T where the most important rules of improvisation are that you must agree with the other person and complete the conversation. One of the most frequently used improvisation games "Yes, and …" illustrates these principles.
Two people face each other. A person starts with a single statement. The other person accepts this idea and builds on it by answering, "Yes, and …" For example, if someone says, "The lake is full of alligators," the other person might reply, "Yes, and one of them is swimming." towards us. "
"Improvisation is like a therapist in many ways," says Andrea Baum, a licensed professional counselor (LPC) in Texas. "It means to appreciate this unconditional positive appreciation, but also to reflect, pursue and convey empathy and understanding."
Baum discovered improvisation when she began to look for more playful counseling modalities. She decided to take an improvisational theater course to improve the role play she used with clients and to focus more on the moment. While having fun, they also observed some parallels to counseling.
"I noticed that what I was trying to teach my clients was making improvisation organic," she says. “Holding things like you in the present moment, accepting yourself, finding your voice, expressing your authentic self [and] and connecting with other people. There were so many risks that people took because they felt safe in the [the improv] environment. ”
She later learned how improvisation could help caregivers communicate better with loved ones, and that happened to her. When Baum was 15 years old, her father suffered a brain injury that led to early onset dementia. Baum now used improvisation for a different purpose: “I started using these techniques that I had learned with my father in improvisation, and our entire relationship has just changed for the better. It was life changing. "
Her experience with improvisation inspired her to team up with an improvisation teacher and open the Stomping Ground Comedy Theater in Dallas. She serves as the director of Improv for Life, a series of therapeutic improvisation classes and workshops that she has designed for different populations with unique needs.
House connections
In preparing to move his counseling practice to the Internet several years ago, Gordon Smith, a licensed clinical mental health advisor with a private virtual practice in Asheville, North Carolina, began looking for ways to build intimacy more effectively and efficiently online spaces . His search led him to take improvisation classes at the Second City comedy club. After attending four online sessions, Smith was delighted. Immediately thereafter, he signed up for an improvisation group for counselors at the Improv Therapy Group, an organization that offers improvisation training with the aim of improving mental health.
"I was immediately impressed with the way this modality brought trust, intimacy, risk-taking, and laughter among total strangers to virtually instantaneous," says Smith. "I realized that I had found what I was looking for and I was also having a really good time with a bunch of therapists."
Smith, who is now on the Advisory Board of the Improtherapy Group, created improvisation groups that are tailored to work with gifted youth, adults, and families. In a recent improvisation group, many of the participants reported that they felt mirrored and seen in the group in a way that they did not often experience in their daily life as neurodiverse individuals.
Improvisation can also help disrupt toxic patterns in relationships, says Smith. He once worked with a family whose members all felt unheard and not seen. The dynamic was so toxic that the family quarreled at the meeting, Smith recalls. While counselors can attempt to involve family members in therapeutic activities during therapy sessions, those activities can only cause eye rolls or hurtful comments when the relationship is so damaged, Smith observes. He finds that the spontaneity of improvisational activities often disrupts these toxic patterns and opens up the possibility of the relationship being different.
"All it takes is the first moment of spontaneity in which something new happens and toxic patterns are broken, if only for a moment, which is what we aim for in family therapy," says Smith. Family members can explore how their relationship could be different, for example by breaking out of an assumed role as the “mean mother”. Instead, the mother can pretend to be a "funny mother" for a few moments. Impro allows clients to play with the family narrative and “break” it in a fun, non-threatening way, explains Smith.
Baum points out that mirroring is a great way to teach empathy and to connect people with others. One of the first games she uses, especially when working with caregivers for people with Alzheimer's disease, is for group members to introduce themselves by saying their name and making a silly gesture that expresses itself in some way. The rest of the group then repeats this gesture three times before moving on to the next person.
When introducing improvisation games to clients, clinicians must provide sufficient details on how to play and show examples from across the spectrum. With the gesture game, a counselor could show a small type of gesture such as:
"It seems like a simple icebreaker, but in reality we give people the experience of being silly, of being themselves, and then we all accept and support that by mirroring them," says Baum. “There is so much that benefits us when we are mirrored. We naturally mirror people when we are connected to them. It helps us listen and stay in the moment … and it's a kind of empathy … [to] really listens and repeats what you hear. ”
Nurses can also use this ability in their own work, says Baum. They can mirror those they care about by adjusting their tone of voice and the volume of their voice and what they do non-verbally. "That can help to make contacts quickly and create mutual trust," explains Baum.
Improvisation can also be a fun way to end a difficult processing session, says J. Claire Gregory, a member of the American Counseling Association, the LPC and a licensed chemical addiction consultant in Texas. At the ACA's Virtual Conference Experience last spring, she presented how improvisation can promote connections with customers and consulting students.
One game she sometimes uses at the end of a process group is "Place, Hobby, and Reason to Leave". The game features two people who act out a scene. One of the two leaves the room, while the others in the group determine the location (e.g. Texas), hobby (e.g. ballet) and the reason for leaving (e.g. stinging bees). The first person returns to the room and the second person plays the location, hobby, and reason to leave with just gestures and gibberish. The point of the exercise is to make the clients laugh and end the group on a funny note, says Gregory.
Include improvisation in the consultation
Comedic improvisation itself can be beneficial because it teaches communication, connection and acceptance in a supportive environment. Therefore, counselors might recommend clients struggling with social anxiety, confidence problems, self-esteem or relationship problems to take a general improvisation course, says Baum.
However, therapeutic improvisation differs in two ways: 1) It adapts the improvisation games to a specific need or population, and 2) it enables participants to process the skills learned in the games and on their own apply. lives.
Alison Sheesley, an LPC and play therapist with her own practice in Denver, uses improvisation to develop experiential activities that help group members learn skills they need to overcome some of the mental health problems they face are. Although general improvisation courses are about being present, listening, receptive, connecting, and having fun, they are not as geared towards helping participants see what they are doing in class with their own personal lives connect, she explains. This is one of the biggest differences between general improvisation and therapeutic improvisation. Sheesley's focus is never on customers being funny. She uses improvisation as a method of teaching life skills, but the humor is often intrinsic.
At the Stomping Ground Comedy Theater, Baum created therapeutic improvisation programs that focus on anxiety, autism, caregivers, dementia / Alzheimer's, children and anxiety, health professionals and doctors, and stress management. When working with an improvisation therapy group, Baum selects improvisation games or adapts them to the needs of the group population.
One game she often uses for clients with social anxiety is for them to create a character – either someone they know or invent – and imagine that character's most distorted thoughts about themselves or the world. For example, maybe the thought is “I am stupid”. The person then plays a scene with another person in the group who is also thinking their character's most distorted thought. For example, the person whose character thinks they are "stupid" can order a cup of coffee at Starbucks from the character of the other person who thinks, "The world wants to get me." The first person may seem nervous and tripping over their words while ordering, while the other person looks at them suspiciously.
After playing this scene, Baum teaches the group how thoughts, emotions and behavior influence each other. You will also learn to rephrase thoughts using cognitive behavioral theory. Baum asks the group how the characters can transform their thoughts into neutral ones. You mustn't create a new thought, she explains. Instead, they have to frame the current one. The two group members take over these new, neutral thoughts and replay the same scene, noticing how things flow differently.
Improvisation games like this have real advantages, says Baum. They give customers tools to communicate with so they don't feel so lost or embarrassed, she explains. Clients learn to express themselves or to position their hands or eyes when they meet someone for the first time.
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Baum also used improvisation games to help people with dementia or Alzheimer's to better express their emotions. After playing the game, she dealt with them briefly by asking, “How did you feel about this game? What did you learn from it? How could you use that in your life? ”Your goal is for clients to draw their own conclusions because they are more likely to apply these lessons outside of the session.
Improvisational games are similar to techniques that many counselors are already using, Smith notes. For example, clinicians can have their clients externalize their feelings: “If your feeling could speak now, what would it say?” He insists that this is a form of improvisation. This activity helps clients ponder how their experience may differ depending on subtle changes in their thinking or acting, he explains, which is consistent with the theory of cognitive behavior.
Reduce fear
Improvisational games work well with people who are afraid, especially social anxiety, Sheesley says, because they allow them to lean into their social discomfort in a safe – and often humorous – way. Sheesley and her colleagues discussed how improvisational comedic therapy can treat social anxiety through group cohesion, play, exposure, and humor in a 2016 article published in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health.
Sheesley, an ACA member with a PhD in counseling and supervision, leads a Denver improvisational comedy therapeutic group that incorporates Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) skills. At the beginning of a recent group session, she explained the concept of defusion, an ACT skill that is about creating space between a client's sense of self and their thoughts and feelings in order to reduce its negative effects. This ability helps clients make decisions that are appropriate to their life values. Sheesley then asked group members to identify a self-critical thought that contributed to their feelings of social anxiety so that they could work to defuse it. In a circle, they repeated the self-critical thought several times in various silly voices, which is a well-known ACT defusion technique, notes Sheesley.
However, it made the participants go a step further by including aspects of improvisation. They created characters to represent this self-critical thought and acted out how those characters spoke, walked, dressed, and interacted with others. After becoming familiar with these roles, the group members performed improvised scenes inviting these self-critical characters to a party. One person pretended to be the self-critical character while another person pretended to be the "self" negatively influenced by that character. Sheesley instructed her not to reject the character but to treat him with acceptance, kindness, and empathy. Whenever she noticed that a group member was not quite in the moment or was making a T-mark (a sign Sheesley taught them when they needed time off), she paused improvisation so the group members could process their feelings using a feeling table . At the end of this exercise, group members told Sheesley that they could see their self-critical thoughts and feelings through a different, more helpful lens.
Improvisation can also help to reduce the fear of gifted people. This population often
lives in a state of overwhelm from all of the cognitive, sensory, and emotional information they process, which can make them more cautious and less trusting in the moment, says Smith.
"The improvisation room leaves the rule for the room, [to be] spontaneity and presence," he states. “It allows [gifted individuals] to come into the present and learn more about trust … and feel safe in the present. … You have time to practice with your intuitive sense … and see how it works without effort. "
Smith once worked with a 13-year-old client who, like many gifted people, showed asynchronous development (uneven intellectual, physical and emotional development). The client thought about social situations and when he figured out what to say the moment was over. His colleagues judged him negatively because of his awkward and delayed reactions.
When the client first visited Smith, these rejections had worried him so much that he found it difficult to even open his mouth to speak. Their first joint sessions only lasted 20 minutes because speaking was so painful for the client. “He was so afraid,” recalls Smith. "I could see how tense he was and how difficult it was to find words."
Smith knew the customer liked to play games, so he asked the customer if he would play a game with him. The customer agreed. Smith chose the improvisation game Energy Ball because he was also working on building the client's emotional vocabulary. The game involves passing a ball that can transform into any feeling. Smith started the game by pretending to be holding a ball of desperation in his hands. Then he threw it to the customer.
First, the client played it safe by naming emotions like happiness or fun, recalls Smith. He would also describe a feeling if he was unsure of the emotional word, and Smith would “catch” the ball and name the corresponding feeling. But after about eight or nine loops of the energy ball, the client relaxed and began to speak.
After playing this and other improvisation games, the client began hours of sessions and became confident enough to attend a summer camp where he made several friends.
In improvisation, “everything that happens is a gift that you have to take … and building on that against some kind of threat. It's just opportunity after opportunity, gift after gift, ”says Smith. "And that can be a cognitive shift: the story I tell, what others expect of me or how they judge me … [changes] to 'Well, they give me that.'"
Create a safe space
Consultants also need to create a safe, supportive space when using improvisation. Baum and Gregory recommend setting clear guidelines at the beginning. Gregory makes it clear that inappropriate or offensive words are not allowed and adapts their guidelines to the population. For example, when she leads groups for addicts, she asks the participants to refrain from drugs or drug use.
The Stomping Ground theater has an ups / ouch policy, says Baum, encouraging group members to let others know if they feel uncomfortable or offended by someone else's actions or words.
"You can't prepare for everything with improvisation," admits Gregory, a PhD student in counseling and supervision at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "There will be times when a client might be over-triggered, but that can turn into an individual session" or a learning experience, she says.
Smith had his own embarrassing moment when he felt he was crossing a line when re-enacting a scene in his personal improvisation group. The game involved group members destroying their fear with an imaginary object. Smith took a "lamp" and continued to aggressively knock fear out of it. At the end of the scene he feared he was a little too violent and triggered another group member, so he asked the group: "Was that too much?"
The impro teacher reacted supportively, remembers Smith. She admitted the performance might have been triggered and advised him to replay the scene in slow motion to remove the threat. So the group laughed while he slowly repeated the scene.
Smith recommends that counselors apply the "yes and …" principle to situations that cause discomfort in their meetings. Acknowledge what the client was doing, he says, and show him another way of dealing with it so that others feel safe.
The need for adequate training
In order to successfully integrate improvisation into their practice, Baum recommends that the consultants take several improvisation courses and receive further training. She also emphasizes the importance of working with a highly qualified improvisation teacher.
"The person leading the group needs to be able to develop a relationship and trust very quickly and in a playful way in order to get the buy-in," she says. "If a therapist tries this for the first time [without training] it could flop very quickly." After seven years of improvisation, Baum says she just feels like she can lead a class on her own.
Through an improvisation course, Sheesley met Stephanie Jones, an experienced improvisation trainer and therapeutic improvisation consultant. Sheesley decided to partner with Jones and start an improvisational comedy-based therapy group for social anxiety. Jones leads the improvisational activities and Sheesley acts as group leader and observes the group through a therapeutic lens.
Before Gregory began using improvisational techniques in her inpatient group, she spent time training and discussing the ethical implications with her clinical director. She also sought consultation with other mental health professionals, who all advised her to continue learning by attending improvisational and psychodrama workshops.
Smith learned a great deal from the Improv Therapy Group training that enables him to play improvisation games with other psychologists and think about how best to use them with clients. Later in training, clinicians learn to design their own games that are tailored to the population they are working with, he says.
What consultants can learn from improvisations
Sheesley was working in a New Orleans coffee shop when she first heard about improvisation from a friend. She started going to the local comedy theater and was instantly hooked. Later, when she started a Masters in Counseling, she noticed the parallels between the two. She remembers having thought: "Improvising is exactly what we learn in my counseling courses in order to be receptive and present, to listen and to react in the moment."
She believes improvisation has also improved her counseling skills because it has given her confidence in her ability to deal with whatever comes up in the session. "I accept a lot more and respond less to whatever comes up because I've been practicing improvisation," says Sheesley.
Smith agrees that in many ways clinicians are already using improvisational skills by actively listening and being present with clients. Consultations run naturally like an improvisation scene, he says. In fact, some of the things he loves about improvisation and counseling are "the immediacy, intimacy, uncertainty [and] the secret of how things will play out," he says.
Smith also benefited from improvisation because he now has a deeper vocabulary to explain counseling concepts. He constantly uses "yes and …" with clients to build on what they say in the meeting. Improv also enables him to crystallize therapeutic language in a relaxed way. For example, through these games he can talk about “being in the moment” and not from a creative, psychoanalytic perspective.
Baum believes that she has become more astute in improvisation lessons. “I can read people non-verbally and verbally and take notes. My intuition has improved as to what might be wrong with someone, ”she explains.
Gregory often found herself in her own head during meetings. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and her focus on adhering to a particular counseling theory sometimes made her feel less connected to the client. Improv taught her how to say goodbye to this strictly clinical, structured way of thinking, she says.
Learning to be spontaneous and in the moment has allowed her to overcome her own fears and anxieties and focus more on what her clients need. Spontaneity in improvisation “doesn't mean being impulsive,” she adds. "It's about getting involved and being authentic to yourself and the group."
Improv also taught Gregory how to "fail". She tried an improvisation activity with a group once and it completely fell apart because no one wanted to join. She let the group sit in silence for a few moments while she gathered her thoughts on how to proceed. Finally she asked the group what had happened and found that there was tension between two group members.
"You will fail with that," admits Gregory. “There will be times when you'll try [an improv game] … and [clients] just aren't really interested. And that's okay because it leads to a different conversation, which in itself can be therapeutic. "
Learning to laugh again
Gregory, Sheesley and Baum agree that improvisation is a form of play therapy for adults. “At some point, as we grow up, we become confident and stop playing. We stop expressing ourselves and we start hiding parts of ourselves, ”says Baum. "Improv is helpful because it is a kind of game in which adults and children can express themselves."
Sheesley notes that counseling often revolves around theories developed primarily by white men who are serious and often aloof. This is not the type of therapy she would like to have with her clients. She wants to make counseling a safe, playful place. "Laughter is as therapeutic as crying, yet we focus so much on crying as the ultimate cathartic expression," she notes. She argues that there is room for both.
Smith recently led an improvisation workshop at a mini-conference to support the emotional needs of the gifted. He noticed a woman who looked like she wanted to join in, but continued to hesitate. So he invited her to play in the next game. Reluctantly she said yes, but a few minutes after playing she collapsed.
Later, while editing the game with the group, she admitted that she had laughed for the first time since her husband had died two years earlier. “And it wasn't because we were mourning,” says Smith. "We just played and supported."
“Part of our job is to help people become aware of their own patterns, habits, scripts and narratives. … Und Improvisation ist eine Möglichkeit, diese Gewohnheiten und Muster auf eine sehr sichere Weise zu durchbrechen, die neue Perspektiven ermöglicht“, erklärt Smith. „Ein Großteil unserer Arbeit als Therapeuten versucht nur, Klienten zu helfen, zu wachsen und ihre Perspektiven auf ihr eigenes Leben zu erweitern und Chancen und Möglichkeiten zu sehen. Und das ist [improv].“
Die Leute denken oft, dass Beratung immer ernst sein muss. Sie gehen fälschlicherweise davon aus, dass „wenn es Spaß macht, ist es irgendwie verdächtig; Wenn es Spaß macht, ist es keine ‚richtige‘ Arbeit“, sagt Smith. „Wir müssen zu den anderen Orten gehen, die traurig und beängstigend sind. [Yes,] diese Dinge können passieren, und wir können spielen.“
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Lindsey Phillips ist die leitende Redakteurin von Counseling Today. Kontaktieren Sie sie unter [email protected].
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