Sociometrics: Embodied, Experiential Processes for Relational Trauma Repair

Trauma represents a loss of connection with the self and can affect our ability to engage in comfortable long-term intimacy. Unresolved trauma often is the reason why people self-medicate. Relational trauma happens a little bit at a time. Feeling unseen, misunderstood, neglected, or rejected by the people we want most to be loved by is, over time, a traumatizing experience. Our need to be seen is core to valuing ourselves as vital people, important to those close to us and with the potential to find a meaningful place in the world. Sociometrics offers many small, incremental moments of healing that cumulatively help to peel back the layers of the onion, revealing ever deepening and widening aspects of both the self and the self in relation to others. Sociometrics is a therapeutic role-playing practice built upon the foundation of psychodrama and sociometry, the pioneering group-therapy concepts developed by fin-de-siècle Viennese psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno. Psychodrama and sociometry have been organically embraced in the addiction field as a method of treating this kind of relational trauma. Role-play in a therapeutic environment allows a full range of mind-body emotions and physical motions to be part of the treatment process. Words, rather than being used in some hapless attempt to describe an experience one can barely remember, can come bursting forward into the here and now toward the right person at the right place at the right time.