Exercise: take a piece of blank paper with some crayons or felt tips.  Draw a monster.  Put the monster in the middle of the floor.  Select an imaginary (unless you have kids’ toys available) weapon.  Take the weapon and kill the monster.

What did your monster look like?  Describe the qualities of the monster.  How did you choose to kill it?  If you did this exercise with someone else compare and contrast.

A couple of decades ago I took part in this exercise at a weekend conference for dramatherapists.  At the time, I was considering this career path.  This exercise has stayed with me.  I remember my monster clearly.  It had a big satanic head and small body.  Another woman and I chose daggers.  We hid behind a chair then ran out and stabbed our monsters and ran back into hiding.  There was tremendous diversity in the group’s monsters and weapons and style of attack.  We did a little analysis…mine has a big scary head, but actually the body is weak and small.  So maybe my monster is more bark than bite.  The killing was exhilerated.  There was a real frisson of fear and then the euphoria of conquest and security.

I cannot recall the name of the woman who led the workshop, but she was a pioneer in dramatherapy techniques for children who had suffered abuse.  She had four bags of small toys and figurines.  Each bag had a  different character; I remember one was full of human characters, another had animals and creatures, another had tactile toys that were squishy or soft or hard.  She would have the kids choose the toys and communicate through their play.

She told the story of one little boy whose parents were drug addicts and they would give him drugs as well to “take care” of him while they were tripping.  I think it was something like heroin or acid.  He would choose a jeep style vehicle with a mummy, daddy and child place in it.  They would take trips into space, to the moon, to other planets.  One day they returned to earth and he decided they didn’t need to take any more trips.

The story is the healing.  As much as I believe in the benefits of talk therapy, it has limited impact.  We can analyze ourselves to death, but the processing of emotion is so much more effectively achieved through symbolic story telling and ritual.  It bypasses our busy little brains and goes straight to the heart.  Those Greek dramatists were onto something with that whole catharsis kick.