Moreno’s Quote
William Berisch Secretan

“The body remembers what the mind forgets” wrote JL Moreno, the founder of psychodrama psychotherapy. Psychodrama was the first psychotherapy to provide a complete and holistic approach to both mind and body. It is a somatic psychotherapy that incorporates the embodied experience of our emotions, which can often be at the core of traumatic memories and PTSD. In more recent years authors such as Bessel van der Kolk have echoed this sentiment in books like The Body Keeps the Score.

Bessel van der Kolk writes that, “Psychodrama is one of the most effective treatments of PTSD and developmental trauma that I am familiar with… Psychodrama helps to make our inner world visible and manifest what we struggle with, not so much by words, but by actions, making the invisible observable and measurable. Operating in a space where important people from our past are recreated in the living present, and where we can experience and manifest our confused inner world, we can finally say the words that were never spoken, and allow feelings to emerge that could not be expressed back then. Working with others in three-dimensional space, as psychodrama does, can not only uniquely create a timeless experience where past and present can merge to help us reconfigure our mental alignment, but also provide profound reparative experiences.”

William Berisch Secretan is a British registered psychodrama psychotherapist and drama therapist at the Psyche and Soma Creative Psychotherapy Centre in London.