like. Every creative arts therapist I've ever talked to is like no, you know, you don't have to do anything to do it, you can do it by just doing it. But you can do it by just doing it. So it's a completely different field. There's a lot of things, no matter which arm are. Now these two ask the client what it means to them not to assume that something Means like even.
Speaker 3:Fascinating. For me, roles can mean different things. So, for example, police, the role of police, it's a very I protect people and that part of me is like a, a law enforcing, um, you know, and we're type metaphor here, Most, most of my clients are metaphorically in place and helping keep people safe and for some people, of course, in our recent years, some people are like hell. No.
Speaker 3:I don't identify with that. That's not part of me. So it's so interesting that certain roles can be charged in different ways. So I don't make any assumptions about what something means to somebody. So that's something. It's like we, as the therapist, would ask in any kind of creation, any kind of exploration, like what does this mean to you, how do you identify with us, or not? The other one is this awkward perception people have that, oh, if I'm creating something in a session with a creative arts therapist, they're just going to be staring at me this whole time. Or like, if they're, I'm asked to draw something or right. Like for me as a drama therapist, if I ask somebody to act something out, I you're right or like to body something, or am I just staring at them awkwardly? So this is an interesting one because it depends on who you talk to. Like we're trained in different ways. Some people are more hands on than others. To me it's kind of more about what does a client need?
Speaker 3:And like like I'll often ask a client do you want me to join in with this thing? Like here's an example yeah, I'm big about the letting go. You heard it a little bit about how I do my vision board workshops or like my ending rituals. So sometimes I'll ask a client like it sounds like you've got a lot like burdening you today. Do you need to write it down and we rip it up together and throw it in the garbage? Or do you want to like imagine throwing out the window? Do you want to stomp on it together? Yeah, and when I offer those things, lots of people love that kind of stuff. They're go, that's fun, like we could do that. Some people like I need to do this myself, like this feels like I need to unburden it. And some people like, yeah, help me, I really like I, you know, want that like co-regulation in it.
Speaker 3:And so to me it's. It varies by client. If I do ask them to do some kind of artwork, I'll ask, like you want me to do my own stuff over here while you do yours? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of times like you know, some people like that kind of co-regulation. Some people are like you do whatever you want, you check your phone, probably care, you know, but like I try to stay in it with the client, that sounds like a parallel thing, or yes, yeah, yeah, for movement therapy we did a lot of practicing of witnessing Great.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you talked about that in your own therapy, but it's. And again, it's not that intense staring at you while you're doing something, but it's the, the seeing your experience of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think a lot of times. I would assume this is similar in dance, movement therapy, like part of the witnessing is so that I can repeat it back, like the experience, like whether I physically embody this is what I saw, you know, or just to observe something about it. Yeah, this is what I felt in my body when you were doing this or again going to the analysis part of it, just like I noticed that your shoulders seem to droop when you did this thing, can you?
Speaker 3:tell me about what that was like, what was? The feeling behind that, or the thought, so yeah. So witnessing isn't just about like I'm analyzing and I'm like criticizing.
Speaker 2:It's about like I'm validating and I'm just with you in it, with you, which is just a huge part of therapy is being with the person I find for my practice. Yeah, yeah, thank you for sharing all of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think we covered all the ones that I pretty much touched up, and maybe in more detail than I had written about.
Speaker 2:Honestly, Well, I appreciate it and I think you know this just still a lot of questions out there as far as what creative arts therapies is and isn't, and so that's really why I'm inviting folks on this podcast with me, so that we can just start talking about it more and getting it out there more. So how can folks get in touch with you if they're interested about learning more?
Speaker 3:Sure, I have a website. It's just my name, christopherastrocom, and I do have a sign up on the blog. I'm a person who hates pop ups on websites, especially when you're on a website and every page you go to has the like pop up sign ups up. I chose to only have it on my blog for that reason. It's like you know, it's not intrusive, but if people do want to sign up, I do have a newsletter that when I have interviews like this, I share, or I did. I have a fun little commigo device that I reviewed and people can get some money off of it if they decide to get it. So I shared that. I share when I have my workshops of different sorts, so any kind of practice news like that, that and when I do write those blogs that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Yes, you can find me there.
Speaker 2:Great Thanks, can you?
Speaker 3:I'm sorry, Christopherastrocom, so I'm sure you'll put it in the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll have it, my name is not exactly easy, romanosky isn't easy either.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, you know, we'll definitely have it in the show notes and, as somebody who has read multiple blogs on your on your website easy to read, easy to take in and a lot of good, good information your whole website is great. It's really appreciated, thank you. So, again, thank you for joining me today. So this wanted to mention for Steve that next on the podcast will be his guest, meredith Canada, so you can look forward to that. That will be episode 140. I guess I probably should have mentioned we are going to be episode 139. I knew it. This folks, I'm still figuring it out. Appreciate your patience. But yeah, until next time. Thank you, I'm just getting your way through. Creative arts therapies has taken its turn, so all right.
Speaker 1:Thanks, krista. Please like, subscribe and follow this podcast on your favorite platform. A glowing review is always helpful and, as a reminder, this podcast is for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. If you're struggling with a mental health or substance abuse issue, please reach out to a professional counselor for consultation. If you are in a mental health crisis, call 988 for assistance. This number is available in the United States and Canada.