The Therapeutic Actions Method, also known by its acronym MAT, is a method that is gaining increasing importance among professionals who provide therapy to their patients. Throughout these lines, I will explain what MAT is about and why I believe it is positive to include it in sessions.
What is the Therapeutic Actions Method?
The Therapeutic Actions Method, or MAT, is a resource that addresses what interests or bothers us through the enactment of such situations, whether imaginary or real, past, present, or anticipated. Anything goes to externalize what our mind produces, projecting it onto a scenic space where, with the use of various techniques, we can explore those thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, to become aware of what affects us and manage to transform what can be changed or accept what is impossible to modify.
This approach arises from the integration of different treatment procedures such as Theater Therapy, Scenic Therapy, Art Therapy, Group Psychodrama of Multiplicity, Body Drama, and Therapeutic Accompaniment.
Phases of the Therapeutic Actions Method
It begins with a dialogue among participants about the topics they would be interested in working on in that meeting and/or with readings of words that resonated from the previous encounter or therapy. To be able to take action later, it continues with a warming up and cooling down of the body, according to the needs at that moment. First, some stretches and free movements, to continue with a dynamic that helps to get into the mood. Then, a body scan is performed to recognize how the body feels and a guided visualization that will help produce thoughts in images about what is needed here and now. What has emerged is discussed, and someone is chosen to enact what they have evoked.
A section of the room is set aside to create the scenic space where what we have lived, dreamed, or imagined might happen to us will be recreated. We are not alone: the one who enacts the scene (protagonist) and I (scene director).
Someone from the group can participate to take on the role of another person involved in that situation (auxiliary). Those who do not participate directly in the action (as part of the audience) can later join in a technique or resource when invited. The one who enacts the scene specifies what was experienced or imagined, contextualizing place, interactions, affects, and chooses auxiliaries if needed.
The scene begins to unfold; at some point, it stops, and a technique is introduced to explore and deepen what is emerging. Each technique has its own objectives that help broaden expressiveness and achieve the desired goals.
Techniques used in therapeutic actions
The most commonly used are: soliloquy (expressing what one feels), role reversal (where roles are exchanged between characters to gain another point of view of the situation), doubling (where someone expresses other feelings that the characters have not mentioned), mirror (where the one who enacts the scene is encouraged to see themselves from the outside with the help of someone representing their role), interplay (feelings expressed among those on stage), changing words for movements or sounds, maximizing (exaggerating sounds or movements), slow motion (an intense moment is played out more slowly), symbolization (where an auxiliary materializes an emotion or represents a significant object), interview (questions are asked to the protagonist to obtain more information about the characters or the situation), interpolation of resistance (where the antagonist character does the opposite of what was being represented), sculpture (where the body posture of an auxiliary is modified so that they can express something of the scene with that body), echo (where an auxiliary expresses what the protagonist says in a louder voice), imaginary dialogue (recreation of a situation that did not occur). There are more techniques within the Therapeutic Actions Method (MAT) that can be used when necessary to intervene with them to unfold what is being staged, such as aesthetic installations, distancing, among others.
After the scene has been enacted and active techniques have been used, the story is closed with the farewell of the characters, leaving behind that symbolic game of “as if” this had happened, and we return to the group to leave that scenic space free, to recreate Micro-Resonant-Improvised-Scenes (MERI) that arise at that moment, whether or not they take into account what happened. They can be singular or collective. The one who created it will give it a title to give some meaning to what was staged.
Once this stage is finished, we return to the group to share comments about what touched us from everything that happened, without “AJI” (no advising, no judging, no interpreting). After this last stage, an invitation is made so that if these people meet again, they can bring written words, their own or others’, that resonate with the affects that were present in what happened in that MAT encounter.
Conclusions of MAT
Most people who have participated in these therapeutic actions express that by engaging the body, the connections between what we think, feel, and do are increased. That other points of view emerge about what happens or is imagined. That something changes, that other desires, other thoughts, other sensitivities emerge. That’s why I dare to say that it is a very powerful approach and that no one knows what a scene can achieve…