How Drama Therapy Changes People: Mechanisms of Therapeutic Change
Drama therapy is proven to help. But how? What exactly changes in a person and why? These are questions asked by both clients and experts – and drama therapy has sophisticated answers.
Change in drama therapy is not accidental or mystical. It is driven by specific therapeutic mechanisms that can be described, studied, and consciously utilized.
Therapy is Transformation – But Slow and Safe
The word transformation sounds grandiose. In the practice of drama therapy, however, it means something very concrete: a gradual change in how a person understands themselves, how they manage emotions, how they relate to others, and how they handle the stories they tell about themselves.
This transformation does not happen overnight. Drama therapy does not work with shock or pushing the client beyond their comfort zone – it works with the gradual expansion of what the client is able to bear, explore, and integrate (Vávra in Kosek et al., 2025).
Core Processes in Drama Therapy
Research and practice in drama therapy have described specific mechanisms characteristic of it. Phil Jones (2007) calls them core processes. They include:
- Dramatic Projection – the client transfers their inner contents (emotions, conflicts, experiences) into the external world of fiction, characters, or objects; thereby gaining safe distance from them.
- Embodiment – working with the body as a tool for therapeutic change; the body in drama therapy is not just a physical shell, but a bearer of memory, emotions, and relational patterns.
- Role Playing – the ability to consciously enter a role and step out of it strengthens identity flexibility and expands the repertoire of ways to be in the world.
- Witnessing – being seen by another person in a therapeutic space has healing value in itself; the client experiences that their story has a witness.