Off The Rocks Theater

Play and humor are so basic and we all understand their healing power and huge potential. Using drama and play in order to promote health and growth is an ancient concept, drama therapy as a treatment approach is the new kid on the block. It carries the potential to change the way we think about treatment and it also provides us with tools to increase the effectiveness of existing treatment methods.

Sigmund Freud defined mental health as our ability to “work, love and play.” We tend to put a huge emphasize on our ability to work, we are willing to accept the need to be able to love but most of us tend to ignore the importance of our ability to play. While many forms of therapy are cultural sensitive, play is universal. Children from different cultures, backgrounds and languages can play together and understand each other perfectly. Recent researches indicated that play has a crucial role in the development of the brain. In the animal kingdom play is a prime teaching method. It is through play that little puppies learn how to survive in the world. It is clear that serious tasks can be efficiently integrated when we turn to be playful.

Drama therapy carries some unique features. Adam Blatner M.D., a psychiatrist and psychodramatist, explains the uniqueness of drama therapy, “Through drama therapy, people can be helped to recapture the freshness of their early childhood’s excitement and vitality, dimensions of the personality that tend to become stifled in the ordinary course of development. Indeed, many forms of psychopathology may be understood in part as repressing disorders of excitement and spontaneity, problems with re-connecting with the innate flow of images, impulses, feelings, and activity that characterize the innocent exuberance of young children.”

In a very powerful and memorable therapy session a client stated, “That was really fun, it didn’t feel like therapy. It felt real.”

Drama therapy can be perceived as a 4 dimensional approach to treatment. It activates the intellect, allows expression of emotions, it involves all our senses and it adds the element of play. The “as if” world provides us with unique opportunities. We can re-visit our past, we can take a peek into our future, we can communicate with people that we can not reach in real life, we can reveal new sides of ourselves, we can play our fantasies, we can give a voice to side of ourselves that had been repressed and we can give ourselves the opportunity to complete acts that froze us and created a crevasse of terror in our psyche and soul. Drama therapy gives us the tools and experiences to create and try on a new identity. It challenges the definitions of who we perceive to be and gives us freedom to act beyond the limitations of definitions of self that were bestowed on us by our families, our society and culture. It gives us the freedom to choose.

For more information about Off the Rocks, or about the benefits of drama therapy, you may email Ms Lubitsh at: tlubitsh@offtherocks.org

About the Clinician

Tamar Lubitsh's extensive and acclaimed background as a theater director and drama/substance abuse therapist enabled her to develop and direct this innovative project.  Her passion and talent for using creativity and play in community-healing work is coming together in Off the Rocks Theater.

Ms Lubitsh earned an MA in Counseling Psychology, with an emphasis in drama therapy, at The California Institute of Integral Studies.  She is one of fewer than 400 registered drama therapists in the United States.

Ms Lubitsh was born and raise in Israel.

 In 2007 and 2009 she won the Substance Abuse Worker of the Year Award. In 2008 she was nominated for the Alaska School of Addictions Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Substance Abuse.