By Regina Moreno

Mommy was busy wrapping presents in the upstairs bedroom with door closed on this Christmas Eve.  I knew Daddy had bought something very special during our recent trip to the winter wonderland known as Macy’s Department Store in New York City. I couldn’t to wait to open the special package.

But first, it was time for me to get dressed. In this scene, I am five years old, and Mommy is helping me into my new red dress with the pretty swirling skirt. My wardrobe  includes a red coat and a matching hat with earmuffs, along with fancy boots decorated with pompoms. Finally, I have a little muff to keep my hands warm from the winter chill. 

Then all of the carefully wrapped gifts were placed into the rumble seat of our black car. I loved riding in that seat, but Mommy said we needed a safe place for the presents. Daddy carried a big bag.

“What’s in there?” I asked Daddy.

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

Here we are at the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. This time, which we call the first day of Winter, might be my favorite holiday of the season because it involves no shop-till-you-drop consumerism and no 24-7 Christmas music.
The day simply asks us to look at wonder in the skies, notice and appreciate the natural rhythms of the earth and ponder the meaning of the temporary darkness before the return of the light

The Winter Solstice is certainly one of the planet's oldest holidays, the day when the Northern ancients noticed that the darkness overtook the light. Astronomically, it is when the North Pole is tilted farthest away from the sun, delivering the fewest hours of sunlight of the year.

When we are in the dark, we move more slowly and tentatively. We may feel more vulnerable and therefore more frightened. So my holiday wish for me and you is this: May we become comfortable with the darkness, learning what it has to teach us, before we return to the warmth of the light.

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

Here in the United States, Thanksgiving Day is our designated day of expressing gratitude.

Native American activists remind us that stories told about the first Thanksgiving – along with the Pilgrim hats and feather headdresses stapled from construction paper that children wear in elementary school skits – often continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, racism and a retelling of history that isn’t exactly true.

There’s a burgeoning movement in certain parts of our country to set the record straight on the facts of Thanksgiving along with indigenous peoples claiming their history, special foods and traditions. Sometimes people call

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

​In the past two decades researchers have discovered a tremendous amount of information about the human brain. As we learn these startling new details, we are forced to discard old assumptions about how the brain works and learn about the brain's amazing powers.

We now know about the delicate nature of the developing brain from the very beginning of life. Certain experiences – a stressed mother, a community trauma, a family crisis – appear to inhibit the circuitry of brain development even before the child’s birth.

Yet the brain is not “fixed” to any specific configuration for life. For instance, we now understand that the brain is “plastic,” continuing to constantly change, alter and adapt as it responds to new life experiences.

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

I remember the first time that I introduced the principles of sand tray into a psychotherapy session with a couple, who I’ll call Harry and Sally.

The couple, who were experiencing great conflict in their marriage, had arrived in my therapy room several weeks before, saying that they had difficulty communicating with each other and that most discussions of any substance resulted in angry feelings.

Each of the couple demonstrated stereotypical gender behaviors: Sally was highly talkative and verbally adept as she chatted easily for many minutes about what she was thinking, feeling, wanting and needing. By contrast, Harry showed up as the proverbial strong and silent type. He appeared to have difficulty bringing a full sentence forward when facing his talkative wife, even though he was well educated and highly successful in a demanding professional job.

By Karen Carnabucci,  LCSW, TEP

When working with survivors of trauma, the main objective of every clinician is the creation of a structure that supports safety and containment.

With the practice of action psychotherapy such as psychodrama, this objective becomes more crucial. Action therapy, including what appear to be rather benign techniques, is a powerful tool that can trigger unprocessed material in survivors of trauma, resulting in flashbacks and dissociation.

The Therapeutic Spiral Model -- developed by clinical psychologist Kate Hudgins, Ph.D., TEP, and colleagues -- is an integration of classical psychodrama, object relations and recent advances in trauma theory to provide additional safety and structure when working with trauma. It follows the goal of providing safety and containment at every step for the client as well as the helping professional. Aspects of the model can be employed in individual and group sessions and may be easily adapted by talk therapists.

The model identifies safety and containment in five areas:

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

A milestone – the death of William J. Hultberg, the longtime chaplain at the Caron Treatment Centers on where he was known by everyone as “Father Bill.”

He was a Vietnam veteran and the first Roman Catholic priest who I knew who wore faded blue jeans under his vestments. He helped thousands of recovering alcoholics and addicts to a better life with his sermons and encouragement.

People, including me when I worked at Caron, loved his Sunday services at the little chapel on the campus at Wernersville, Pa., which were more like free-range 12-step meetings than anything I knew growing up Catholic.

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

Imagine a constellation in the sky -- a grouping of stars that depicts you and your ancestors.

These ancestors have imbued you with strengths to face the struggles of your daily life. And ironically, some of your struggles may actually belong to these ancestors, not to you. You are “carrying” the struggles because they have been passed to you as a curious inheritance.
New studies that focus on epigenetics – the study of biological mechanisms that will switch genes on and off – are suggesting that we inherit experiences of our ancestors just as much as physical characteristics like eye color and nose shape.

However, these inherited traumatic experiences can be healed with Family Constellations, an unusual experiential approach that defies typical therapeutic categories. The Family Constellations approach is not talk psychotherapy, nor is it a true creative arts therapy. It has similarities to psychodrama although it most closely resembles sociometry, the sister method to psychodrama, as developed by Dr. J.L. Moreno.

By Karen Carnabucci, LCSW, TEP

There is psychodrama, and there is sociodrama. Sociodrama is the less-known method of the two action methods, although it offers great opportunities for action explorations in many settings.

In psychodrama, we explore a personal issue; for instance, the protagonist, as the client is called, may wish to look at a difficult relationship with a boyfriend, a long-standing conflict with mother, a repeated nightmare or a rehearsal to ask the boss for a raise. The idea is to address a personal problem with the help of “auxiliaries,” the other group members, to enact the roles in the drama to arrive at a conclusion that feels enlightening, satisfying and healing.

In sociodrama, there is no protagonist. Instead, the group identifies a social or cultural issue of common interest and each person in the group takes and plays out a role that relates to the issue or problem.

Psychology Arts, a project initiated by the delightful and  inventive  Azizi Marshall of The Center for Creative Arts Therapy in Chicago, Ill., recently interviewed Karen Carnabucci, founder of the Lancaster School of Psychodrama and Experiential Psychotherapies. Here is a transcript of that interview:

What do you do? Who do you help?
 
I use and teach psychodrama and other experiential methods that support people in rehearsing new roles and discovering new dimensions within themselves -- leading to more satisfying lives. With carefully directed experiences -- with both psychodrama and the newer Family Constellations – we are literally able to shift the molecules in our beings into embracing new realities.

I especially enjoy working with psychotherapists, educators and other helping professionals who want to learn these methods to integrate into their own work. For this reason, I've founded the Lancaster School of Psychodrama and Experiential Psychotherapies in Lancaster, Pa.