Welcome

Welcome to our World

You are either one of our existing customers, or you found us in an exploration of the internet universe.

This is my first blog post and I am delighted to experiment with a welcome to our new website.  All of us at Davaar are excited with our new look and I want to give a big appreciative thank you to Nikki for your work in pulling this together.

It will be great to get feedback from you, our customers and visitors, about our new look through the blog. Also let us know if you have some topic that you’d like us to get blogging with and we will work with creating a stimulating, thought provoking space for folks.

Whilst this first post is a welcome to you all, I also want to start using this space to share my passion and interests in terms of the work I do. Those familiar with my work will be aware that I have been training in psychodrama since 1990 (some days it feels like a 22 year training background, at other times I have a sense that I started training just yesterday, such is the work in psychodrama). If you are interested in knowing more about my relationship with psychodrama you can access an article published in the ANZPA Journal 2010, available in our publications page in the resources section of our website.

I see that the theory, practice and philosophy of psychodrama offers much to clinicians working in mental health. This is especially so currently, with the growing research emerging from neuroscience which demonstrates the relationship between childhood trauma and reasons for individuals presenting to mental health services. This is intensified when the individual has a history of complex trauma and where attachment, shame and betrayal are integral to the personality development of the individual.

J. L. Moreno, the creator of psychodrama was a psychiatrist who established a therapeutic community at St Elizabeth’s Hospital Beacon Hill, New York in the 1930’s.  Moreno put forward that there was a strong relationship between spontaneity and mental well being. St Elizabeth’s provided a place and space where patients could explore their relationships with themselves and others whom they encountered in the past, present and significantly in the future through psychodrama. I have to add here that psychodrama opens up a world of experiences for participants and is not restricted to encounters with self and others.

Role Theory, an integral component of psychodrama, enables practitioners of psychodrama to explore early childhood relationships for their clients and work towards Social Atom Repair with a view that the client will be able to act in new relationships from new roles rather than from old scripts.

If I have in anyway created interest in you in the links I see between psychodrama, spontaneity, role theory, neuroscience and complex trauma now would be a good time to comment here.

I have to fess up, of course, that these connections and relationships have been written about by many other pioneers in the area… I will be bringing forward what I have noticed and continue to notice in the work I do.

Thus, I will keep adding to this beginning introduction to our blog and look forward to your comments, questions, observations, curiosities and dances with ideas.

Wendy