The Rabbit and The Bear: My Experience of Training to be a Creative Arts Therapist

By Kat Shore

If you’re prepared to peer into the abyss, feel terrified, and dive in anyway, then training to be a dramatherapist might be for you. Dramatherapy uses storytelling, play, art, and movement to facilitate healing and growth. Training to be a dramatherapist involves a rigorous process of academic and experiential learning. But before you can sit with others’ pain, you first have to learn to sit with your own.

“The inner critic makes each of us a child.” – Embracing Your Inner Critic by Hal and Sidra Stone (1993)

I wanted to be a dramatherapist because as a shy, anxious child, I had felt most confident at drama club. Then, during my undergraduate degree, I ran drama workshops with school children and saw how powerfully drama could foster confidence and creativity in people. 

A few years before beginning the dramatherapy training, I had been diagnosed with anxiety, and the pressure to do well in my new classes brought to the surface a lot of my ‘not good enough’ insecurities. The others in my year group all seemed so knowledgeable, so confident, so grown up. I was just a 28-year-old kid! It felt like it was only a matter of time until I was found out as the fraud that I felt I was. 

During a story making activity in my first year of training, I wrote about a small, frightened rabbit facing a trek through a haunted forest. High above the trees floated a luminous, all-seeing, all-knowing eye. At the end of the story, the frightened rabbit and the wise eye merged into one. I was the rabbit, and I wanted to absorb all the qualities I believed were crucial to being a therapist: clarity, calm, and wisdom unclouded by insecurity and anxiety. 

For our first assessment, we were to facilitate a dramatherapy session for one of our peers in front of the tutors; we were going to give each other therapy. The sessions would involve the exploration of artworks we had completed earlier. Without putting too much thought into it, I had grabbed the thickest, brightest pastels and drawn two animals standing side by side: a sensible, practical elephant and a flappy, excitable parrot. I was grateful for the opportunity to practice our facilitations before the real assessment. The morning of the practice run, I made sure that I meditated and concentrated on staying calm to avoid being completely overwhelmed by nerves. 

The practice run was a disaster. I was flat, shut down, and my body language betrayed my nerves. I had so, so wanted to get it right. I looked at my drawing and felt utterly disconnected from it, flooded with shame and disappointment. A friend in the group caught me staring hopelessly at my artwork and suggested that tomorrow I leave the practical elephant at home and only bring the parrot. The next morning, I abandoned meditation in favour of zooming around the block on roller skates, party playlist on shuffle. 

I experienced the assessment completely differently to the practice run. I felt like I had a firm hold on it, like I was an equal in the space; not a person trying desperately to get something ‘right’ but a person saying: “I am here”. The feedback from my tutors reflected my increased presence, clarity, and energy. I understood then that therapists are not all-seeing, all-knowing superheroes but individuals who are able to be present. I was beginning to realise that trying to get it ‘right’ was holding me back and that there is vital energy, power, and truth in presence and spontaneity.

In an exercise to mark the end of our first year of training, we paired up to discuss which inner strengths we would like to be bestowed with. I requested that my partner say, “I give you the gift of courage, self-worth, and womanhood.” My partner paused before expressing some uncertainty about my choice of words, telling me that they thought I already had the things I was asking to be given. I was filled with anxiety. Why was my choice being questioned? I thought about it before responding, “Okay, can you say: ‘you have strength, you have courage, you have self-worth, you are a woman’.” Hearing myself say this out loud overwhelmed me. I had never said anything so empowering about myself. I held my partner and cried. 

“The more refined our conscious personality the more shadow we have built up on the other side.” – Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert A Johnson (1991)

In our second year, we had to choose a myth to work with. I chose the Native American myth ‘How the Real People Came to Earth’, which I found in Storytelling in Theatre and Education by Alida Gersie and Nancy R King. The assignment was to interpret and embody two characters from our chosen myths. The protagonist from my myth was the first ‘real person’ to wake up. They were alert, reborn in the light, possessing wisdom, strength, and bravery. Every value I admired, I poured into my protagonist. My antagonist was Bear, the character that had eaten up all the original ‘real people’. Into Bear, I poured everything I found disgusting. I tried to embody this arrogant, mean, furious creature by stalking the room and yelling. Once the exercise was finished, I found myself shaky, tearful, and tingling with embarrassment.

The next day I felt numb. I explained to my group that I had put everything I valued into my protagonist and everything I found disgusting into my antagonist. My tutor offered the idea that seeing things so black and white, as ‘just good’ or ‘just bad’, is extremely limiting. We often ended each day of training with the exercise ‘take something/leave something’. I shared that I wanted to leave behind the idea of ‘good’ being over here and ‘bad’ being over there, the idea that I am a ‘good’ person and that everyone has to see me as a ‘good’ person. Then I shared that I wanted to take with me mess, confusion, bitchiness, bitterness, anger, and sadness. I recognised that I owed it to myself to allow space for anger and fear, without shame. I wanted to own these parts of myself and to say them out loud, as that is where assertiveness lives: not in passivity or aggression but in stating your feelings and needs. Looking back, my second year of training was an awakening. I got to know, take care of, and even celebrate parts of myself that had been in exile. 

In our final year, we directly explored our inner demons and our inner heroes. Through role-play, we introduced these opposites to each other in order to incite a confrontation. The embodiment of my fear and anger emerged as an all-seeing, all-crushing creature called Shut Up. My inner hero was spontaneous, confident, connected, and curious. I was certain that she was doomed. Her name was Fire. She felt young and naïve, while Shut Up felt heavy, looming, and powerful. But during an exercise in which I embodied both parts, I raged against Shut Up; eventually, Shut Up lay defeated, flat on the floor, explaining tearfully that they had only ever wanted to protect me. 

The self-critical and anxious part of me had been using its great power to repress other parts of me for years. What if instead, I could project this power outwards? What if I could show it to the world? What if I could honour each part of myself, including the frightening parts, free of shame? 

Training to be a dramatherapist didn’t just teach me how to sit with others pain. It taught me how to sit with my own. With the pain, the fear, the strength and the joy. In the end, I left nothing; I took it all.