Dramatherapy - Volume 41, Issue 2, 2020

The article is written by two Dramatherapists working for a community interest company offering arts psychotherapies and arts for health and wellbeing services to a variety of client groups. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the organisation experienced an increase in client referrals. The multidisciplinary team considered ethical implications to create policies, procedures and ways of working via remote practice. This article considers the diversification of approaches to Dramatherapy when working remotely, including framing and its impact on the therapeutic alliance. It considers clients who began interventions remotely and those who transitioned from in-person working to remote. The article takes a duoethnographic approach voicing Dramatherapists’ personal experiences and reflections of transitioning their practice. Thematic analysis is applied to the therapist’s data set and a small-scale collection of client feedback to enhance meaning-making. Findings are presented through inclusion of therapist and client vignettes, including themes of feeling deskilled, adaptivity, assessing, disclosures, framing, therapeutic alliance and facilitation. Exploration of experiences shared by therapist and clients further informs Dramatherapy practice both now and for the future. The Dramatherapists conclude by identifying that an effective alliance can occur remotely, and that Dramatherapeutic techniques can be diversified into the world of remote practice. In addition, providing remote Dramatherapy could widen the diversity of individuals who can access.

Peer supervision is a dynamic process which highlights constructive and supportive feedback among therapists while minimising feelings of being evaluated. Some of its benefits include decreased dependency on the expertise of a supervisor, freedom, and equality. In this article, we outline the benefits of peer supervision between a dramatherapist and a family therapist and how their common roots based on creativity and action-based approaches could be used remotely to enhance the goals of peer supervision. We discuss how we utilised such methods and more specifically role reversal in a virtual space during the first Covid-19 lockdown to facilitate the process of peer supervision and understand better the needs and perspective of the client. We propose that incorporating creative and spontaneous methods such as role reversal in a virtual peer supervision environment can potentially enhance the supervisory alliance and therapeutic practice.