multi-family work using psychodrama

[Erica Hollander]

I have worked with a number of families whose kids had perpetrated family 
assaults using psychodrama.  It was very effective and powerful, and in 
particular the Behind the Back technique for the families to express their 
caring for the youthful perpetrators was very moving.  The assaultive kids 
were the subjects of the exercise Behind th Back and their  familiy members 
had a chance to say what they understood about the kids' roles in acting out 
some of the system's tensions.  I used that as the conclusion of an entire 
day of work in which the families showed one another their set ups, their 
problems, the assaults, the building pressures.  It was quite good, quite a 
lovely ending to a day of hard work and growth, and a day in which the 
families found that they were not alone in their situations.  Some of it is 
written up in a chapter I did for a book on psychodrama edited by Anne 
Huntington and Anne Bannister, called Communicating with Children and 
Adolescents.  Erica Michaels Hollander