Using Psychodrama to Break the Trauma Loop

When Lauren walked into my office my heart immediately went out to her. She had a sweet face—vulnerable, determined, anxious—and a stride that was somehow both halting and confident. Having spent decades integrating trauma, psychodrama, and addiction treatment, I recognized immediately the familiar tension I often see in adult children of addicts (ACAs). I sensed Lauren’s deep need for connection wrapped around an equally deep fear of it.

“My mother was an alcoholic,” she told me. “My father was, well, I guess you’d say sexually abusive. I’m here because I want to get closer to my fiancée but can’t stop sabotaging things with him.” Although Lauren’s tone was matter of fact, I sensed a raw ache underneath. She went on to tell me that it was her fiancée who wanted her to try therapy.

“One minute I want him to never leave,” she said, “even in the morning when he has to go to work. I don’t want him to walk out the door. But then I’m relieved when he does so I can feel some space around me. It’s like when he’s here I almost follow him around,” she explained. “I don’t want to let him out of my sight, but when he’s at work, I sort of forget about him till I know he’s coming home. Then, if he’s even a little late, I get so worried.”

I nodded. After treating ACAs for decades, I’m all too familiar with the dynamic she was describing: of feeling like a needy child one moment, then wanting to push the person you need away the next. Her voice carried that slightly muted quality I’ve come to recognize, too. A steady narrative, almost rehearsed sounding, yet somewhat disconnected from the feelings that went with the words.

Lauren had come to me specifically to do psychodrama at the suggestion of her therapist, who was in one of my training groups. Empty chair work and other role play techniques allow clients to embody and show interactions rather than talk about them, and her therapist thought this might help Lauren to get out of her head. She suggested a few sessions with me as part of her overall therapy.

Showing changes everything. When a client tells her story, she stays in the loop of language, circling the same well-worn phrases she’s repeated for years. This narrative feels safe and familiar, but it’s also limited. When a client begins to show, however, to stand, move, and embody the relational dynamic, something visceral happens. The story shifts from being told to being experienced. As she steps into her own role, then reverses into the role of the other person, perhaps a parent, partner, or even a part of herself, her body begins revealing what her mind has kept hidden. Her tone changes. Her gestures become charged with meaning and she can feel both sides of the relational dynamic living inside her. Through embodiment, the truth doesn’t have to be told. It emerges. There’s power and gravity in talking to rather than about.

“What would you say to your mother if she were sitting in that chair?” I asked, after Lauren had spent some time describing her and it seemed a natural transition to talking to her mother rather than about her.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Lauren said. “It feels weird, like acting or something.”

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “It’s not acting—it’s more just being. I’ll guide you.”

I gestured toward a chair. “What would you say to your mother if she were sitting in that chair?”

Lauren was quiet. She seemed to be caught between the familiar comfort of her rehearsed narrative and the risk of stepping out of it—or further into it. Then, she turned her head and adjusted her position in the chair. Her body stiffened as though she were beginning to sense her actual mother sitting in the chair in front of her, sucking up the oxygen in the room.

“What would you like to say to mom?” I repeated, hoping to help her cross that terrifying bridge between nothing and what must have felt to Lauren like everything.

“I don’t even know. I mean, this conversation would never happen. My mother never talks much. It’s like our childhood never happened. She and my father are back together, and she just wants to act like it was always that way.” She looked at me pleadingly. Please let me retreat into the safety of my thoughts, where I can get away from the feelings stirring inside me. Confronted with the felt presence of her mother, she was experiencing some inner conflict—longing to connect and say everything she’d never said to her while at the same time wanting to run away.

“You’re right there,” I reassured her. “You’re doing fine. What would you like to say to your mother?”

“Mom,” she began in a trembling voice, “I can’t believe we never talk about my childhood. You always act like nothing happened, like everything was normal—but nothing was normal. If I hadn’t spent so much time at my best friend’s, I wouldn’t even know what normal looked like. Why can’t you acknowledge anything?”

“Reverse roles,” I said gently, gesturing toward the chair opposite her. “Physically change places with your mom and answer back as she would. Show me mom.”

As she moved into the other chair representing her mother, Lauren appeared to see-saw between freezing and opening up, her hypervigilance unsure where to land. Her eyes glazed over, and her demeanor grew guarded.

“I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to,” she said in a cool, emotionless voice with an empty look on her face. The moment became pregnant with an embodied reality that words alone could never have captured. Through some hidden door in Lauren’s psyche, her mother had entered the room. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” she continued, still embodying her cold and distant mother, who was now leaning in as if to feign maternal concern.

I invited Lauren back into her own chair. Now she seemed emboldened. Her eyes met mine: Do you see?

“You’re doing beautifully,” I said.

“You were drunk,” she said. Her legs began to shake as if releasing years of frozenness, as if they wanted to run away or finally discharge that activated energy and hold her ground. “I had to put my little brother to bed every night. I was 10! I was supposed to be the child, not you!”

“Reverse roles,” I said softly. “Answer as your mother.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” she replied as her mother after she’d changed chairs again. “And besides, how would you know if I was drunk?”

This time Lauren needed no prompting from me. She leapt back into her own seat, disbelief, disgust, and relief crossed her face. It was as if the permission to speak the unspeakable had lifted her out of her past and into her present. Her ribcage raised, her neck extended, and her head took aim until she faced the person who, moments ago, had been imagined but now felt real.

“How did I know?” Lauren sat back in disbelief. Her words landed in the room with a quiet, eerie thud. “Maybe because you slurred your words and stumbled all over the place? Maybe because you sipped wine all through making dinner, and you kept pouring yourself glass after glass until you passed out. I had to clean up after you, do the dishes, wake you up when you passed out on the couch, and walk you up the stairs to make sure you didn’t fall. I had to put you to bed every night.”

Lauren blinked, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just said. Then came the words that blew it all open. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “You don’t remember, do you, Mom? But I do. I was there. Cold sober.”

For a moment, time stood still. We were no longer therapist and client. We were two children staring down the same bewildering distortion—the way addiction bends truth until everyone begins to doubt their own eyes. Both of us sitting at the dinner table, watching slurred words and unsteady steps masquerade as normal life. I could see again the glassy eyes, hear the voice insisting nothing was wrong, feel the way the room tilted when truth and lies collided in the same breath.

I was stunned all over again by the realization that follows me and so many of us who grew up with this strange, soul-robbing disease of addiction—that shattering this delusion is no small thing. It brings you face-to-face with what it felt like to love and need someone who wasn’t really there. To feel crazy, as though what your eyes saw and your body sensed couldn’t live in the same moment.  To live a lie, because for much of the family, it was less tormenting to deny the truth than to face it. Reality checks weren’t just unavailable, they felt dangerous. Because over and over again, nothing changed.

Alcoholic parents, even if they become sober, don’t necessarily remember these scenes. They “forget.” But we can’t truly forget. We carry those ghosts inside us. They haunt us when we try to get close to someone, when we risk the vulnerability and dependency of intimate connection. When we dare to hope, to need, to long. As I came back into my role as Lauren’s therapist, I felt relief. When truth breaks through and masks drop, it’s liberating, even if it isn’t with the real person. We ourselves feel freer as the strange scrim of lies falls, revealing the true tableau—corrupted and decaying—behind it. For ACAs, this is a win.

The Power of Showing

When we use psychodrama interventions, we’re saying to our clients, “Show us, don’t tell us. Talk to, not about.” Telling often keeps us in a narrative at a safe distance from our emotions. Showing risks connection, with the feelings inside of us and someone else, and it’s in that risk that healing happens. The words that need to be said rise organically, pulled out of us through the experiential process of connection and embodiment. The truth takes over and the emotional numbness and denial lose their grip. What was split apart begins to knit itself back together. For adult children of addicts, whose childhoods were defined by secrets and silence, this shift can be transformative.

Once these visceral experiences find expression, the body and nervous system can register truth in a way that words alone cannot deliver.

The Austrian American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno describes psychodrama as the theater that frees the soul. He felt that psychodrama wasn’t simply a therapeutic method, but also an existential and spiritual practice. He saw it as a way of liberating spontaneity and creativity, revealing deeper truths within a person’s inner world.

Trauma repeats in a loop when the past and present fold into each other and our unconscious mind is unable to separate them. We lose our sense of time and place, and of the actual sequence of events. This temporal and spatial disorientation occurs because chronic relational trauma downregulates the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—areas of the brain responsible for sequencing experience, contextualizing events, and distinguishing the past from present—leaving us trapped in a timeless, emotional now. The past and present blur and we feel as if our yesterdays are repeating themselves in our present, but we don’t know that’s what’s happening. We think our anxiety and discomfort are all about what’s happening in the present, we’re unaware of how we’re importing our pain from the past into our relationships in the present.

In psychodrama, we “do, undo, and redo” that loop. We reenter the scene that holds the charge (do), bring awareness and expression to what was frozen or unfinished (undo), and then create a new, embodied experience that restores agency and coherence (redo). Through embodiment, spatial placement on a therapeutic stage (as I did when I invited Lauren to sit in the chair), and role reversal, we interrupt the repetitive cycle of trauma and bring time, space, and meaning back into coherence. We unlock ourselves from old narratives and experience ourselves more fully. We create a new memory.

Proxemics—how people perceive and use physical space in communication and relationships—are revealed as the therapist says, “Where is mom vis-à-vis you—how far, how near?” And later, after a drama has been fulfilled, “Now show me where mom is. Put her where you feel she is inside of you now. Or put her where you’d like her to be, or even where you wish she’d been when you were young or would like her to be in the future.”

Space is also part of how embodiment heals. We can bend reality back to where we wish it might have been or would like it to be—and we can put ourselves back into this emotionally reconfigured scene. No longer the frozen spectator of our own lives, we take charge. We shift the power dynamic and our perspective.

The Loss of Connection

 Addiction isn’t just the loss of sobriety. It’s the loss of honest connection. It robs families of the one thing children need most: a shared reality that others validate, the sense that what they see and feel is real. When that’s stolen, children learn to mistrust themselves—to hide what they truly feel from others, and eventually from themselves.

As ACA’s, we don’t know what we don’t know. And we don’t know that we don’t know. This is the legacy of relational trauma, of cPTSD that we pass down to the next generation.

Lauren was finally telling the truth, stepping out of denial and gaslighting into the raw, unfiltered light of what really happened. Being the whistleblower in a family devoted to secrecy often means losing the approval of those you love—not always formally, but in unacknowledged ways, through invalidating or judgmental comments that can feel like a death by a thousand cuts. There you go again. Can’t you ever let anything go? Why do you have to say these things? The past is over. Move on. You’re being so emotional. This is the strange world that adult children of addicts grow up in. Not only does having an alcoholic parent bend reality, but it also shapes our insides. It changes how we see ourselves, the world and our future. Some family members join in the denial because it feels safer or keeps them connected to their parents or siblings. Others teeter on the brink between truth and denial. But in a cruel paradox, the person at the epicenter of that painful world often doesn’t remember how they helped create it. They weren’t there. They were on a drug. Unconscious. While we were there. Conscious.

ACAs are left trying to make sense of what felt senseless, becoming the caretaker for a drunk parent, hauling them to bed, tucking them in on the couch—being the adult in the room. And when that parent wakes up in the morning with no memory of how their child took care of them, read a story to a younger sibling, and tried to keep family life running smoothly, the ACA’s experience gets erased and rewritten. Their mind swirls between two worlds. They doubt themselves. Did last night really happen? Was that other person really Mom? Was the disgusting, boundaryless person slurring their words and grabbing at me Dad? Or should I just buy the lie, or the one I infer because the truth is so often denied by everyone: that I imagined it. That I made it up. That there must be something wrong with me.

The embodied work Lauren did in session became an antidote to years of gaslighting and denial. Through the power of embodiment, what had been buried inside her found expression on what Moreno called the “stage.” There, in the language of posture, breath, tremor, and tears, the unfelt was felt, and the unspoken was spoken. Lauren was able to actually feel and integrate pieces of the puzzle that had been frozen inside, revealing to her how she’d experienced her own life, helping her fill in the silent gaps she carried.

***

Lauren’s block to coming closer to her boyfriend began to break apart a bit as she came closer to herself.  The space between them could hold more honesty and less projection because she was distinguishing her past from her present. Now that she was connecting her anxiety with her chronic feelings of abandonment as a child, she could soothe herself when her fiancée came home late. She could share her vulnerable emotions with less fear, letting them surface, feeling them, and saying or even shouting her truth. Dependency and intimacy felt less unsafe. She’d stepped into her nightmare and back out of it, emerging with more of herself intact, shattering the lie she’d been asked to live. And she’d been witnessed in the process.

As therapists and as people, we’re tempted to tell—to explain, analyze, and summarize. But healing requires more—especially for ACAs and those with adult relational trauma from childhood. We need to shed the comfort of familiar narratives and show. We need to risk being seen and saying the quiet part out loud. We need to help our clients break out of their internal frozenness and silence. Transformation doesn’t happen in the abstract. It happens in the room—in the body and nervous system. It happens in safe spaces where we can time travel, encounter, and embody parts of ourselves along with relationships that shaped us. It happens when we can bring what’s stuck in an endless loop on the inside of us outside and encounter it in real time and space.