If I had five minutes with my younger self when my life was falling apart, the first thing I’d say is - you can heal, you will heal, and you can do it your own way!! And one of the things that I wish I'd done then is drama therapy - it's a fantastic modality to engage your body, and your creative power in the service of healing and moving.

Drew Bird is an expert in Drama Therapy. Drew is also the Head of the Creative Arts Therapies Program at the University of Melbourne, with an incredible dedication, passion as well as contribution to the field of drama therapy. I think that you're going to love this conversation!! Drew is speaking from his own professional opinion on drama therapy.

​Full transcript:

Joe Bakhmoutski:             All right. This is Joe Bakhmoutski. Welcome to Power to Be Happy Podcast. I'm incredibly excited today because we had an incredible conversation with Drew Bird. Drew is an expert in Drama Therapy, and Drew is also the head of Creative Arts Therapies program at the University of Melbourne. And Drew is just an exemplary human being. Drew, I'm stoked to have you, welcome to the show, Drew.

Drew Bird:                           Thanks, Joe. That's quite an opening there to live up to. Quite a welcome. But yeah, I'm very grateful to talk about Drama Therapy and its benefits.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. Beautiful Drew, listen, from the moment we first spoke, Drew, I just saw that fire in you when we talk about Drama Therapy and just, you light up and you just, you're so passionate about it. Drew, can you tell us, like, what is it about Drama Therapy that really makes it different from everything else? Like what is it about Drama Therapy that really makes it unique?

Drew Bird:                           Okay, well, that's a good place to start. So, well, Drama Therapy is a unique form of psychotherapy. And most traditional forms of psychotherapy use the spoken word. So, you know, a lot of reliance on talking, talking therapies. And now Drama Therapy is like a lot of the creative arts therapies like dance therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. But they don't rely so heavily on speaking alone. But we look at what we might call nonverbal communication. So, you know, nonverbal could be through movement, it could be through image making. It could be through story making.

So in a sense, the emphasis is not solely on talking. It's about exploring and expressing yourself verbally. So in a sense, being able to move and express oneself, you know, through gestures, it can also be a really helpful way. Not just for someone who might not be, if you like, confident with words, but actually it's a really good way of being able to access perhaps, experiences that we might have had, like traumatic experiences where we might not even have words for.

So, the nonverbal approach in creative arts therapies lends itself to people of all ages, all types. And it's a very creative way of exploring and expressing oneself, you know, in a very nonconventional way. So, as I said, it could be through image making, it could be through music. Obviously I'm a drama therapist. We might employ all those ideas. We might employ music, we might employ image making. But mostly we're employing story and we're using the body to help us express ourselves in ways that maybe words have limited.

So in a sense that we might not have much repertoire. After all, 96% of our communication is non-verbal. So finding a way to express ourselves through our body helps us potentially to access a bigger part of ourselves that may not always be available when we use words alone.

Joe Bakhmoutski:             Yeah. I love that Drew. And I love how, going through expressions through your body, through something that comes up from somewhere deep within us. I feel it's also something that helps us to, especially when you may have been impacted by trauma. It helps us to find that sense of trust within ourselves.