Reverse roles and answer as the other person

Switch places with the person you are in conflict with and speak from their position until you feel how it looks from there.

Pourquoi ça marche

Role reversal is described in the psychodrama literature as one of the foundations of Moreno's method and was the technique most often found in the texts Cruz and colleagues reviewed. The protagonist moves into the other person's place and speaks, stands and reacts as them. This gives a more accurate sense of that person as an individual, and a view of how the protagonist looks from the outside. In a directed session it also teaches the auxiliary how to play the role, so the scene stays close to the protagonist's experience. The shift is physical as well as mental, which is part of why it reaches further than imagining.

Comment faire

1. Pick an ordinary, ongoing disagreement with one person. Stand where you usually stand in it and say your side in two or three sentences.
2. Step across to where they would stand. Take on their posture, pace and tone, and describe the situation as they see it, in the first person: "I am tired of always being the one who..."
3. Stay in their role long enough to say what they want from you and what they are afraid of, not only what they object to.
4. Step back to your own place, shake off their posture, and say one thing you understand about their position that you did not before.
5. With a willing partner on a shared disagreement, each of you can speak as the other for two minutes, then say what you heard about yourself.

Données probantes

Kipper and Ritchie's meta-analysis pooled 25 experimentally designed studies of psychodramatic techniques (published 1965 to 1999) and found an overall improvement effect the authors describe as large, similar to or better than that commonly reported for group psychotherapy in general; role reversal and doubling emerged as the most effective of the four techniques compared. A later review of 27 psychodrama studies from 2018 to 2022 found role reversal, doubling and the mirror were the techniques most used. (observational)

The studied versions were run by trained directors in groups or structured experiments, and many were small; the self-guided and partner versions here have not been tested. Do not use role reversal alone to speak as someone who seriously harmed you: if you feel flooded, lose track of where you are, or images keep replaying afterwards, stop and take that scene to a trained psychodramatist or therapist. The partner version is not for a relationship where one person frightens, controls or has seriously harmed the other; in that situation, talk to a trained therapist or a support service first rather than practising together.

Sources

• Kipper, D. A., & Ritchie, T. D. (2003). The effectiveness of psychodramatic techniques: A meta-analysis. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7(1), 13-25.
• Cruz, A., Sales, C. M. D., Alves, P., & Moita, G. (2018). The core techniques of Morenian psychodrama: A systematic review of literature. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1263.
• Maya, J., Pérez-Berbel, M., Giraldo-Arroyave, L., & Hurtado, I. (2025). Psychodrama: Implementation, study design and effectiveness: A systematic review. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 25, 232.

Erreur fréquente

Playing the other person as a caricature so that they lose the argument. If "they" sound unreasonable in every line, you are still in your own role; the technique only works when you answer as they would actually answer.