I am so honored to have John Rasberry with us for an interview. He is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a trainer, educator and practitioner in psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy.
He has been in private practice for 40 years and has trained many students in psychodrama. He also travels around the country, supporting trial lawyers to exonerate those that are presumed guilty and win multimillion-dollar cases.
In this video, we talk about how anxiety impacts life and how should one deal with anxiety, depression, and grief. We also cover how psychodrama relieves anxiety and fear and the top three reasons to choose psychodrama over all other modalities out there.
This interview was transcribed by Otter.ai.
Mary Catherine:
Hi everybody, I am so honored to have John Rasberry with us today for an interview. He is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a trainer, educator and practitioner in psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy.
He has been in private practice for 40 years, he has trained many students in psychodrama. He also travels around the country, supporting trial lawyers to exonerate those that are presumed guilty and win multimillion-dollar cases. John, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.
John Rasberry:
Thanks for the invitation.
Mary Catherine:
So we'll just jump right in. John, you know that I see clients mostly dealing with anxiety, grief and relationship issues. So I really want to hone in on that today. First question, how have you seen anxiety and grief impact a client's life?
John Rasberry:
Well, it runs the gamut from totally destroying somebody and debilitating them and moving them into chronic depression, and hopelessness, all the way to needing help to make adjustments to that loss to that empty space that's now created, particularly in this day and time with the pandemic, the stresses that we're under as a society, this grief that used to be in many respects, and I don't mean to downplay it, but was, was very simple and basic grief that we tried to help people work through. Now, it's much more complicated. There's even some talk now about complicated grief as a separate pathology caused by the trauma that is multiple for many of us.
So you've got the pandemic, you have people that died during the pandemic, you have loss of jobs, you have desperation and hopelessness, that continues to not have any relief. So another problem happens, another problem happens another loss. And people are finding themselves in a hole that here tonight has been much deeper than I can remember.
Mary Catherine:
What do you think is the best course of action for clients dealing with anxiety, depression and or grief?
John Rasberry:
I have to give this caveat because this is much like asking a car salesman, what's the best car to buy? It's the one they're selling. So, with that disclaimer, certainly I have to promote psychodrama and Sociometry have been around long enough to be able to have experienced and seen practice many other forms of therapy, that on the spectrum have varying degrees of success, but psychodrama in my experience produces the shift the necessary shift and emotions required for closure, to anxiety and grief, because it is not a cognitive process, it is an action process, where the doing, the meeting with or in our nomenclature, the encounter with those open tension systems, the problems, the losses, the hurts, the fears, feelings of out of control, and powerlessness, when a person can get the kind of help that pulls that from outside of themselves into an empty chair in front of them are into a chair in front of them are an occasion a moment that they've lived through their living through or in the future will be living through. And they have someone playing the role of the fear playing the role of the powerlessness the part of them that feels so out of control. We've got this pandemic, I don't know who's safe anymore. I can't go to the grocery store, go where I'm asked to get a shot do not to bring that out to where people can engage it outside of their mind can facilitate moments of emotional sharing, expression that can produce closure to these fears, griefs, things.
Mary Catherine:
Right. Well, I'm gonna jump, I'm gonna jump ahead a bit because you're kind of touching on this. Now another question that I have, which is, can you explain to folks the catharsis of abreaction and integration and how that alleviates symptoms that people are having symptoms of anxiety and grief depression, because that might be a part of the encounter you're describing.
John Rasberry:
So let me give credit to Dr. JL Moreno, a Viennese psychiatrist who emigrated to the United States back in the early 1900s, who is a student of Freud, who became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, and the couch that most of your listeners are familiar with Freud and the couch and Freud would interpret what the patient was sharing from the couch. And Dr. Moreno left Dr. Freud, because he wanted to help people not only analyze their dreams, but dream again, to get unstuck, to dream to have aspirations and hopes and be excited about the future, and have an ability to deal with all of the challenges and rewards that come with that one of his major contributions was his experience in thinking around emotional expression, what he called Emotional purging.
So the concept is, if a person stays shut, shut down emotionally, and our society says, You can't cry, you can't laugh too loud, you can't be too angry, you can't be scared, then we have to modify how we really feel in order to not be rejected. We get various forms of those demands, in our society, from church and school and family and friends and business, but that suppression of feelings runs the risk of creating not only emotional instability, but now that is very researched, and well established that what you don't bring forth, your body is going to exhibit that your body is going to bring it forth. So if you don't deal with this anxiety, this depression, this grief, this unresolved anger, this tension you're having, you get ulcers, you get migraines, you can't sleep at night, there's some link even with arthritis. And even before Freud in Moreno, some of the early physicians described rheumatoid arthritis as rage of the bones, Moreno began to test that in a living laboratory.
And one of the things I love about psychodrama is that it can be evaluated in the situation, we don't have to wait. In the counseling session, you can do the work where a catharsis of abreaction or purging of feelings happen, the protagonist or the patient begins to has the opportunity to say what they've always been afraid to say, or express what they've always been afraid to express. And from that release of emotion, can calm an opening up of the psyche of the thinking, to where many people can solve their own problems, what blocks them from solving their own problems, is this constipation. If you will have feelings, the catharsis of abreaction is that significant purging of emotion. Not a few tears. Not a little bit of a raised voice. Not just talking about being scared, but manifesting that in the moment in the session as fully as possible.
Mary Catherine:
Yes. And then that's when the catharsis of integration becomes possible because then folks can have this aha moment that has been blocked by what you're saying the modifying of the feelings.
John Rasberry:
Exactly. So the catharsis of integration is when the head and the heart come together. So liberating, it's liberating because many people, people are not stupid. They know I shouldn't be this angry or harsh. I know I shouldn't feel this way. Or I know, mother's in a better place, even though last year to COVID I know all of this, but I feel so differently. Yeah.
Mary Catherine:
And I think it was Moreno or either you taught me. You know, the body remembers what the mind forgets.
John Rasberry:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Bessel Vander Kolk. Very prominent and, and active psychiatrist currently practicing, wrote a book by that very title, the body, remember? Yeah, and keeps the score, the Body Keeps the Score. So yeah, Moreno said the body remembers what the mind forgets. And so you know, we can kid ourselves or people we're in relationship to, as we we sit around and sit like this and say, I feel fine. And there's nothing wrong with me. And I don't I'm not mad at you know, it's when we can move that person into an encounter with this part of themselves. And then the truth comes out, and yeah, I'm hurt. And you hurt me. And I'm mad at you. And what what.
Mary Catherine:
What do you think as someone is beginning, a journey, a healing journey? What do you think? I mean, you've been in practice for 40 years. So you've seen it all? What are the qualities and traits of exhibited by a client that is committed to their own personal work that you feel like can tackle the anxiety or grief to get to the other side?
John Rasberry:
A partial desire for help.
Mary Catherine:
And when you say partial, why is that?
John Rasberry:
In psychodrama, we believe any action we take, taking care of a child driving to work, having a fight with the spouse, loving someone has three parts, to go into play a baseball game with friends, going to the movie, going to the lounge and having all of that has three components to it, to which we're not made aware of. And we're not taught how to use how to work through each of those three parts or stages.
And the first stage and the most crucial is what Moreno called the warm up it no act can be successfully performed without an adequate warm, a surgeon going into surgery cannot do an adequate job. Unless he or she has really reviewed the film. The X rays is really reviewed, the examinations, the paperwork that's drawn up before they go into surgery so that they can begin that moment adequately.
Now, a lot of surgeons would say I've done 10,000 appendectomies, I can do them with my blindfolded with my eyes closed, Is it adequate? Marginally, could it be more adequate? Conceivably. So what happens in life is many of us get stuck in this rehearsed fixed route behavior and it affects the way we relate to ourselves and in particularly other people. So the relationship cannot thrive. It might survive unsatisfactorily. It was boring, it, it didn't meet my needs, it could have been more. We see this with couples all the time, particularly if they have any longevity together. So the three stages are the warm up, then the action, the engagement, the doing of what needs to get done, or be done or corrected. So it can be past present future. That hasn't, didn't, wasn't adequately, very adequately performed before. When you ask about, when I say marginally
Mary Catherine:
or partially
John Rasberry:
partially committed to therapy, people are scared. They're hurting. They don't want to get hurt again. They don't know who this rasberry guy is the psychodrama stuff. This talk into an empty chair. This becoming the part of me that's afraid. That's all crazy stuff. It sounds wacky. But I'm suffering and I'll, I'll try anything in 40 years. I probably cannot remember but a handful of people that ever came to this therapy with me. First Session fired up. Glad I'm here, let's get to work. This is going to be great. Oh, totally. Okay. So if all of what I say and what I've been told is true, then what's crucial for the client in therapy is to have a therapist that can help them create and engage in an adequate warm up. If that happens, that partial commitment to therapy now becomes, I wouldn't miss a session. if my life depended on it, no pun intended, they'll tell the babysitter to stay an extra hour for the kids because they got a session, I'm not gonna miss a session, and I'll pick the kids up. If you can stay an hour and keep telling the boss, this is important enough to me, and I'm committed enough, and I'm getting enough help. And things are changing where I need to leave work at three o'clock this afternoon. If you say I can't, then we're going to have to talk because so that's what I'm talking. I don't want people to think that they have to be all in because if they were all in, they wouldn't need us. They wouldn't need a therapist out.
Mary Catherine:
Totally. Yeah. And I, one thing I love that you've taught me that psychodrama has taught me is that only an inadequate warm up is what stands in the way of supporting someone getting to where they want to be? Absolutely. We've been talking a lot about psychodrama. But let's even more, why psychodrama over all the other modalities out there.
John Rasberry:
Well, I could give you a number of reasons, I believe.
Mary Catherine:
What about your top three reasons?
John Rasberry:
Catharsis of integration is created most adequately, adequately through action, not talking inside does not change people. Now the cognitive therapist, my colleagues that are just as devout in their belief of cognitive therapy as I am psychodrama, their feelings would be hurt to hear me say that. That insight does not change people. If insight did change people, and one of the reasons I believe that we have such a proliferation of book sales, particularly in the self help market, is because people are looking for this cognitive way, if you change the way you think you'll change the way you feel. You can, if you'll understand this trauma that happened to you and you understand it more completely, then you can work through I've seen brilliant, insightful, wounded people that could tell me insightfully what was wrong with them, why they're depressed, the mechanisms of the dynamics of it, just know more about it than I do. But they're still depressed, you know, it would be like, if people came to us wanting insight, we could just refer him to the library, you know, go buy this book and read it. And it'll tell you all about yourself and what you need to do to change. So action, the doing is the corrective, emotional experience. If you're a trauma survivor, and you never have been given an opportunity to face the perpetrator, it's very hard to move beyond the trauma.
Okay, so action. Number two, it's the only modality I know whose efficacy can be tested. By the time the session is over, you can see the results immediately when a psychodramatists directs an encounter and you spend the 30 minutes in this encounter, whether it be an individual or or or couples therapy, or family therapy or group therapy. We always return to the last piece of action in a drama, which is to do again, what was first done in the beginning when we were building the warm up and let the protagonist feel and understand if it is different, in fact, if they feel differently, and they behave differently and they have power, they have control. They have had this tremendous grief expressed to where they can look up through swollen eyes and say I've had enough yeah, and move on.
Now that does not I'm not saying that psychodrama can cure in one session but I am saying That's one of the reasons I love it, because we can test it in situ, so I could dramatist, if the person goes back to Scene one, as they demonstrated what the problem was, and they keep doing the same thing.
Then psychodramatists says, Well, I failed. And we'll have to come up with something else that I like that about third, it's relationship building, and I am nothing without you. And that's the mantra of Sociometry. That without you, I cease to exist. Does that mean I'm dependent on you? Sure, it does. I wouldn't be on this YouTube interview. If you had enough, created it and invited me in, I wouldn't have closure to some of my problems if I didn't have some people in a group that was willing to walk in the darkness with me. And it's helped me explore and, and do some hard, painful things. Likewise. I can't laugh unless someone makes me laugh. Unless I'm psychotic, I guess.
Mary Catherine:
But we all need each other.
John Rasberry:
Oh, it's imperative. So those are the three elements. Those are three. Yeah, that me.
Mary Catherine:
But we won't, for now, when you talked about Freud, and when we talked about Murena, one of my favorite lines, that is Moreno having this encounter with Freud saying, you know, Freud, you help you analyze people's dreams, but I help people to dream again. And that's one of my big motivators. Because I will, because I was given the chance to dream again, to build a life that I want to live. And I give a lot of credit to you and psychodrama for helping me to do that. So I'm very motivated to support other people to do that as well.
So I guess my question to you is, how does psychodrama relieve the present anxiety and fear so that those dreams that people have are possible, or if they don't even know what their dreams are, how did they start having dreams?
John Rasberry:
We get the anxiety we get the fear out from inside of us into a chair in the same room, where we can see it, and look at it and feel it and get our hands on it. And deal with it in ways that keeping it inside prohibits, particularly in group psychotherapy. And Dr. Moreno and psychodrama created group psychotherapy. One of the things he introduced is the use of the auxiliary, as you've already mentioned, so we have group members that can come up. You see behind me, Barney Fife is my constant double, who can speak the unspoken are speak the unconscious for me, while I'm here in my office doing a session, so we have group members that can do this doubling for us, which is a very safe way for us to get in touch with what our truth is, and co-create this opportunity to overcome the fear.
Mary Catherine:
So it's overcoming the fear and that makes room for the dreams to happen or to be created or for them to arise. If someone says, I don't know what my dreams are?
John Rasberry:
Absolutely, absolutely can't. I mean, it's like opening the floodgates. Without fear, I can't even wrap my mind around the possibilities that mankind has, well, we've already seen some of it, there have been some people, maybe in spiritual ways, or maybe even in other forms of therapy that have overcome the fear enough to walk, walk boldly into the night and discover the cure for this or discover the addition of this or to I mean, these guys, these men and women who, you know, created this vaccine for the pandemic as they've been doing for eternity but you know, to dream to envision to create.
Mary Catherine:
well, let's wrap it up. Then. We'll do another one and talk more about spontaneity, that's important too.
John Rasberry:
good. Well, this has been fun.
Mary Catherine:
Yes. Thank you so much. You're welcome. What would you say just in closing, what do you want people to know? I mean, you've got committed and devoted your life to this work. What do you want people to know? In closing about healing about psychodrama about group that's meaningful to you?
John Rasberry:
Help is there. Help is there, trust yourself and go from there.
Mary Catherine:
I think that's your next client knocking on the door. So we'll go let you that's what help reduce fear and increase spontaneity and keep peeling people over there and thank you so much for your time. Okay, take care. Bye bye