Clients do not need to have previous experience or skill in acting, theatre or drama. Dramatherapists are trained to enable clients to find the most suitable medium for them to engage in group or individual therapy to address and resolve, or make troubling issues more bearable.

No, the process and content of the therapy will be based on the needs of the client and negotiated with the client both at the start of therapy and during therapy. However, many interventions will be illuminated within a creative framework.

The Dramatherapist can be seen as an empathic director who encourages clients to experience their physicality, to develop an ability to express the whole range of their emotions and to increase their insight and knowledge of themselves and others.

The Dramatherapy session occurs in what the director, Peter Brook, calls the 'Empty Space'. In the internal life of the client there are memories and dreams, fears from the past and apprehensions about the future and these can be embodied and realised in this 'Empty Space'.

Dramatherapists enable clients to release their own 'inspirational creativity' into roles they play, thus, both clients and Dramatherapist become what Augusto Boal calls 'spect-actors' - both actors and spectators.

The Dramatherapist as empathic director helps the client or group member take responsibility for his/her own life through the use of aesthetic distance and theatrical metaphors.

Some useful explanations can be found at www.londoncentreforpsychodrama.org or www.creativepsychotherapy.info.
The Website for the British Psychodrama Association is www.psychodrama.org.uk.

This is not usually possible due to the confidential nature of therapy unless you are a student on a HCPC registered Dramatherapy training course. Other HCPC professionals might be able to join a session if it was deemed appropriate within a professional capacity - such as working within the NHS. 

Many writers have studied play and, in the main, they all acknowledge its dramatic or representational nature. Freud thought that the play of the child represents the 'first traces of imaginative activity', allowing the child to move between levels of fantasy and reality. Melanie Klein, the noted child psychoanalyst, highlights the 'as if' thinking necessary for spontaneous make-believe playing. Peter Slade, who worked with Drama in Education, considered that play marks the beginning of all dramatic activity, for the child distinguishes between 'personal play' (e.g. movement and role playing) and 'projected play' (which is more internally focused).
D.W. Winnicott's work on transitional objects is particularly important for Dramatherapists as they are interested primarily in dramatic or creative play and in understanding the significance of creativity to healthy development.

Anthropological awareness helps us understand rituals of healing that are culturally determined in form and content. Cultures which have retained more of their traditional forms of communal self-expression provide models for self-discovery by means of group experience. The discoveries that can be made through metaphor are explored, and personal insight can find expression through corporate awareness.