As actors, we often have to go to deep, dark, personal places. We scratch old scabs, dredge up old sense memories, access our younger, more vulnerable selves—do whatever it takes to serve the script.
Can psychotherapy—aimed at healing our wounds, making us more healthy and stable—hamper the delicate creative process?
"At first I wondered, will I just become happy and not be able to get back to those dark emotional places?" says Jennifer Stuckert, a San Francisco actor who went into therapy as required to obtain her master's degree in psychology.
Her fears were unfounded. Stuckert chose to work with a drama therapist—a professional who incorporates role playing, improvisation, and movement techniques—but she believes the more traditional, verbal approach would have been beneficial, too.
"The biggest thing for me is how therapy helped me develop really positive self-esteem," she explains. She no longer takes job rejection personally; she "disempowered" her unhelpful inner critic, which in turn led to riskier artistic choices and even to taking direction better ("I no longer beat myself up about not getting it right"); she is more relaxed and emotionally present when auditioning, networking, and performing; and she accepts that she can't be perfect, that she's only human—and that's a good thing.
More than that, psychotherapy—particularly the role-playing aspect of drama therapy—gave Stuckert a deeper understanding of interpersonal dynamics: When doing script analysis, she has new insight into how people go after what they want, how they behave when they don't get it. "Working through some big issues regarding my old wounds in my relationship with my parents, what was really effective for me was taking on their roles, experiencing what it was like to be where they're at," she says. "It gave me a sense of empathy, and it also helped me embody my own rage and hurt." In addition, she experimented with underdeveloped roles within herself, particularly the archetypal strong, wise woman. That in itself expanded her acting range.
She adds, "I can tap into emotions more easily since therapy. And I've learned to contain my emotions as well: I can go to a really dark place, but also I can let go of it when I'm done with the scene."
Actors who seek psychotherapy are presented with a variety of challenges. San Francisco–based author, creativity coach, and former psychotherapist Eric Maisel cites authority and dependency issues: "Actors want to retain a sense of independence although they're at the mercy of directors and casting directors, so they'll often act out inappropriately at auditions."
Other common issues: performance anxiety and unemployment. Studies indicate that 10% to 15% of artists experience high anxiety, according to Maisel, but if you ask casting directors how many actors seem anxious, they will say it's more like 90%. As for not landing jobs: "When the average person is unemployed, they suffer from depression, loss of self-esteem, and identity issues," he says. "Actors are constantly unemployed and are expected to handle that with grace and lack of distress." Psychotherapists consider unemployment so stressful that they're on the alert for resulting physical illnesses.
But again, can therapy destroy the creative spark? Maisel says no: "To feel miserable and mentally distressed, and to say you'd not be able to act if that pain and misery went away, is a mistake," he avers. "The bottom line is it's a better risk to try to feel healthy rather than hold on to the pain in case that's useful for your art."
Los Angeles stage and screen actor Maurice Godin concurs. He initially went into therapy in the late 1980s (talk therapy and relaxation techniques, in Toronto) because he had trouble dealing with confrontation and conflict—the very essence of drama. He was continually interpreting characters in terms of their more conciliatory faces. Although his work was praised, he knew his range would be limited later on if he didn't expand.
"I come from an addictive household," he explains. "I had to get a handle on that. These things affected my work as an actor, my choices for characters." In addition to not being able to easily access rage, he also found that his default focus was always on the character's darker side, whether the character as a whole was light or dark. "Through therapy I could find the other side of the coin," he says. He started to investigate his characters' deeper motivations, which in turn made him much more interested in his roles.
Now he deals with other acting-related issues in therapy. "As I aged, the work started falling off," he says. "Through therapy I dealt with the terror that I'd never work again. So I started defining myself as much more than an actor—as a human being who happened to be an actor. In Hollywood, if you don't get the job, you're nothing."
Godin's wife, licensed clinical psychologist and Los Angeles dance and movement teacher Paula Thomson, works with many actor clients. Their symptoms can include mood disorders, depression ("driven by being unable to achieve their career goals"), eating disorders, substance abuse, and performance anxiety. "Stage fright is usually a secondary thing," says Thomson. "You can't do what you used to be able to do well, and that leads to stage fright."
Some come to her because they're blocked—they can't find their creative voice. With others, stress has affected their body, resulting in chronic fatigue or irritable bowel syndrome, for example. "If you can't trust your body, that encroaches on performance and brings up anxiety," she notes. Her clients are worried about money, health insurance, forgetting lines, nailing this or that job; they're spinning into a negative vortex, she says, and she helps them escape it.
However, Thomson believes there's still a romanticized idea that your creative muse is connected to your early agonies. "I'm forever saying, 'No, it's you that's creative, not your trauma,' " she says. Released from chronic mental anguish, you may find yourself working more from your imagination, less from your neurosis.
"Actors used to think their neurosis was feeding their acting, and to lose that, you'd lose that crazy drive," says drama therapist, director, and former Los Angeles actor Armand Volkas. Being a little edgy and self-destructive was part of the mythology.
On the contrary, he says: The more grounded actors become, the more they're able to sort out what's truly them, as opposed to the assumptions of directors and casting directors about their "type." "I think acting attracts people who are narcissistically wounded, meaning that a lot of times they're trying to get their needs met from acting and from some of the characters and processes of acting—needs that didn't get met [early in life]," he muses. "It's good to sort that out so you know what your drive to act is about."
Godin reports that many of his actor colleagues are also in therapy. "Now that I'm in my 40s, all the actors I knew in my 20s, we're all much more open to each other about our feelings. Actors I used to vie against in my 20s, now we're open about the pain of rejection. For most actors I know that are in therapy, it has helped enormously.
"There's so much anxiety you carry into middle age if you don't do some work on yourself," he cautions. "It will eat away at you like a cancer, that kind of anxiety."
Says Stuckert, who once worried that psychotherapy might dry up her emotional well, "I still use earlier traumas in my acting. We carry this within us. The body has its own memory. Even if you work through stuff, it's still living within you."
One more thing: "There's a danger that in becoming healthy you might no longer believe your own reasons for becoming an actor," warns Maisel. "But we have to [continually] reinvest meaning in what we do anyway. You'd have to consciously reinvent meaning in your acting in any case."