The 2025 Psychodrama Training Program in Sydney commences in March.
There will be 4 stand-alone workshops:
- Sat 15 & Sun 16 March, (2 days),
- Fri 16, Sat 17 & Sun 18 May (3 days),
- Sat 5 & Sun 6 July (2 days), and
- Fri 19, Sat 20 & Sun 21 September (3 days).
Please ensure you are on the mailing list to get further information about the program as soon as it becomes available.
For 2025 enquiries contact Rollo Browne (0417 682 085) or Bona Anna (0451 046 928).
Upcoming Events
Galileo (b.1564) said, “You cannot teach people anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves”. As a method of self-discovery, psychodrama works because it is guided by principles that capture fundamental aspects of human nature. Specifically, the potency of psychodrama emerges whenever attention is paid to four areas of human existence: the living nature of the group, the flow of spontaneity, embodied action and the ritual power of theatre. Each of these areas implicitly captures something that people respond to, but in combination they create a therapeutic theatre where participants’ inner life or spirit is sustained and nourished.
Moreno invented the Social and Cultural Atom as an innovative way to display the self and the range of its significant relationships. It depicts the significant people in an individual’s life, their social atom, overlaid with their dynamic relational patterns, their cultural atom. Its usefulness is that it sets the context for developmental work by understanding patterns in how tele and spontaneity function in relationships. Essentially it a tool for self-awareness.
The three stages of the double, the mirror and role reversal, from birth to approximately 5 years, describe Moreno’s foundational sequence for human development. The corresponding techniques of doubling, mirroring and role reversal emerged from Moreno’s theatrical experiments with role playing and spontaneity in the 1920s. At that time, he knew that his psychodramatic methods worked, but not why they worked. His subsequent insight was that the therapeutic effectiveness of these techniques is because they “are profoundly related to the dynamics of human growth” (Moreno 1952 in Fox, 1987:136).
Coming soon
Current and Past Events
Psychodrama focuses on reclaiming your innate spontaneity – ‘a readiness for a free and vital response to the emerging moment’ (Phil Carter). Spontaneity infuses daily life with potency and flexibility, so that you create more satisfying relationships and find the value in what is here and now.
In this 2-day workshop, we will use psychodrama to bring greater spontaneity to the issues that matter to you. There will be a focus on sustaining a warm-up to areas of life that are fulfilling and generative, working through habitual patterns that no longer serve you, and realigning thoughts, feelings and actions to bring a fuller expression of yourself in your life.
Friday 26th June (evening) to Sunday 28th June 2020.
With Hilde Knottenbelt & Charmaine McVea
The shift in context facing each one of us as we live with the impacts of COVID 19 has meant that many of us have had to reimagine aspects of our lives and futures. In the midst of this disruption and loosening to some of our patterned ways of living, there is a possibility to reconfigure, reassess and to dream again.
Using the psychodrama method and arts making processes, this workshop offers an in-between space where the stories we tell ourselves about who we are can be paused and perhaps reimagined. It offers a liminal space where the experiencing being can stay with what is, as part of engaging in a creative process.
This year long training program covers the core knowledge, skills and personal development that underpin psychodrama practice . It equips participants to integrate psychodramatic processes into their professional practice, bringing greater vitality, depth and immediacy to their work. You will have the opportunity to experience psychodrama, broaden your production capabilities, develop greater flexibility in group work and deepen therapeutic or systems interventions. The purpose is to apply your learning in your work and life, to be more effective in your work and have more satisfying interactions.
Experiential Psychodrama Workshop, Saturday & Sunday, 9.30-4.30pm
Making a communityCommunity can be looked at from many points of view.In this training workshop we will focus on roles that are required to assist in creating and developing a community.Self-presentation, understanding our attractions to and rejections of others, increasing the flexibility of our responses to situations, and working with differences of opinion will be investigated in action and discussion.Participants will be encouraged to practice leadership, take initiative and to be active group members.Finally we will draw conclusions about the essentials of a community from our experiences in the workshop.Leaders: Annette Fisher, Richard Hall
Psychodrama is a relational method.Dr JL Moreno the founder of psychodrama provides us with concepts and methods that enable us to recognise and articulate and apply elements and processes which constitute a relationship and enable us to participate to our mutual benefit. In this workshop participants will be able to investigate in detail what is involved in a healthy constructive relationship. Capacity to apply and practise these insights will be an integral part of the workshop.
Many of us are committed to an on-going process of learning throughout our lives. We each have many experiences which assists us to develop. How we learn, explore and process those experiences can assist us or hinder us in learning. A person can be an open learner, a most helpful style to integrate and process experiences and communication. Other styles of learning include being a dependent learner, an anxious learner or a fighting learner.
In this workshop we will consider and explore the many learning styles to assist us when working with a variety of people, as well as in our own evolution. It will assist us to be alert to the particular personality and role systems a person enacts and how that person explores and learns from a particular experience. It will also assist us as to integrate roles we enact in response to anothers efforts to learn.
This workshop is an opportunity to focus on areas of your own development that will assist you to be more engaged and effective in your professional and personal life. Using classical psychodrama we will work with the interests and concerns of group members. The intention is to bring your actions and relationships more in line with who you are and what is important to you, so that you live life with greater vitality.
Participating in this workshop meets the experiential hours requirement for entering a training group in 2019.
In this workshop we will consider the structure of a psychodramatic session and the timely application of psychodramatic techniques.
November is often a time of integration of the year’s training and professional development and a time to be conscious of the learnings of the year so they can be carried forward into our practice as group workers and individual consultants and clinicians. It is an opportunity for all participates to direct, be an auxiliary and also a protagonist within the weekend.