Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 823: Drama Therapy and Trauma with Myriam D. Savage, Ph.D

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Episode 823: Drama Therapy and Trauma with Myriam D. Savage, Ph.D · The Trauma Therapist

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Trauma Therapist Podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right
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now. Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma
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Therapist Podcast and signing up today or welcome back to the Trauma Thepist podcast.
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My name is Gamiferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible
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selves, to be human, to be real, not just a clinician.
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I'm a big believer in who we are is more important than what we know,
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and this requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires
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intention. Can learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma
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Therapist Project dot com. That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get
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started. So here we go. So five four, three, two and
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one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to have
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as my guest today, doctor Mimi Savage. Memi welcome, thank you,
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glad to be here. Welcome, awesome. So Mimi is registered drama therapist
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and Board certified trainer who's Associate professor at California Institute of Intrical Studies in San
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Francisco and the Master of Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts program. She's a core
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faculty member of teaching courses as Human Development and Family Group Dynamics, Arts and
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Therapy, and Professional Development. She's also one of the contributors to the new
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book coming out by Susan PA's Bannett titled Women Therapists on Healing. Mimi,
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welcome to the podcast. You thank you so before we get go on to
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share with our listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently. Oh
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wow, well, yeah, I wish that was an easy response. It
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should be, right. I'm an army brat. So where am I from?
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I was born in Fort Lewis, Washington, so that's Seattle. I
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spend a lot of time in northern California, where my parents reside their elderly
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there, and also stayed in Europe till I was about eight years old,
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until I had to come back to America because the soldiers were asked to come
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back, and then my father went to Vietnam. So my experience is not
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a straightforward. Shoot, you know, I was born in Wisconsin or whatever.
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I have been everywhere. Yeah, a bit of a vagabond. And
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now I reside in Los Angeles with my family stayed in California. Yeah,
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lived in New York for a long time too, studied there, went to
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school back east. Awesome. Awesome. So we'll talk about the book and
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your contribution to it. But before we do, I'm curious. Before we
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started, you mentioned that you're a registered drama therapist, licensed drama therapist,
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and of which there are you? How did that start start for you?
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How did your what did that interest for you start? Yeah? The theme
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today might be circuitous. That might be the theme because you know, again
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it's not a straight shoot, and which is exciting in life, right.
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Although I have students who know exactly what they want to do and they're in
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school, you know, getting their masters, they have had all planned out.
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I went to Princeton and was a comparative literature major, studying theater and
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French languages. And then I went to Acting Conservatory, New York, the
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Neighborhood Playhouse fame for Sandy Meisner in those days. And then I ended up
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doing regional theater, and then I ended up in Hollywood, and I ended
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up acting on television commercials and mostly television sitcom comedy. You know, I
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studied clowning. It was my that was my path. And then the LA
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Uprising occurred and I found myself working with children and teaching artistry positions and doing
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advocacy work and still a professional actor. And then the yeah, the world
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was it was topsy turvy. So somehow I found drama therapy through a professor
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at the time at cal State University, Los Angeles, and I started understanding
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and I always knew this that theater and the arts, you know, and
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Catharsis had something to do with well being, you know, And I knew
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there was something about not just being in the audience and also for the actor,
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but there was this interaction, and this interaction had something to do with
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something was happening therapeutically. So I found drama therapy. It is the story
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is what I just shared is so common. I didn't know it existed.
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I found it, it found me, and then I studied it and was
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a teaching artist for quite some time, and then eventually ended up in acute
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settings like the psychiatric units, and then forged forward and got a PhD.
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So again it was a circuitous way. I didn't know about it, I
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landed. And I also have mostly worked in acute settings with neurodiverse folks,
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residential treatment, creating programs in acute settings for children and adults. That's been
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my world until really now steeping into academia where I can offer my knowledge in
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that way. Now, when we hear the term drama therapy, I think
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we can come up with an explanation or definition of that. Seemingly it sounds
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simple, but how do you describe or define drama therapy? What is it?
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Right? It's an intentional use of the theater, arts and anthropology and
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all that has to do with performance in a therapeutic manner, realm for that
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you know happenstance. It's we have research. I'm a researcher. There's empirical
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research as to what happens neurologically, physically, you know, on the to
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or combined to or connected. So it's an intentional use. It's not far
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from art therapy, music therapy, poetry therapy, and dance movement because the
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theater encompasses all of those, you know, art forms. So we feel
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fortunate because we can we can use everything in the kitchen sink. There are
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different methods of drama therapy. Some are mostly an embodied way of working with
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improvisation, and others use sand tree and other externalizing ways of working. I
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mean, that's at the core of what we do as an externalizing way of
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working. You know that trauma is locked inside of us, and so we
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want to put it out there so we can see it. We all are
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familiar with the empty chair. That's very psychodramatic. That's our roots are psychodrama.
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With Jacob Moreno, that's what we do. We do psychodrama, but
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it's also mostly with groups. We do one on one and it's not just
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one person's story. You know, the endeavor for drama therapy is to include
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everyone in the room. So yeah, there's different methods, but we're our
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intention is all the same, that intentional use. So let's get a little
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more specific. What might it look like? Given and with the understanding that
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it could look many different ways, you know, but give us an example
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of inn a group. What would this What would it look like? How
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might it look right? I'm trained narratively, so the way I was trained
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is what they call narrow drama. It's now for me changed through my research
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and you know, morphed into my own way of working narratively. But let's
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say I'm in the acute setting with a higher functioning group of men, which
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is common for me and the days. And you have people there obviously who
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are either suicidal or homicidal. Right, it's in the most acute situations that
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they're there, and there's depression, there's schitzer. Everything is in the room.
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Actually, that was very that's a great way to learn everything. There's
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schizophrenia, the schizo effective behavior is bipolar disorder. Is all in the room.
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At the same time. It's not for everyone because it's very triage way
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of working. But I think having improvisation in my background and that kind of
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training kept me on my toes and able. I had interns that came in
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and won this is not for me. I can't, I can't, I
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can't do this thing. So let's say that that's the environment, that's the
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meliu, that's the population. And let's say you have, you know,
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a person that says, you know, I'm going to kill myself, you
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know, and of course we already have had the terrasof we know everything is
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set, the person is safe there there, they've already attempted suicide and you
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know it's their prerogative to think that. But you know, I would say
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something along the lines is, well, let's let's see if there's an option,
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and every every group, every you know, I think of him as
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workshop, has a format warming in, a warm up, a central activity
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or central part of the group, and then a closure, right, And
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that's that's the microcosm, and it's at the macro. You might have twelve
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weeks working with a group of folks. I worked on skid Row with unhoused
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women for three years. I was hired for documentary and the same thing happened.
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Although there I wasn't I didn't you know, I wasn't privy to medical
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records, et cetera. I was an open door policy, so that was
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a whole different thing. But that's still that's the setup. So here's this
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person who comes in, he says I'm going to kill myself or somebody else
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comes in and you know, off the gurney, which is ridiculous, and
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you know, on heroin. Still, and let's just take those two examples,
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maybe for that one person. Once the whole entire group is there and
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we've warmed it up in maybe some improv of where we're just sharing where we
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are today with a talking stick or maybe we're I've placed images on the wall
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of scenarios of people, diads, people you know, in scenes, and
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they just share what they see and then maybe we can enact those scenes,
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or maybe we can just speak to a figure in that scene that brings out
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what's going on with them today. I'm just riffing off of this. And
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then maybe a lot of fabric on the floor, like loads of fabric,
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and they pick up one that means something to them today or maybe not means
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nothing. Maybe they're on their podium today or their soapbox and they give that
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talk that they need to talk to someone. Maybe they write a letter to
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someone who's passed or someone that they haven't been able to speak to because a
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lot of people have been incarcerated. You know. It's a forensic setting.
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So there's all of that, And then there's that gentleman who says I have
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nothing to live for, and maybe we do an improv where he steps out
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and I have confetti, he steps in, and we give him a surprise
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party. That moment is real, he experiences it, and then maybe we
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do the supper he never had with his long lost children, and literally this
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has happened. He said, well, now you've given me some food for
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thought. Maybe you know, ha, I didn't. I didn't. I
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didn't. I haven't known that feeling before. I've never had a surprise party.
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I've never had that. I'm getting a well touched by remembering this,
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this man I haven't forgotten or the person who got off the gurney, who's
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who's using Heroin? And I sit in the hot seat and I'm Heroin and
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he speaks to me and I'm seductive, and I'm like, you know,
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you don't want to quit me because I do. I'm like, you've said
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it before. Come on, you're here right now, why you know?
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And then we roll reverse. He sits in the hot seat of Heroin and
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he ses to me as I'm him, and that back and forth gives you
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perspective right right away. That right let me just let me holy for a
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second here. This is so intense. I love this. There's such a
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sense of immediacy and being in the moment and having to be okay with that
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right and having to be being able to trust your own your own instincts and
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what's coming from the other person. When you talked about that, excuse me,
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the gentleman who maybe said he wanted to commit suicide and you offered that
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situation where he came to the door and you through confetti. That's so amazing.
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What are the other people doing at that point? What might they be
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doing called upon to do? It goes back to dynamics, right. We
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don't want to do the one person therapy in a group, and you know,
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in a group, were taking care of the one and the many,
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right, and we want group consensus, we want mutual aid. So the
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rest of the players are auxiliary players. That's what Jacob Moreno would say,
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because this is very psychodramatic. It is one person's story in that, but
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isn't it everyone's story? Because they're all there for basically the same reason.
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I mean, this is the last hurrah, This is it, right,
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So they're playing the parts of the neighbor or whomever they're they're giving right and
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witnessing, and then they're also processing. We always process, right, It's
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not as if talk therapy isn't part of the deal. So unpacking what happened
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and other people witnessing or saying you know, I know that feeling, So
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they're part of that mutual aid. They're part of that exploration, witnessing all
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of the things, you know, even in human development wise, we need
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to be witnessed. How many of these folks who are where they are.
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You know, it's a journey, a lot long journey of trauma, right,
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of not being seen, of not being held. It's it's it's trauma.
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It's all trauma, whether we're working with the children or working with you
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know, an older and older population. And so they're part of that processing,
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right and part of also chiming in. You know, there's there's that.
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Here's the theater, right, You've got the chorus. It's like the
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Greek chorus. That's a setup where the chorus says something that that that player
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needs to hear, you know, and that happens, or you can look
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at it as an orchestra. But we're all part of the story. We're
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all part of working together. I'm just the guide and the facilitator. I'm
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the director. Sometimes I'm in it, sometimes I'm on the side lines,
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but I'm fighting it. Yeah, that's there's so many ways to go in,
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you know, narrative ways of approaching. For me, it's about the
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story and the problem is not the person, but the is the problem,
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right, you know, and the problem saturated self identity issues that prevail in
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a setting like that. It's why we're there, right, So that's what
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we're looking at, and I like using all of these different tools. I
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have colleagues who do a a method called developmental transformations, where it's ideal for
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one on one work private practice. Although they've used it in different settings.
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Now it's expanded in the way that they approach it. But the person walks
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in and basically it's improvisational from the get go. There's no processing. There's
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just who are you? Who am I? Who are you? And then
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you could play the perpetrator. It switches then you become the instigator, and
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then you become the victim. And you know, it takes a lot of
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training for that way of working. It doesn't really work ideally in the settings
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that I was in because things are fast in my setting, right, someone
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is here today, someone's gone tomorrow. You might have a group of people
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who are staying for quite a while and they support each other. So I
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was lucky the way I was trained fit the environment that I was in.
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When you first started doing this, I would imagine it's one thing to be
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an actress and to be have that orientation, but it's and to study and
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it's another thing to be immersed in that type of work in that type of
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setting. What was that like for you when you first started. What were
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some of the challenges maybe that you came up against well systems. You know,
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I didn't realize when I was in the hospital, was my partner at
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the time at one tank, because I'd leave at lunch and I can't believe
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the way you know, what's going on in this environment and people are you
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know, and and my partner said, you know, you're in a corporate
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You're in a corporate environment. I'm like, no, I'm in a hospital.
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He said, no, you're in a corporate environment. This is corporate.
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It's it's systematized. And I'm like, oh, you know, because
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as the actor in me, you know, who was taught, you know,
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through a collaborative way of working, but also a very you know,
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I would say that the way I was trained in New York was very hardcore.
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You know. It has nothing to do with it has everything to do
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with your own psychology and finding all the trauma in the dark and the light
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that's inside of you. But has nothing to do with taking care of you,
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right, But I didn't understand. I thought, Oh, there's a
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barn put on a show. I'm here, you know, and I bummed,
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ted's a lot. I got into trouble a lot. It was,
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oh, there she is, we want her, but she's a trouble maker.
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And eventually I learned, you know, I had a supervisor who was
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actually an occupational therapist, a doctrine in OT and you know, she said,
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one day you're going to be in a position of leadership, and you
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know, you got to know how to work with, work with and you
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know. And it wasn't as if I was so self centered. It's just
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I just didn't get how to work in the system. And then that is
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actually what spurred me on to get a PhD. For a couple of things.
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One I saw with the children. It was mostly the children. Nothing
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was really happening with them. There was some jinga and ot work that was
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pretty minimal. And not to poo poo that it was just play therapy wasn't
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a part of that world when I got there. I think early on in
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the seventies, they had a lot of play therapy and things like that.
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For the kids. But I knew that I could do something, and so
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I made a lot of proposals, and finally I was in the children's unit
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and there I noticed a disproportionate amount of foster care kids and I thought,
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well, it's not like all foster care all kids. And they were black
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and brown. I'm a biracial woman. I identify as black woman. I
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thought this is really strange. And then I started understanding, you know,
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the the finances around this, and how hospitals, you know, keep abreast,
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how they benefit from big pharma and foster care, and the pipeline from
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foster care to incarceration. And then I got really incensed and also curious.
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And that's what really spurred on, along with understanding the systems that we do
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we buy into them, do we work with them? We have to pay
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our rent, our mortgage? How do we balance that? I came across
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a book by Parker Palmer, A Courage to Teach, I Think, And
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there is a passage in it where he speaks of the Rosa Parks moment where
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you know, she gets on the bus and she has to decide because other
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people had tried it, she has to decide on this day that you know
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she's gonna get on that bus and she's not gonna move, so she's going
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to say no, Today's the day. And it's that moment that I had
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at the hospital where I went, well, you know, you've been here,
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you see what's going on. What are you going to do about it?
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It kind of harkens back to what I said about the LA uprising too,
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like what are you going to do about it, mamie? Because you
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know you could talk the talk, but are you going to walk the walk?
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It's a big decision and how are you going to do it? Because
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you still have to pay your bills? So yeah, I mean that's what
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i'd share about that bumping heads or how did I deal with it? It
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is not an environment that I think is healthy for everyone. I speak for
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myself for long term, but I also sometimes miss it dearly because it is
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a wacky place and your author shows and there's an adrenaline rush, and then
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there's also there's just so much. I will say that while I was there,
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the trauma that I hadn't encountered as a young person seemed to dissipate.
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I understand the world really well, and that's not like I said, for
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everyone, So let's talk about this book that's coming out together by Susan p'ce
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bannett called Woman Therapist on Healing. It's going to be released, Susan said
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November twenty twenty four from North Atlantic Books. How did you get involved in
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this and what's your contribution? Right? So I got involved because I met
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Susan at I was I was deeply for a decade and still am involved with
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my family called the Drama Therapist, so the North American Drama Therapy Association,
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and we've been around for forty eight years. And so I was a regional
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representative of that organization, the NA DTA. Anybody who was interested in drama
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therapy looked that up. I was education chair, et cetera, on the
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board, and so I did. I created a regional conference in Oregon,
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and Susan happened to be there. We reached out and asked for people,
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you know, if they wanted to have vendor tables, etc. And she
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was there with her books and she happened to just hand me her books at
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the end because I was chairing that with some colleagues and I'm like, oh,
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thank you. And I didn't even look at the book for the books
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for a while. And then I had this gig where I was teaching as
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an adjunct at the time, and I saw this book she wrote, Wisdom,
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Attachment and Love and Trauma Therapy Beyond Evidence Based Practice. I'm like,
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oh, that's a great title. I'm going to open this book. It
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just been sitting there collecting dust, and I'm like, oh, wow,
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I got to teach how to this book. And then I asked her,
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hey, remember me. She goes, of course, I'm like, would
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you mind just, you know, doing a guest lecture for my student?
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She goes, oh, I'd love it. And then then it just kept
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building from that from that moment, so then she's we just hit it off.
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We understood each other. I mean, the work that she does is
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phenomenal. What the worlds that she's encountered. Talk about my acute setting,
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what she's done with her clients who you know, have been victimized with organizations
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that have you know, kidnapped folks, it's just you know, cults is
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it's amazing. She's retired from that now. But she was the one who
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said, you know, I think you have something to contribute to this book.
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And I'm like, really okay, And she knew that I had been
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published already. And so my contribution to this is the title is called brick
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Collage, and that's not something I coined. It means, you know,
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a hodgepodge of collecting things, prick collage. And the title is Prickolage on
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being Enough Healing through narrative code construction. And that's my contribution. In the
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chapter section about disassociation and remembering, she has three sections, and sure she's
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told you about it in book, but there are there are stories coming from
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ourselves and also our knowledge is therapists. And you know, I had a
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lot of trauma of her in my early youth, just some from the environment
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that I was in and others that you know, were from family. And
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it was interesting writing this chapter because I start off with a memory of my
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grandmother in the South. I'd lived with her for a year with my mother,
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who is a frenchwoman. It was the first time we lived in America,
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so her English was terrible. But anyway, what was going on with
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you know, culturally, what was going on with previous trauma, what was
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going on with her? And I start off with just a memory a picture
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that I describe of my grandmother doing laundry for a white family and knowing at
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the age of eight that there was tension, there was something going on in
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there, and that just triggers and triggers. In this chapter a whole journey
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of dealing with disassociation, dealing with trauma, dealing with what's going on in
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the environment that that contributes to trauma, but also how that triggers and the
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internalized trauma that I carry, right, And so yeah, that's and also
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some of them I'm keen on because as a drama therapist, I get excited
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and I'm keen on inventing inner you know, interactive, experiential ways of working,
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in externalizing ways of working. So I write about the way of working
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called the poetic Home that I devised, a way of getting the story outside
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of yourself so that you can look at it and also create the ideal environment
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that you want to embrace. So that's in the chapter because I did that
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with the women who were unhoused and skid row and many times in other workshops.
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So that's my contribution. It's a bit poetic in its vibe. I'll
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say it's not it's not something that uh that it's not a way of writing
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that I've done before because it has memoir in it. I love that,
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and I love that you brought or bring a part of yourself to that work.
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I mean, you just seem like such a passionate, interesting person that
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I think you know it's you can you could feel it just by talking to
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you. Mem and I think that's such an awesome part of you that can
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become so healing for for people listening and reading your work. As we kind
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of wind down here, can you share just a little bit about and you've
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talked before in this interview about the importance of externalizing. What does that look
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like sometimes? What can that look like? What does that mean? You
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know? The word that comes up for me right now when you ask that
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and thank you for what you just said, that that really warms my heart.
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I feel it right here. You know, it's all embodied ways of
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working. That's what I'm addicted to. It's somatic and you know what that's
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about. That's you know, if we take that pause and that breath and
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we let things in and let things out. What else is there? But
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with that saying that, the word that comes up for me is buffer.
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You know, that's the externalizing way of working, that projective way of working,
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so that I can put that stuff out onto something else. And isn't
27:57
that an easier way of dealing with my hurt, my pain, my layered
28:07
trauma. Right, I can start unlayering it and project it onto And we're
28:11
going back to human development again about projective, you know, identification or just
28:15
projecting onto right, and the mother, the gays, the parent, the
28:19
ideal, the good enough, you know, going back to Wennacott. We
28:23
need that we've got that projected onto us, but we also need to project
28:27
out when it comes to what are we going to do with it? It's
28:30
just going to stay and fester within, right, we know that and all
28:34
of the things that happened. So that embodied way of working for me is
28:38
just a natural way of working. I know, for myself, I could
28:42
just talk it talk talk talk, talk talk around it if I don't.
28:52
You know, I'm with a union, for instance, who allows me to
28:56
just stop breathe find those images that speak to me and actually encourages me to
29:04
do my art. I'm not just you know, I paint, I take
29:07
photographs, I do everything so that I can heal, and that's what I
29:14
encourage my clients and also my students. They work by doing, they learn
29:18
by doing in the program that I teach at CIS, which is all about
29:22
expressive therapies. But obviously the border behavioral sciences needs all the courses also to
29:27
be met, so they come in with that ability to express in whichever way
29:34
is needed. But also it's prescriptive too. It's not just willy nilly just
29:38
do whatever, because they're not right for certain clients and for certain needs.
29:42
So did I answer your question? You did? You did? Look I
29:48
still good talking to you. How can people get in contact with you?
29:52
What's the best way? Yeah? I think the best way is through my
29:59
Universe City email, and that would be Amazon, Mimi M. Savage,
30:03
s A V A G E at CII, S DOT E d U.
30:10
The other way is I have a pretty defunct website. It's under Sokel Drama
30:14
Therapy Center. If you try to reach me, you'll see lots of stuff
30:19
on that. You can reach me through that, but yeah, direct email
30:25
is a great way to reach me if you want to know more about expressive
30:27
therapies. That's my PhD as a matter of fact, and or drama therapy.
30:32
I'm more than happy to to help, and I'm mentor many so yeah,
30:37
that's my pleasure. Well, awesome talking to you, and you're welcome
30:41
back here anytime. I look forward to it. Thank you so much,
30:45
Thank you so much. This has been great. I like right, thank
30:48
care ata happened to ronloading