Therapeutic Enactment : Restoring vitality through trauma repair in groups

Marv Westwood, Patricia Wilensky.
(2005, Group Action Pub., Vancouver)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-9738082-0-9

Marv Westwood

“Group counselling and psychotherapy are important media for client change. Recently I published Therapeutic Enactment: Restoring Vitality Through Trauma Repair in Groups with Patricia Wilensky. This book describes the model, the method and the relevant research related to trauma repair through group counselling. Therapeutic enactment is an intervention that is language centered and involves narrative-in-action. It is an embodied experience of meaning reconstruction through performance that offers the client an opportunity to re-story the traumatic event in a safe witnessing environment, to reconstruct this event through dialogue with the witnessing group and to somatically re-narrate the story through action (reprocessing the somatic memory of the traumatic event and reconnecting the silenced/forgotten narrative through the body).

There are two important concerns in trauma therapy. First, the therapist needs to provide the individual with an opportunity to re-experience elements of the traumatic event in a safe environment in order to activate a trauma response. Second, the experience needs to contain elements that are incompatible enough with the event to change it."

Westwood’s work focuses on the use of group counselling techniques to aid clients with trauma repair. He works with a wide range of individuals, including peacekeeper soldiers and war affected civilians, suffering from a range of sources of trauma.