Speaker 1: 0:31

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa and I'm here to show you how let's go. Hey man, you are in for a treat. This two-part series on porn and psychodrama is one of the most important episodes of husband material I have ever created. I'm so thankful you have the master, the Yoda of psychodrama, doug Carpenter, to teach us what is psychodrama, how does it work? How can it help men outgrowing porn? You will get some amazing examples of what it can look like and find out how we are using it at Husband Material to help men heal. Enjoy this two-part series. Welcome to Husband Material. Today I am welcoming back Dr Doug Carpenter. Hey, doug.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Hey Drew, how are you?

Speaker 1: 1:32

I am so excited to be talking about psychodrama. Why are you so passionate about this topic?

Speaker 2: 1:39

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 1:39

So this is just such an awesome, wonderful technique that we use in the psychological field.

Speaker 2: 1:46

Psychodrama was developed by Jacob Levy-Marino back in 19, I think it was like 52.

Speaker 2: 1:54

But how he came about this was he would watch children playing on playgrounds and he would actually see them playing out their days and sometimes their traumas and things that they were processing in their brains.

Speaker 2: 2:11

And so he thought how can I get adults to do this, how can I get adults to connect their mind, their body and their senses and to work out psychological issues that they're dealing with? And so then he then started trying to do this with groups of adults and coined it as psychodrama, and I'm just super passionate about it because it's a wonderful technique that helps people actually get into their bodies and connect their head and what they're thinking and even what they're feeling into their bodies, about where they're feeling it, how they're feeling it, where they're experiencing it, what are the five senses that are involved and what do they experience through this process. And so, in order to understand the process, you have to understand the theory of it, and the theory of it is that we all learn by experience, we learn by doing, and sometimes the things that we learn are not healthy for us. They're not accurate or there's trauma involved.

Speaker 1: 3:25

For example learning pornography.

Speaker 2: 3:29

Learning pornography, yes, and that it's helpful to you in some way. So we learn. And then he believes and in psychodrama we believe that you have to undo and then you have to redo. And it's not just enough to sit in a chair and talk about this, which you know, I'm a full supporter of therapy and I'm a supporter of talk therapy. But I'm a greater supporter and I think a greater component, is psychodrama and gestalt techniques, and that's putting action to your words, allowing your body to also experience what it is that you need to work on. So we bring what's inside out and we create it. We redo the scenario. We may act out the scenario the way it was, talk about what your internal experience was with that and how you you interpreted it, how you felt about it, and then we redo it. We redo it in a way that you would have liked the scenario scenario to have gone, or we redo it with words that you needed to hear. So let's say that you, as a child, had a fight with your father and that was somehow ended up being traumatic with you. We can go back and replay that, process it and then redo it, and that fixes the wiring in our brain and how our brain interprets that event and allows us to redo it and bring resolution. So psychodrama is all about creating a cathartic experience, and I'll use this as an example to kind of understand and demonstrate what a cathartic experience is.

Speaker 2: 5:32

So when I was teaching psychodroma in graduate school, there was this woman in my class and she volunteered and I asked her what she wanted to work on and she said well, I would like to quit smoking and I said, okay, great. So I started doing a technique with her where we were going to have each side of her begin to talk, and so I had her hold her arms out straight, and in one arm she was saying and holding all the statements in her head of why she wanted to stop smoking, and in the other one she was naming all the reasons why she didn't want to quit smoking and wanted to continue that behavior. And I was having her move her arms, signifying which side was winning, which one was, you know, like she was a scale and which one was weighing out. And in the middle of that she broke down crying and screamed at me and screamed some obscenities at me. So I'm her professor, you know, in this moment and the whole room went dead silent, like what is wrong with this lady, and so naturally I stopped what I was doing.

Speaker 2: 6:45

I attuned with her, kind of got down in her space, and I asked her what she was feeling right now and what was going on for her. And what was going on for her is, in that moment of her body moving, representing her thoughts, she had a cathartic moment and realized had her father had just died, and he was a very heavy smoker and in that moment she realized that the reason she could not quit smoking was, she felt, that is, if she quit smoking she was going to lose a part of her father that she identified with. And it was so powerful and I helped her process through that feeling, that emotion process, through other ways that she could hold on to his memory instead of hanging onto this habit that was hurting her body. And so she completely worked through that process, had no idea we were going to switch from talking about quitting smoking to the grief that she was having with her father and over the next couple of weeks of the class she was able to come back and report to the class that she had successfully quit smoking.

Speaker 1: 8:03

That's so amazing.

Speaker 2: 8:04

It is amazing and so it just goes to show the power of psychodrama and that until we start acting things out and allow our bodies and our heads, our minds, to connect and have that cathartic moment, we really don't know what's going to happen and what type of healing can happen if we allow it to just emerge and have that cathartic experience.

Speaker 1: 8:33

And that story really shows how it can also apply to men who are outgrowing pornography and trying to quit porn Absolutely, because I might do something similar with that around your porn use.

Speaker 2: 8:44

So some of you will remember from last year's retreat that we did a session where I led psychodrama technique of externalizing our sexual desire, which I defined as that part of us that wants to be congruent with our spirituality and God and then that part of us who holds that arousal, and we had those two parts of ourselves argue with one another. And so you know, when you're looking at an unwanted sexual behavior or pornography in a psychodrama, we would invite someone to come and play each part of you and we would tell you as the protagonist and I'll explain that term in just a minute would tell that part of you what to say and what to do, and then we would play that out in front of you. And watching those parts externalize from yourself and being able to see what's going on inside of you, outside of you, can give you a whole new perspective on what your internal experience is.

Speaker 1: 9:48

That's right. And at the first husband material retreat you also did one about the inner critic, where each member of the group was one of those voices of shame and condemnation and each man had to break out from their inner critic.

Speaker 2: 10:03

Yes, so they got the choice to either knock over their inner critic they could have the guys come and enclose them in and they had to fight their way out but somehow that person got to externalize their motivation and strength to break the voices of their inner critic and find some freedom from that.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:26

Because anytime we can externalize that and turn it into dramatization, it just exponentially magnifies the experience and then the change process. All the people involved become a change agent in your process.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Yeah, it's really amazing, both for the person who's a focus and for everybody else. Let's talk about the basics. So how does psychodrama work?

Speaker 2: 10:59

Okay, so psychodrama begins with a director, so somebody who's a trained professional, who's been trained how to do this. So I would ask someone in the group, or the group would identify who's going to go first, or I would ask for a volunteer. I would ask this person what is it that you would like to work on today? That person is known as the protagonist. They're the person who holds the story and who will be telling their own story.

Speaker 1: 11:27

The hero.

Speaker 2: 11:28

They're the hero. They're the hero of their own story. The second part is the auxiliaries. Well, actually now we have the third part. So we have the director, we have the person telling the story as the protagonist, we have the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries are the people that are going to play the parts and the roles inside the protagonist's story. So I may pick Mike to be my dad, I may pick Drew to be my little brother, I may pick Jordan to play my mom. You know, I will pick people out in the room to represent the parts in my story. I will tell the story. I will give each person a verbal script of what they're to say or what their role is, what their emotions are supposed to appear like. Then, when it comes time that all those parts have been picked out, we then re-enact the story.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Now there's an important component about this too, that we have the audience. Those are the remaining members who are not part of the direct story. But this can be powerful on all levels, because the person who's the protagonist is having the cathartic experience of change. But an auxiliary can also have a cathartic experience in a moment of change, because if they're playing someone's mom, maybe they suddenly gain insight into the role of a mother and what their mother was like for them, and so it can become their own cathartic experience and they can have insight. Then the people in the audience can have a vicarious cathartic experience by watching this play out in front of them.

Speaker 1: 13:20

Yeah, and research into neuroscience has shown that we have mirror neurons which activate when we watch someone else doing something. So when you witness someone else's healing, something happens in your brain and that healing overflows to you too.

Speaker 2: 13:40

Right, this is the exact opposite of vicarious trauma. Like they talk about vicarious trauma, that you witnessing someone else's trauma or hearing about someone else's trauma, you can feel traumatized by that. Well, this is the same process, but in reverse. You can experience healing in your own process through a cathartic experience of watching someone else gain their healing, just like we're going to hear in a few moments about an actual psychoroma, and I can tell you that people who witnessed this had a cathartic experience as well in their level of trust and willingness to build intimacy.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Very true.

Speaker 2: 14:22

That's the role of psychodrama is to play this out and bring it to life. And then the protagonist has the ability to rewrite the script and to hear what they needed to hear. Maybe they had a neglecting parent. Maybe they needed to hear soft and loving words instead of words from a critical father. I may have everybody in the room surround them and double for their father and replace those critical words with words they needed to hear that were loving and soft.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Yeah, you just used a fancy word there doubling. What does that mean?

Speaker 2: 15:07

Let's say in the middle of a psychodrama that you as an audience member is thinking okay, this dad needs to say this to the boy, and the boy is the protagonist. You can come up behind the person playing the father and speak for him. That's called doubling. It's when you're adding another layer of vocalization or action or behavior that you think a person is holding and they need to say Right.

Speaker 1: 15:41

So there are some tools like doubling and role reversal that you can use to really make things even more creative. Let's talk about role reversal.

Speaker 2: 15:53

Okay. Role reversal is really powerful. This really opens up our minds, not only on an emotional level, but on a cognitive level and a problem solving. It pushes you to use your executive functioning in a more productive way versus just staying stuck in your own personal, identified role and thought process.

Speaker 2: 16:17

So if you are playing out an argument that you've had with another person, I may stop you in the middle of the psychodrama and say, okay, I want you to move over here and you to move over here and I'm going to have you switch roles. I want you to now be your wife, I want you to now be your husband and I want you to argue the opposite person's point of view, and that can open up a whole new level of cognitive and emotional understanding of another person's experience and how they experience you as an individual, and it can be very powerful. You can do this with between an employer and an employee, like if you're upset with your boss. You can do this with a parent. You can even do this with parts of yourself that are arguing with one another, like anger and sadness, and both of them need to have a voice.

Speaker 1: 17:12

You can do it with your inner child. So at one point you're the adult and then in the next moment you're the child and you get to undo and redo that relationship.

Speaker 2: 17:22

Absolutely, absolutely. That can be very powerful. I know in a psychodrama that I was personally. In one time I played myself as the child who was being wounded by a medical doctor, but later in the script I also played my adult self who walked into that room and rescued my inner child from the harsh words that the doctor was saying to him. So you may even play different roles in your own psychodrama, but it may be helping your adult self access, protect and rescue the inner child within you who's wounded and hurting.

Speaker 1: 18:07

One of the important roles that often comes into this when we're in a group of Christians is Jesus. It's an amazing way to embody the presence of Jesus in real life.

Speaker 2: 18:20

Absolutely. A lot of times in a psychodrama I may introduce the idea that Jesus just walked in the room. Where would you like him to stand? Where do you see him in this scene? How do you experience him? How do you feel him right now? Is he standing behind you with a hand on your shoulder? Is he wrapping his arms around you? Is he over in the corner? Does he feel real distant from you? What can you do in this scene to allow him to come closer to you so you can know that he is with you, so you can use that in so many different ways to help the person connect with a level of their own spirituality and their connection with their Savior.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Yeah, I hope you guys are getting the sense that there is no limit to how this can look. You can have everybody play different people. You can have everybody play different emotions. You can have people play sexual parts of you Absolutely, Absolutely, Like I may like.

Speaker 2: 19:35

If you're angry at your penis or your penis has been wounded, I may ask you to pick out somebody in the room to be your penis.

Speaker 1: 19:46

Right, and this is always done with curiosity and compassion, compassion Checking in, attuning to the person and also to the person who is invited to play that role.

Speaker 2: 19:58

Absolutely. Yes. You check in constantly with each person. How is this for you? How are you feeling right now? What are you feeling in your body? Is this resonating with you? Are we getting this right? How does it need to change to truly represent your internal world?

Speaker 1: 20:17

And there was a moment at the recent leaders retreat when I wasn't okay and it was maybe even re-traumatizing a little bit, and with time, processing and conversation we were able to repair and rebuild trust which then allowed me to go.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Yeah, and when you start opening up, sometimes it gets harder before the healing comes. Then you have to deal with the defenses that are there and the hurt that is there before you can start to heal. Yeah, and that's a normal part of the process, and it's not always perfect.

Speaker 1: 21:02

That's why we really need to emphasize there will be rupture. We won't always get it right. We're trying to be sensitive to the needs of each person and also to where the Holy Spirit is leading.

Speaker 2: 21:16

Absolutely. I say that psychodrama is the crossroads of art and science Because in order to be the director, you have to be a very creative soul, you have to really let your creative juices flow, but yet I have to keep in mind that creativity is flowing. For me Is the way I want to creatively help this person create and visualize their process. Is this going to be helpful? I don't ever want to do anything that is purposefully re-traumatizing for them. I only want to take them as far as they're ready to go, and with some of that, I have to use not only just attunement but also my knowledge of human behavior and emotion and experience. So I think, like I said, psychodrama is the perfect crossroad of art and science, probably more so art.

Speaker 1: 22:21

Yeah, there are many tools. What are some of those tools and techniques?

Speaker 2: 22:27

We can use anything in the room. Anything can be used as a prop. We can make anything represent anything.

Speaker 2: 22:34

For example, I did this with a guy in my office the other day where this was an individual session, and it was just him, and he is grieving over the loss of his mother, who just died two months ago.

Speaker 2: 22:47

And so I ask him I want you to look around my office and I want you to find anything in here that has some representation of your mother for you. And he pitched this vase right here and he said that looks like something my mother would have had in her house. So I went and got that and I set that in a chair across from him and I had him tell this vase, who represented his mom, about his grief and how much he missed her. And then in the process, I went into a role reversal where I had him pick out something in the room that would represent him. I have a big globe in my office on the other side and he picked that globe because he loves to travel. So I had him put the globe in the couch and I had him sit in the chair and become his mother and I had him, as his mother talk to him about how she was feeling, about how deeply he was grieving, and it's so powerful to allow that to just come to life, and it can be so changing.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Something like that happened for me when we did the leaders retreat in March. I had a series of relationships with girls that almost became boyfriend and girlfriend and then got cut off, and those specific girls were the focuses of all my first orgasms and the sexual fantasies that I developed, and I had a chance to break up with them in my heart.

Speaker 2: 24:30

And what was that like for you to be able to speak to them with a person there representing them? What was that like for you?

Speaker 1: 24:41

At an intellectual level I knew that I was looking at a grown adult man. But they acted and played their role so perfectly that emotionally I really felt like I was talking to the real person. But what really mattered is that I was talking to my experience of that person. I was talking to the part of me that loved them and needed to let them go. Many of you guys know I've had this fantasy and fetish for braces and it was my way of holding on to my connection with that person. She was the first tall girl I ever met. She was as tall as me. I'm six foot six. It was like I had no idea what I needed to say to her. I needed to give her a blessing, I needed to say thank you. I had all this unresolved stuff about puberty that a big part of me was stuck at that sexual developmental stage of puberty.

Speaker 2: 25:52

Even as the protagonist, you don't know what you need to say until you start actually saying it. That's the beauty of the connection of your head and your heart, your head and your body is that when you verbalize it, you're accessing different parts of the brain and your emotions. What needs to happen will happen if you go with the process.

Speaker 1: 26:20

Yeah, as we went through that process, you saw something that I didn't see in myself. I was breaking up with each of these young women from the past. Then at the end, you said, andrew, there's one more person you need to talk to. I need you to divorce your mom.

Speaker 2: 26:42

That was a beautiful moment, because I can tell in this process, not only did you need to break up with these girls, you really needed to divorce your mother to truly allow your heart to fully be free.

Speaker 1: 26:59

I have to say I've already had a lot of freedom and healing, and this took it even deeper. There is no limit to what God can do when we create space for healing.

Speaker 2: 27:15

Absolutely, absolutely. It just takes a willing heart and an open heart and trust the process and let healing come to you.

Speaker 1: 27:30

We're even doing it on Zoom.

Speaker 2: 27:33

We are, which has been a whole new experience. We've tried this in the last husband material virtual online retreat, where we split up into groups and we did some of this work virtually. It was truly just as powerful online as it was in person.

Speaker 1: 27:56

That surprised me.

Speaker 2: 27:59

Me too, because I thought how am I really going to create this atmosphere that you have in person when you do psychodrama? How is this going to happen online? You know what it's about the person's own internal experience. It's about the words that you're hearing and can still be done over Zoom. We successfully did it over Zoom. I can personally tell you that the five guys that were in my individual group in the retreat have experienced some life changes as a result of their psychodrama process, many of them at the end of the process we developed action steps. What are you going to do with this learning that you've now had? What are you going to do with this experience? Many of them set goals and they held each other accountable for the next couple of weeks when we're checking in with each other and did some life changing things that bettered their lives and their relationships in their lives from that experience.

Speaker 1: 29:09

Not every group had the same experience. In my group we had six of us. We took six hours and just wow, it was probably the most powerful facilitation I've ever done.

Speaker 2: 29:24

There's no right and wrong way to do this. As I said earlier, it's the director's ability to attune with the person and take them as far as they're ready to go and know when to stop and know what other parts need to be addressed that they can handle or that they're ready for. There's no exact right way to do this. That's why it's also an art, because it's so creative.

Speaker 1: 29:53

As a result of that virtual retreat experience and everything that we're seeing with how psychodrama can help men outgrow porn, we are actually launching level two husband material groups which are all based on psychodrama. Every week for 12 weeks you come into the group. It's a two-hour group meeting and each week two men will get a chance to go. You'll have an hour of being the protagonist, being the hero, and everyone else in the group is coming around you with creativity and spontaneity and seeing whatever needs to happen and letting it happen.

Speaker 2: 30:33

Right, we're all going to come with some curiosity and compassion and help you be a changing agent in your process and whatever needs to happen for you.

Speaker 1: 30:45

The level one. Husband material groups have been amazing. They're very story-centered and psychodrama allows us to embody that story. Life is the story of our bodies and when we can embody a new story, oh my word, it just takes the healing that much deeper.

Speaker 2: 31:10

It creates the catharsis that we need for change.

Speaker 1: 31:15

So if you are interested in a Level 2 group, you can find a link to apply in the show notes, but please keep in mind that there are very limited spots. This is not for everyone and you may or may not be ready, Doug. What would you recommend?

Speaker 2: 31:27

Well, I definitely would recommend that you think about this process and am I ready to go deeper? Am I ready to go to the next level? But also, it's important that you have a support system around you, because this process may drag up and bring up a lot of uncomfortable feelings. There may be things happen for you that you either were out of your awareness or that you didn't know were there, you didn't think you were going to experience, and so you may need to have some support to lean on. After this, you can rely on your triad, your family, your spouse but someone who can support you.

Speaker 1: 32:04

Yeah, while we're doing this online, we want to make sure that you have some in-person safety to fall back on if you need it.

Speaker 2: 32:14

Yes, and we also want to make sure that you don't have any specific barriers in your life or in your psychological health that would prevent you from being able to fully participate in a way that would be healthy for you. We're not here to cause harm. We're here to help bring healing to those wounded parts of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 32:38

Doug, why do you believe psychodrama is so powerful, specifically for men outgrowing porn?

Speaker 2: 32:45

Because I've witnessed it. Psychodrama is an experience. It's not just something that I can just explain to you and you're like, oh, I get it. Like it becomes so powerful when you experience it and that brings on so much change through the experience of it. And so, like helping men to outgrow porn, when we begin to heal those wounds, when we work through those traumas, we're able then to take that pacifier and say, here, I don't think I need this anymore. I don't think this is really bringing me the comfort that it once did, because I'm finding healing for these wounded parts of me and I don't need this fake in the moment pacifier. I want real connection with people that I experienced through psychodrama and I want to be known, and I want to be known for who I really am. I don't want to just run to a pacifier.

Speaker 1: 33:53

Exactly so many times. Our attachment to porn is so personal. It's as if porn is a person in your life, it's as if it's a part of you or it's someone that you're in an abusive relationship with, and so psychodrama allows you to get unstuck, to find a healthy, secure attachment in real life and to resume sexual development wherever it was stunted.

Speaker 2: 34:25

Right. I was able to identify that the type of porn that I was drawn to was a true representation of my sexual abuser. And once I was able to work through, that porn lost its power and its draw. Because now, when I think about using it, I think about why would I want to revisit my childhood sexual abuse? Why would I want to bring that upon myself? And the thought of looking at porn almost now makes me have an ill feeling in the pit of my stomach versus anything that's comforting. But it's the ability to have insight into that and let that experience speak to you about what it truly is versus what we think it is.

Speaker 1: 35:22

Sounds like undoing and redoing the wiring in your brain.

Speaker 2: 35:26

Absolutely, absolutely, and that's what psychodrama is all about.

Speaker 1: 35:30

I am so excited that psychodrama is becoming a much bigger part of what we're doing at Husband Material. We just had an amazing virtual retreat, led by Andrew Baumann, where we did psychodrama online on Zoom, and we're doing psychodrama on Zoom for Level 2 Husband Material groups which are launching this month, which is super exciting. And, most importantly, what I want to invite a lot of you guys to join is this year's annual retreat in September.

Speaker 2: 36:02

I'm so geeked about this retreat. Many of you have heard me say that our in-person retreat is simply the highlight of my year, and this year is going to be even better than years before, which it's hard to even imagine. But we've got a couple of different sessions planned that are going to use psychodrama techniques and really help bring to life this healing process, and I'm just so excited about what that's going to look like and to see the transformation that are going to happen for everybody.

Speaker 1: 36:35

So, gentlemen, you are all invited to come to Santa Barbara in September for our amazing retreat, september 8th through 12th. You can sign up at husbandmaterialcom, and in part two of this episode we're going to get more detailed and talk to Rick Carlson about his experience doing psychodrama and you're going to get some really practical real-life examples of what this can look like in person and on Zoom. Always remember, my friend, you are God's beloved Son and in you he is well-pleased.