Aims and methods:
Integrating the Psyche: Sesame adopts the overall aim of "befriending the unconscious", coupled with a client-centred approach to ownership and empowerment. This is achieved through experience of archetypes in myth and folktale enactments; storytelling; fantasy fulfilment in enactment; and development of kinaesthetic awareness. An important principle is a lack of compulsion: clients feel - and are - more in control over their involvement in the therapeutic process, and feel safer to take risks. Further, this respects the need for the unconscious to determine the degree of depth at which clients engage in the work.
Practicalities:
Sessions last typically 60-90 minutes; (less if concentration spans are limited). Courses usually consist of a minimum of six sessions, once or twice weekly; alternatively an open, rolling membership group may operate. Maximum useful group size is around 12; one-to-one work is possible. Dramatherapy is often integrated with other therapeutic input, including medical treatments, but is sometimes used on a stand-alone basis. Dramatherapy spaces are ideally large and private - eg a gymnasium - but dramatherapists are skilled in adapting spaces.
