Valerie Simon interview – Healing with Psychodrama

Caroline Rothstein and Valerie Simon discuss psychodrama and its benefits.
Caroline Rothstein and Valerie Simon discuss psychodrama and its benefits.
Usually, performers are the harshest judges of our own work, far worse than any stage or film critic. But do we need self-criticism in order to be a good performer?
While playing Brenda, the headstrong detective on the hit series The Closer, Emmy and Golden Globe winning actress Kyra Sedgwick discussed the stresses of having played a challenging character for six seasons.
“[Brenda’s] a bundle of contradictions, and she’s dealing with at least ten very intense emotions in every episode…
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a client sitting in my office tell me some version of “nothing terrible happened to me in my childhood, my family was fine. No one beat me, I was fed and clothed. I didn’t have any traumas.” Yet in their adult lives, these clients are struggling…
”You can’t heal what you can’t feel.” – Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse
Sharon Wegsheider-Cruse, a pioneer in the recovery movement and founder of Onsite Workshops in Tennessee, is talking about the unpaved, yet ultimately rewarding road of recovery.
“I’m an actor who believes we all have triggers to any stage of emotion. It’s not always easy to find but it’s still there.”
– Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman’s quote alludes to the fact that the actor has to access all of his or her emotions in order to deliver an authentic performance.
Decades ago, the founder of psychodrama, JL Moreno said, “the body remembers what the mind forgets.” Moreno was speaking about how trauma gets stored in our bodies on a cellular level. Recent research is validating Moreno’s earlier statement.