In this post I continue to search for the roots of my current expression as a group psychotherapist. Although my work has been informed by contemporary psychoanalytic theory and  Jungian psychology and  reinforced with attachment theory and inter- relational dynamics, this eclectic mix  was influenced by my training an experience in  expressive creativity as a  community offering.  This practice in ritual theatre and  spoken word,  activism with heart,  had roots in the subliminal , the symbolic and the co-creative aspects of self.
      How does this  advise my current group  today?   How might this be useful for current practitioners? How do I clarify  this embedded process for those interested in my groups?  Well I will take the long way to this question and require many postings, but  this will likely result in answers to more than one question.
        This  all leads  me  back to Paolo Knill who was my core group teacher in, The Expressive Arts Therapy Program, many moons ago.  I was fortunate to have experiences  with someone who had been  involved in similar inquiries.   In his text examining this work, Minstrels of Soul: Intermodal Expressive Therapy he states, “All rites of restoration have a spatial and temporal form that distinguishes them from every day reality. ”  I will  describe just such an experience that I had with him and my core group members while I was in this program. I will identify  this experience  I had as:
Experiential Process To Sanctify Individual Identity Within A Tribe: 
      
When we enter the room  I don’t recognize it. It seems massive and unwieldy, particularly in contrast too our cozy group gathering.  To come here for an experiential process is  daunting. My core group has spent considerable effort to form a safe container for each of us. The primary training in our program  is through our experiential process. We are the living experiment. So our group has been bonding , and developing norms and going through various  creative  processes  establishing  who we are as individuals,  our personal intra – psychic dynamics, as well as our interpersonal dynamic, immersing ourselves in the group matrix. Our meeting room is small, intimate  and the various inter-modal exercises we utilize have become more familiar.     

Now we are entering another room , a theatre, and we have a premise. For we are each to create a world for ourselves to inhabit. We come in here no longer a tribe but as individuals on our own and we must make our own shelters.  There are materials to use  or to gather ,cloth branches, clay, chairs, stones, art materials, as well as our own objects that we have brought with us, photos, journals, drawings, any objects that seem to self identify. As we gather ourselves and claim our area Paolo plays  music on the piano that is a product of this experience, a composition of the time we are in.
There is story line we enter  with; we are a group of lone individuals not yet part of a tribe, each needing to find our own shelter. Once the shelters are established there is time given, to write to draw to move to rest . Each of us evolve and  devolve into a character, our own character. The lone one in each of us emerges. We each make our own shelter and meet with ourselves.  Each aware that the are others in our proximity. The  underlying theme   belonging/not belonging  provokes all of us differently. but provokes us all. 
      We are in our own experience. We fully enter  our own strange imaginal realm. Time collapses in upon itself. Then Paolo he calls us together. As we gather, are gaits are peculiar, our gaze is altered. We came down to the front of the theater and bring  what we need from our shelter, on the stage.  Even now I remember how we were like odd  animals, vulnerable and wary, longing to belong yet protective.  We were human like but almost throwbacks from another times.  Certainly  a  more primitive manifestation,  wrought from  the strange theater of the  self. As we re-entered the group circle, we were all  altered, stripped a bit. it was evident  that much of  the sophisticated veneer had  softened.  Together we created our individual  alters, objects placed in such a way to  identify ourselves to ourselves to  each other. We shared our story in many forms. How frightening, how wondrous, how absurd and how meaningful it was to be together. The   carapace had come off, our needs as humans, to be both one self and tribal and what came about in that struggle lay at our feet in the center of our experience.