What Drama Therapy taught me, and what it left me questioning

A mask making activity completed during the training. We were asked to imagine ourselves as a victim from a safehouse

I recently had the opportunity to attend a drama therapy workshop conducted by Dr. Ravindra Ranasinhe. I would consider this my first real experience of drama therapy. Although the workshop was structured as a training for counsellors, it quickly became an experiential and therapeutic space for the participants themselves.

Many years ago, during the first year of my bachelor’s degree, I was introduced briefly to art therapy and a very small component of drama therapy, something referred to as playback theatre. At the time, I was in my early twenties, and that exposure did not resonate with me at all. I was far more rational in my way of thinking, and ideas such as imagined endings, metaphors, and symbolic re-enactments in real-life situations felt unnecessary and pointless.

One activity I distinctly remember involved recreating a situation where a proper goodbye had never taken place. At that point in my life, I was dealing with my own unresolved grief and was firmly in an anger stage. I remember feeling deeply uncomfortable and dissatisfied with how the activity unfolded. The exercise focused on a foreign student in our group who reenacted a moment of finally saying goodbye to her father, whom she missed deeply as she was stationed in Sri Lanka at the time. There was a great deal of emotion and crying involved, and instead of empathy, what surfaced in me was anger, intense and confusing.

I recall questioning the facilitator about the rationality of the exercise. I do not remember the response I received, and I suspect this is because it did not make sense to me then. I simply was not in a place where such approaches felt meaningful or helpful.

Art, however, has always been different for me. Whether or not one possesses technical skill, art has a calming and grounding effect on me. Over the years, I have used art-based techniques with my young students at school. While I cannot confidently vouch for their therapeutic validity, I have repeatedly observed that these methods help children open up and express themselves more freely.

The recent workshop with Dr. Ravindra was a perception-changing experience. I am not entirely sure whether this shift came from my own emotional maturity over the years or from Dr. Ravindra’s clarity and skill as a facilitator. Perhaps it was a combination of both. The workshop primarily focused on supporting victims of the recent disastrous floods, though it was not limited to that theme alone. Interestingly, it became a therapeutic experience not only in theory but also for us as participants.

Speaking for myself, I found most of the experience meaningful, except for activities that required physical touch, which I found personally challenging. One particularly uncomfortable yet important realization emerged during the group activities. Many of the exercises were designed as team tasks, intended to create opportunities for therapeutic exploration, emotional release, or catharsis, especially for individuals who struggle to articulate their experiences verbally. As the workshop progressed, I became aware of an unsettling internal drive within myself: a desire to perform better than others, to be noticed by the facilitator, or to be seen as doing something unique or impressive.

This realization felt at odds with the intention of the activity.

I cannot say with certainty whether others experienced the same internal conflict, but certain behaviours suggested that similar thoughts may have been present, at least to some degree. This raised questions for me. Does this competitive or approval-seeking instinct interfere with the intended therapeutic outcome? Or could it, in some way, contribute to the process rather than hinder it?

Unfortunately, I became so absorbed in my own thoughts that I missed the opportunity to voice these questions during the session. Even if the thought had fully formed at the time, I doubt I would have raised it in front of a large group. Knowing myself, I tend to sit with such reflections privately, attempting to make sense of them on my own and arrive at a personal understanding of what feels true.

This is something I am still sitting with, and I wonder how others experience it.

My preferred emotional state once trauma is resolved.