Work Trainings, Mental Health Services & Psychodrama as Self-Care

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to a work training. How many? Is it like one or two? Maybe five to seven? Or is it A MILLION? I’ve only been in my “career” for two years, and I cannot even BEGIN to tell you how many trainings/orientations I have attended. I just. I can’t. I don’t. <shudder>

What have all these trainings given me? Let’s see…

1. Giant stacks of paper (…which I’m always glad about for doodling purposes, yet, at the same time, I must cringe for the environment…)

2. A love/hate relationship with PowerPoint (WHO ELSE HAS DEEP FEELS ABOUT THIS?!)

3. A commute home in which I question everything I am doing with my life. (#existentialcrisis)

PLUS, there is the added all-encompassing disappointment in fellow adults’ abilities to spell. <sigh>

Needless to say, in a recent training, I had reached my capacity for the above as well as: a) small talk with others, 2)   stale snacks, and 3) general bullshit.

WHOA with the negativity. Right?!

Time for some self-care…but honestly, I was doing everything I could to care for the self. I utilized all the breaks. I wore comfortable clothing. I slept well. I sang in the car. I treated myself to a pleasant cafe lunch. I socialized a little. I took a walk to get space when necessary. I even brushed my teeth in the middle of the day (which gives one a surprising boost).

Guess what? I still wanted to scream at people. My thoughts were angrily whipping back and forth with every presentation slide like that little needle on a seismograph during an earthquake.

Then…there were the role plays. !!!

For those of you who like role plays, fine, but I’ve never met a group of strangers who jumped at the chance to play pretend in front of more strangers. “Who would like to volunteer?” So many crickets. Absolutely. No. Eye. Contact.

Somehow, I managed to avoid the first three role plays (that’s right, it’s not my first time avoiding role plays, not even close). The time I did participate in a role play, I had to be cornered by upper management during lunch. Yeah.

So there I am, miserable, and the room is getting that mid-afternoon stuffiness. I detached from the lecture and started analyzing myself — what is really bothering me? What is it that I find so frustrating? Why do I feel like this is all so pointless?

After a few minutes of doodling and pondering, I thought, “None of this is applicable to what actually happens.” I realized, then, that when the trainers said things like, “Well, this is really for an ideal situation,” it raised my blood pressure.

An ideal situation? Nothing in the mental health world is an ideal situation. Why would we “practice” having an “ideal” situation? No one in this room would ever use strategies for an ideal situation. You don’t need strategies for “ideal.” Because it’s ideal.

I looked around the room. What a homogenous bunch of hopeful hapless helpers. What in the hell? We must be kidding ourselves — to the very core — as individuals, as mental health professionals, and as a culture. I have been among them, lost in it as much as the next person — but now I’m awake. And I don’t know what to do.

And I certainly didn’t know what to do for those last couple hours stuck in that training. I needed to change my attitude, and to do that, I needed to get out of my head.

“Who hasn’t been in a role play yet?”

There is a sign in my office that says: “Options for Responding to a Problem: 1) Feel Better about the Problem, 2) Tolerate the Problem, or 3) Solve the Problem.” Feel better? No. Tolerate? No.

I raised my hand. “I haven’t gone.” Time to wake up, folks. “I’ll be the kid.”

I have let my recent crochet project, my emotional baggage tote bag, go to the wayside at this point. I haven’t felt the need for it; I haven’t felt anything about it. The therapeutic intention behind it did not manifest. It was too planned. Too forced. I have struggled with deciding whether or not to complete it, start over, or forget it.

I took my place as the “problem” kid in the role play. This pretend meeting was for my benefit — to create a plan to solve my “issues.” I had every intention of acting exactly like all the adolescents I had sat with during these meetings in real life to force the role play into a real space.

I got my headphones out.

I played on my phone.

I went into the role play with the intention of waking everyone up. What I didn’t intend to do was feel everything I had just embodied.

All I had done was “act” like those kids I had worked with for the past two years. I said the things they said and did the things they did. I thought I was just acting angry and pissed off at the world because that’s what all those kids look like.

But I wasn’t acting pissed off. A few minutes into the role play, I realized I was scared. All those adults staring at me, wanting me to tell them whatever it was they needed to write down on their plans. I realized that when I said, “I don’t know,” with that angry tone that all those kids used, it was because I actually did not know. At least, not in the way they would understand. They couldn’t change what I needed them to change. They couldn’t fix what I needed fixed.

Halfway through the role play, I realized I wasn’t hearing them — my focus went in and out. I gave one-word answers because I hadn’t processed the questions. I cared, but I didn’t care. I wanted them to listen, but my throat had tightened up.

I didn’t see these people the way I had seen them as my real self, the counselor. The teacher, the court counselor, the care coordinator, the pastor, the family members — the positive adults. We saw ourselves as a great support system, but as the kid, I saw us almost as cardboard cutouts. Just sitting in our places. We weren’t real.

And that’s not the kid’s fault. As adults, we can’t take it personally if our bullshit is not taken seriously. Unfortunately, we are so used to swimming in it, we often don’t even recognize when we’re bullshitting.

They ended the role play to debrief; we weren’t going to make it to the resolution. People thanked me for my “performance,” though at that point, I knew I hadn’t been performing.

All those emotions I was supposedly crocheting into my emotional baggage tote had not actually left me; I couldn’t exorcise them by simply pulling them out with a crochet hook. They had to leave me organically — by choice. Those emotions — those kids’ stories — weren’t going to leave me through granny squares. That was too quiet. Too structured. Too nice.

They left me through an expressive art most representative of the chaos of real life:  psychodrama. From that role play, I could begin to fully understand the hostility, anxiety, disappointment, fear, and meltdowns of all the adolescents who are wrapped up in a world of mental illness and poverty — and accept its lingering effects on me as a counselor.

Psychodrama cuts through the bullshit and engages all the senses. It pulls off that fluffy touchy-feely blanket we cover people with to expose the raw, human places — the blood and guts of their stories. Psychodrama bridges the fantasy world of “making a difference” with the true reality.

I mentioned earlier that I had a really nice lunch to help me cope with having such a bad day. I had a fabulous chicken salad panini at a little sidestreet place called City Lights Café (complete with wine and neighboring bookstore).

That’s where I saw the above sign: No Pissy Attitudes

I started off the day of that training with a pissy attitude. Oh I did. And at first, I was annoyed with myself for having such a pissy attitude, but now I’m glad I did because it brought so much to the surface. Nothing keeps everything buried like apathetic niceness.

A bad attitude can serve a person well when wielded briefly and effectively. It’s a signal to wake up, a signal for change. But a person can’t stay in that place without spiraling into negativity; you have to feel better, tolerate, or solve. Throw in a little psychodrama, and everything shifts.

Often, the therapeutic part of something falls away when we chase after it to grasp at its warm-fuzzies, but if our eyes are open, most of the time, therapy just finds us.