Warm up before you act

Spend the first minutes loosening up and finding the scene that is actually ready to be worked on.

Pourquoi ça marche

A classical psychodrama session begins with a warm-up phase before any scene is enacted. In the literature Cruz and colleagues reviewed, warm-up exercises raise the material a session will work on and help decide the theme and who will be the protagonist; they also build trust and a relaxed atmosphere in the group. Blatner gives warming-up its own chapter in his practical text. The point of the phase is that the scene chosen is the one a person is actually ready to work on, which is found by warming up rather than decided in advance.

Comment faire

1. Before any of the other techniques, take five minutes to move: stand, walk the room, shake out your hands, breathe slowly.
2. Say out loud, in one sentence each, two or three situations that are on your mind today.
3. Notice which one makes your body react most (a tightening, heat, a lump in the throat). That is the scene that is warmed up.
4. If nothing stands out, choose an everyday situation rather than the heaviest one you can think of.

Données probantes

The warm-up, action and sharing sequence is the standard structure of a psychodrama session, traced to Moreno and described across the literature consolidated by Cruz et al. (2018). An integrative review of psychodrama research from 2007 to 2017 found that about half of the studies used these three phases. The warm-up has not been tested on its own; its value is a matter of clinical experience. (clinical)

No study isolates the warm-up from the rest of a session. Choosing an everyday scene for self-guided work is a safety adaptation for doing this without a director, not part of the classical method.

Sources

• 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.
• Blatner, A. (1996). Acting-In: Practical Applications of Psychodramatic Methods (3rd ed.). Springer Publishing.
• Orkibi, H., & Feniger-Schaal, R. (2019). Integrative systematic review of psychodrama psychotherapy research: Trends and methodological implications. PLOS ONE, 14(2), e0212575.

Erreur fréquente

Skipping it and going straight to the most painful situation in your life. Without a warm-up and without a director to slow things down, that is the quickest route to feeling overwhelmed.