The body on stage: therapeutic theatre, developmental trauma and the science of healing in relationship

I am going to assume something about you. If you are reading this, you have probably been through some kind of therapeutic process, or you are considering starting one. And it is likely that at some point you have noticed that talking has limits. That you can explain very clearly what happened to you, even understand it — and yet something in you keeps reacting the same way. The body that tenses when someone speaks to you in a particular tone. The knot in the throat that arrives before you have had time to think anything.

I know this well. I grew up in a house where the air changed temperature before my father opened his mouth. I learned to read those variations with a precision no book ever taught me. And for many years I was able to speak about all of that with considerable articulation, while my body kept working in exactly the same way: on guard, managing, measuring distances.

Why the body keeps reacting even when the mind understands: developmental trauma and somatic memory

There is a neurobiological reason for that feeling of understanding something without having truly integrated it. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) explains it in The Body Keeps the Score: trauma is stored in subcortical circuits as implicit, physical, pre-verbal memory. The body keeps reacting even after the mind has spent years working on the material.

Neuropsychologist Allan Schore (2019) adds another layer: the patterns of emotional dysregulation rooted in early childhood organise themselves in the right hemisphere of the brain. They were encoded before there were words. And that leaves a mark in a register that language can barely reach.

Why the stage reaches where conversation falls short

Jacob Levy Moreno, a Romanian-Austrian psychiatrist, developed psychodrama in Vienna from 1921 onwards. The idea was as simple as it was radical: instead of talking about conflicts, enact them — in the physical space of a stage, with others present, in real time, with the body as the primary instrument of the work.

Van der Kolk (2014) identifies three concrete reasons why theatre works with trauma. First: the stage allows the enactment of responses different from those the nervous system crystallised. The body rehearses what it could not do before. Second: performing demands physical presence, which directly counteracts the dissociative tendency. Third: belonging to a group that creates something together is an antidote to the isolation and identity fragmentation that so often accompany trauma.

What the research says

Orkibi et al. (2023), in the most comprehensive meta-analysis available — 30 controlled studies, 1,567 participants — found a medium effect size of d = 0.50 on mental health outcomes. For context: Leichsenring et al. (2022) obtained d = 0.34 for psychotherapies in general. Drama-based therapies come out slightly ahead.

In trauma work specifically, Giacomucci and Marquit (2020) documented reductions of more than 25% in post-traumatic stress symptoms in just two to three weeks with trauma-focused psychodrama.