Co-Creation & Membership

[Connie Miller]

Everyone has been talking about how to "get" more members.

Today, I just came back from presenting in Jersey City at the The Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups, Inc. An International Professional Organization. The presentation was "Souldrama: A therapeutic method to access our spiritual intelligence" and it was well attended. I questioned how come I was the only psychodramatist presenting there. The attendees loved the sociometry, the action methods and the psychodrama. These presentations attract many people to the psychodrama community. This would have been an amazing opportunity to add your spontaneity and creative methods.

Then I recalled presenting at the pre conference in Detroit this year for the American Counseling Association, as I have for the past five years. This organization has 50,000 members. I have presenting there almost every year and I have also announced in our publications about how beneficial it would be to have other psychdramatists present there as well. One of the previous speakers was Irving Yalom, speaking about creativity in groups. There were10,000 members attending the National Conference this year in Detroiot. They are  looking for new creative methods! Each state has an organization and sub divisions that are hungry to learn action methods. The NJ conference was packed and very curious to learn more when I presented "Doubling" Each time, people are awed by Moreno's methods and the sociometry of the group. Each time, few know about the history of how the first self help groups were started. So I asked myself again, where are the other psychodramatists?

Then it occurred what is happening with Souldrama. To train in this model, I require 250 hours of Souldrama and 200 hours of psychodrama training with a trained psychodramatist. I have done many international and national trainings and I always have and plan to in the future, send the attendees to the local trainers in their state or country for the psychodrama training. 
This is co-creation. Even though I am a TEP and have a training group, my interest is in training others in this new model of Souldrama. I need the help of the all the other trainers in psychodrama to help support this model which is an outgrowth of psychodrama. This will help all of you attract new students for your training groups and spread psychodrama. I wonder about the resistance to my program, when so few of you have experienced it. Perhaps this is true with all new things.

So I have been inspired to share, my final thought ... perhaps we need less to worry about "getting" new members but perhaps we need to worry more about "giving" of ourselves and as well as sharing our knowledge of psychodrama and sociometry to the groups that are waiting to hear from us. Who shall survive? Maybe it is in the "giving" of the joy of the methods of psychodrama that the "getting" occurs.

Connie Miller TEP

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