Abstract
Cultural trauma is passed down through generations, influencing interpersonal relations. Avoidance or denial of intergenerational cultural trauma’s (ICT) cumulative effects can impede dramatherapists’ ability to analyse countertransference and develop cultural empathy. Lack of exploration of how personal cultural context intersects with that of clients can hinder self-knowledge and recognition of similarities, differences and tensions within the therapeutic relationship. This article details my retrospective identification of ICT’s influence while working with a refugee and asylum seeker drama group prior to my dramatherapeutic training. I analyse how limited knowledge of ICT hindered productive exploration of the participants’ racialised perspectives. Contrastingly, Thorn’s 2011 case study exemplifies how ICT engagement can increase a dramatherapist’s self-knowledge and understanding of client experiences and perspectives. This article explores how discomfort elicited by racial and ethnic focus can lead to avoidance, diminishing the dramatherapist’s ability to understand clients’ lived experience. It also pinpoints colour-blind racial ideology’s negative impact, alongside the limitations of intellectual understanding alone when engaging with cultural realities. Consequently, this article promotes experiential exploration of cultural context in dramatherapy training. It supports incorporation of Powell’s Embodied Multicultural Assessment model, with additional ICT focus, as this could prove invaluable to trainees’ professional development.
Keywords
Introduction
It is widely acknowledged that the narrative of a culture’s collective memory shapes individual identities, and that people understand society and their place within it through immersion in their cultural context from birth (Guralnik, 2016). Associated intergenerational cultural trauma (ICT) not only influences daily life but may also strengthen over time (Holmes, 2016; Tummala-Narra, 2016). A growing body of psychoanalytic research calls for therapeutic professionals to witness clients’ cultural experiences alongside their own to strengthen the therapeutic relationship.
Ignoring the impact of ICT can risk client well-being. Dictado and Torres-Harding (2022) have linked decreased treatment effectiveness to low cultural awareness in therapists. A key concern is that Eurocentric therapeutic interventions can harm ethnically and racially marginalised clients through minimisation of lived experience and framing of their cultural differences as intrinsically negative. Stereotyping and invalidation reinforce societal inequality inside and outside the therapeutic space (Wendt et al., 2015).
Retrospective analysis of my experience creating theatre with Cape Town–based refugee and asylum seeker youth prior to my dramatherapy training highlights how racial discomfort and unfamiliarity with ICT can hinder understanding of trauma and cultural empathy development. Rose Thorn’s (2011) case study offers contrast by exemplifying how a dramatherapist’s conscious ICT engagement can promote insight into and empathy for clients’ lived experience and perceptions, as well as the dramatherapist’s own internal processes. This article delves into the limitations of intellectual understanding, and the need for experiential exploration of cultural biases and perceptions.
This article concludes by advocating for dramatherapy training to incorporate experiential engagement with intersectional identities and ICT’s influence in group settings, promoting capacity for cultural empathy through increased understanding of the self in relation to others. Powell’s (2016) Embodied Multicultural Assessment, with additional focus on ICT, is one possible model that could help facilitate this outcome.
Literature review
Intergenerational cultural trauma
Culture is here understood as a ‘dynamic embodiment of a worldview through learned and transmitted beliefs, values, norms and social institutions, including psychological processes’ (Bilodeau et al., 2016: 8). Alexander (2004) defines cultural trauma as members of a collective being forced to endure a negative event that damages the group consciousness, irrevocably altering the collective identity’s future. The event can threaten the collective’s existence or violate an aspect of its self-conceptualisation. Examples include ethnic cleansing, slavery, forced migration and genocide. The trauma from these events threatens core values, collective pride and group survival, and can linger across generations (Smelser, 2004). ICT can produce multigenerational silencing, exacerbated by denial of trauma by the groups responsible (Alexander, 2004; Holmes, 2016). Remembrance of the event often triggers negative emotions and becomes an ineradicable part of the cultural fabric; ICT is embedded in the collective identity, with the potential to disrupt or solidify it. Often the result is a paradoxical mix of both (Smelser, 2004). An example of ICT’s influence is an anxiety arising from a history of pogroms 1 and genocide identified within Jewish communities. Awareness of these historical traumas is suggested to have produced the ‘siege mentality’ influencing many Jewish individuals’ worldviews (Blumenfeld, 2012: 18). This mentality relies on the belief that anti-Semitic violence can resurface at any time, regardless of how stable societal conditions may seem, promoting distrust of other cultural groups.
Ethnicity and race
Ethnicity here refers to the trans-generational commonality and continuity instilled by family and community, critical to one’s subjective sense of self (Dokter, 2000). This article recognises race as a social rather than biological construct, the consequences of which rely on perceived similarities and differences between peoples based on various factors, including physical characteristics and geographic origins (Hays, 2008).
Cultural empathy versus cultural avoidance
Cultural empathy, the ability to understand clients’ experiences from interpretations of accrued cultural knowledge, is vital for proficient multicultural therapeutic practice (Constantine, 2001). Engagement with cultural context can increase dramatherapists’ understanding of their own and their clients’ socialisation, encouraging a culturally empathic position. Goldberg (2011) explains how feeling understood over an extended period promotes self-cohesion, an essential part of the therapeutic process. However, the intersection of various combinations of ICT-informed privileged and marginalised identities belonging to client and practitioner can trigger defensiveness and uncertainty. These feelings can encourage emotional withdrawal and diminished empathic capacity in practitioners (Adams, 2014).
Discomfort elicited by focus on race and ethnicity increases likelihood of practitioners relying on colour-blind racial ideology (CBRI), which studies have linked to lower cultural empathy levels (Neville et al., 2013). CBRI frames race and ethnicity as having minimal impact on daily life, encouraging therapists to minimise or disregard client experiences of prejudice (Burkard and Knox, 2004). When therapists fail to recognise prejudice’s detrimental effects, accurate assessment of client issues becomes less likely, encouraging poor therapeutic outcomes. Therapists engaging in ‘power-evasion’ by dismissing political, cultural and societal practices perpetuating inequality can view clients as culpable for experiencing challenges that are in fact by-products of systemic inequality (Neville et al., 2013: 460). CBRI can also allow for therapists to unwittingly inflict microaggressions on clients; a common occurrence for racial minority group members in therapy (Dictado and Torres-Harding, 2022). Dictado and Torres-Harding (2022: 2) define microaggressions as everyday exchanges conveying ‘offensive, insulting, or denigrating messages’ directed at a person due to their cultural context, potentially eroding ‘perceived well-being and identity development’.
Methodology
This article uses analytical retroactive autoethnography to explore ICT’s influence on a youth drama group. This qualitative method situates the personal narrative within a wider cultural context, providing the ‘unique analytical value of lived experience’ (Nowakowski, 2016: 1617; Smith, 2015). By employing a narrative approach to deliver critical analysis of past experiences, the interpretation of intercultural interactions is contextualised as the product of personal perspective as opposed to objective truth (Nowakowski, 2016). Contemporary ICT literature informs this narrative. The focus is on ethnic and racial ICT specifically, as these categories critically influenced my experience with the refugee youth group, from whom I obtained permission to write about the process.
The section following the retrospective analysis aims to demonstrate the benefits of a culturally responsive therapist by juxtaposing my narrative with a critical analysis of Thorn’s case study. The article then explores how Powell’s Embodied Multicultural Assessment Model, by using experiential engagement, can develop dramatherapy trainees’ capacity for cultural empathy and intersectional identity engagement.
Retrospective analysis of ICT
This section analyses my personal experience working with the youth drama group, informed by the ICT literature outlined above.
In the year prior to my dramatherapy training, I facilitated a drama group comprising Cape Town–based refugee and asylum seeker youth, culminating in the staging of a work-shopped play. While the group was not dramatherapeutic in nature and my role and responsibilities differed from those of a dramatherapist, I believe retrospective analysis of the process demonstrates ICT’s complex influence. It also highlights the difficulty of confronting ICT without knowledge of historical and contemporary cultural traumas, and without reflecting on how intersectionality informs interpersonal relationships. The group participants, ranging from late teens to early twenties, came to South Africa from Zimbabwe, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite differing nationalities, they shared experiences of encountering xenophobia, either personally or directed towards their communities. I hoped the creative process would help increase the participants’ self-confidence and agency, as well as building camaraderie.
I witnessed how the theatrical medium contributed to the participants’ development of confidence and agency through addressing xenophobic prejudice. One participant who presented quite shy when the process began seemed to experience increased confidence through playing the role of a powerful and authoritative South African. Creative experimentation with role highlights our ever-changing reality, encouraging fluidity growth, and rejection of rigid roles, coding and perspectives (Powell, 2016). The participant requested an additional scene for his character midway through the process, highlighting growing confidence. The workshopping process enabled the participants to incorporate their ideas into the script, situating their stories within a collective narrative, which has been shown to have positive effects on refugee community members (Hudson et al., 2016). The group verbally expressed pride in the final chorused lines in the play: ‘No African is a foreigner in Africa’, asserting their right to peace and dignity. However, I did not facilitate creative exploration of certain racial elements brought to my attention.
During a discussion around the work’s midway mark, one participant declared that white people were better than black people, being less prone to crime and in-fighting. Other group members verbally agreed, which I found jarring. I experienced the participants as highly insightful regarding xenophobia’s injustice, yet here was a demonstration of internalised racism that no one verbally contradicted. While I questioned their reasoning, referencing the violence of colonialism and various conflicts initiated by majority white populations, this did not seem to alter the participants’ conviction. I was uncertain how to pinpoint the roots of this belief and did not encourage exploration of it in our creative workshopping. We continued to focus on xenophobia directed at foreign nationals by economically disadvantaged black South Africans. I now recognise how unaddressed ICT supports such perceptions of black inferiority.
Social oppression by privileged groups can instil notions of inferiority in marginalised groups, diminishing ability to direct anger towards the progenitor of their oppression for generations to come (Tummala-Narra, 2016). The group participants originated from countries historically subjected to colonial rule; their racial perceptions align with tenets of post-colonisation stress disorder (PCSD) (Comas-Díaz, 2000). PCSD is an ICT variation resulting from a protracted assault on a colonised community’s sense of self through racism and cultural imperialism. This oppression can create alienation, and identity conflicts, self-denial and attempts to assimilate into the colonising culture. Racism alters perception, distorting one’s sense of trust, power and safety. It can encourage marginalised racial groups to project self-hate onto members of their own and other racially marginalised groups. This ‘horizontal hostility’ arises from individuals feeling unable to confront the group holding power directly (Comas-Díaz, 2000: 1320).
One can see horizontal hostility in economically disadvantaged black South Africans espousing xenophobic sentiment towards displaced and economically disadvantaged foreign nationals. South Africa’s white population has long benefitted from the colonial legacy of race-based oppression that led to apartheid, resulting in a nation struggling with injustices past and present (Adonis, 2017). The majority of white South Africans, due to economic advantage resulting from a legacy of black subjugation, not only lack geographical proximity to refugees that economically depressed black South Africans may experience, but also are not competing for limited resources. The organisation Africa Check (2018) reported that, as of 2015, 64.2% of South Africa’s black population live below the poverty line, compared with 1% of the white population. A black South African participant in a Human Sciences Research Council focus group on xenophobic violence explained:
Government is fighting against us, employers are fighting against us, and foreigners are fighting against us. That is why we fight them (foreigners), because they are nearer. They don’t support us in our struggle. (Sharp, 2008: 2)
The above statement illustrates a tenet of horizontal hostility; unequal treatment fuelling aggression towards those within reach, regardless of their lack of power. Meanwhile, the white financial elite promote differentiation between ‘our’ poor and ‘foreign’ poor to maintain a hierarchal system supporting their own interests (Sharp, 2008: 2). Resultantly, the bulk of overt xenophobic behaviour experienced by the group members came from black South Africans, encouraging stereotyping of black populations as inherently violent. Meanwhile xenophobia from members of the white economic elite proved harder to recognise due to the complex history of ICT that produced it.
Through exploration of the drama group participants’ perspectives, I witnessed the impact of cultural traumas past and present. Retroactively, I recognise that not only familiarity with ICT and PCSD as concepts could have strengthened my understanding of their ethnic and racial trauma, but also the need to confront my anxieties linked to the colonialist legacy.
Discussion
The need for ICT awareness
Familiarity with ICT and ability to explore personal ethnic and racial realities can facilitate dramatherapists’ insight into countertransference, and into perspectives clients bring to the creative space. Thorn’s (2011) case study exemplifies how a dramatherapist’s self-reflexive exploration of ICT’s influence on personal perceptions and emotional responses, and on the client’s creative work, can increase cultural empathy. Thorn details a 7-week dramatherapy assessment with Auriel, the sole black female client on a forensic ward, at a time when Thorn was the only black member of the multi-disciplinary team. Thorn’s engagement and identification of ICT’s influence contrasts the largely unaddressed racial anxieties and traumas of the youth group, highlighting how a lack of experience with these issues can hinder understanding of one’s own cultural context and how it intersects with others.
Thorn’s countertransference analysis demonstrates the relevance of familiarity with ICT. She examines her internal processes in relation to Auriel, supported by an understanding of how racial trauma informs her emotional response to her client. Gelso and Mohr (2001: 64) emphasise how such ‘cultural countertransference’ management is vital in therapeutic relationships where one or more participants belong to a marginalised cultural group. Historical traumas, including colonialism and slavery, have shaped contemporary Western forensic psychiatry’s treatment of black and minority ethnic groups, destabilising racially marginalised individuals’ sense of self (Thorn, 2011). Thorn (2011: 141) can identify racially charged countertransference in her innocuous-seeming desire to neaten Auriel’s hair; concerned that ‘wild’ hair would result in the white staff perceiving Auriel as ‘mad’. This concern echoes a history of dominant Eurocentric beauty standards encouraging othering of black hair (Maynard, 2018). Her insight into the roots of her unconscious processes and perceptions indicate the understanding gained through analysing discomforting ideas and emotions through the lens of ICT.
While Thorn increases understanding through exploring racially charged personal discomfort, I believe that unexplored anxieties regarding my privileged racial identity in relation to the youth group prevented the exploration of internalised racism and historical trauma in the creative space. Regarding ethnic identity, I readily acknowledged my Jewish group membership, with its fraught history of alienation and displacement, to the participants. I believe I was seeking empathic connection by recognising commonality due to societal marginalisation (Hays, 2008). However, I was also the only white individual present in addition to being director and facilitator, with authority over the rehearsal process and ultimate creative product. The intersectionality of one’s ‘aspects of self’ can be contradictory, the location of power and privilege shifting depending on the interpersonal interaction (Powell, 2016: 111; Sajnani, 2013). Walker (2010) writes how privileged racial identity can generate anxiety focused on historical and present-day injustices towards racially marginalised groups. I believe this anxiety contributed to my avoidance of exploration of racial issues during the creative process.
Thorn (2011) demonstrates the ability to explore both feelings of camaraderie elicited by shared marginalised identities as well as anxieties generated by privileged racial elements. She empathises with Auriel in feeling scrutinised and isolated within a predominantly white environment, while also questioning whether the darker-skinned Auriel might see Thorn as unable to understand her experience due to certain privileges reserved only for lighter-skinned black women. This dynamic stretches back to the institution of slavery, with privilege supporting internalised feelings of ‘superiority and elitism’, diminishing empathy and trust capacity (Hays, 2008: 63). Thorn’s feelings of racial anxiety and camaraderie demonstrate how assuming an entirely neutral position while maintaining empathic connection is impossible (Goldberg, 2011). Thorn’s identification and analysis of ICT-fuelled emotional responses diminishes their unconscious influence over the therapeutic relationship, demonstrating the necessity of competent cultural countertransference management.
Dramatherapists who develop awareness of racial realities are more likely to identify racially charged images and themes in their client’s work successfully (Mayor, 2012). Accordingly, Thorn’s knowledge of ICT provides insight into Auriel’s role choice in the creative space. Auriel invents the role of Prince Charles’s girlfriend from ‘the tropics’, a character Thorn (2011: 139) recognises as having roots in ‘colonial/racist’ exoticisation and sexualisation of the black female body. Auriel’s role choice also reflects processing of ICT through the aesthetic realm, potentially producing ‘imaginative identification and emotional catharsis’ (Alexander, 2004: 16). Such experimentation can increase appreciation of role fluidity and rejection of restrictive coding (Powell, 2016), including ideals internalised due to ICT. Thorn’s ability to identify how colonial influences informed Auriel’s character choice indicates how ICT awareness can enable a deeper understanding of traumas informing client creativity, encouraging the dramatherapist to assume an empathic position.
How might the youth group members have benefitted if I had approached the process with greater understanding of ICT? In therapeutic terms, Comas-Díaz (2000) promotes decolonisation for individuals experiencing PCSD, a process intended to correct cognitive distortions, enable recognition of colonisation’s effects, and facilitate increased dignity. Communities can begin rejecting notions of inferiority instilled by socio-political repression through rebuilding the ability to connect with others and establishing a collective voice. While I believe the group touched on this when they presented a united front maintaining their right to exist in South Africa, the racial ICT remained unexplored.
This avoidant approach to racial or ethnic discomfort carried over into my dramatherapeutic training. When I first began clinical work, my marginalised and privileged identities, their intersection with clients’ identities, and the accompanying emotions, went largely unexplored. In the rare instances when a client directly referenced Judaism, I did not reflect on my resultant discomfort in supervision or in session analyses. I lacked an integrated understanding of how even innocuous-seeming ethnic references can trigger powerful unconscious emotions linked to discrimination and ethnic cleansing (Dokter, 1998). These can activate a subconscious need to defend the self, potentially resulting in emotional withdrawal from the client (Adams, 2014). Contrastingly, Thorn directly engages with ICT-influenced realities and discomfort, utilising knowledge of historical racial oppression to analyse its impact on herself and Auriel. She consequently strengthens understanding of the culturally traumatised self and client while diminishing the corrosive effect of unconscious defensiveness on the therapeutic relationship.
Farther on in my training, I was able to recognise aspects of my drama group experience within the ICT literature my course provided. I wondered – if I found myself in a similar position with dramatherapy clients, experiencing racial anxieties and witnessing ICT’s influence over worldview, what preparation would I need to navigate these issues productively? Thorn (2011: 135) encourages dramatherapists to examine their identities and where power ‘has resided historically and is currently played out in society’. To promote this, I believe experiential engagement with cultural context and ICT during training is the key.
The limitations of intellectual understanding
While my training increased my conceptual understanding of ICT, this alone cannot ‘transcend egocentric and ethnocentric attitudes, values, and beliefs’ learned from a young age (Jun, 2010: 9). The British Association of Dramatherapists’ Intercultural Good Practice Guidelines stipulate that trainees must engage with their own and their clients’ cultural backgrounds, including how intergenerational cultural issues impact the therapeutic relationship (Bilodeau et al., 2016). During my training I familiarised myself with these guidelines and developed intellectual understanding of ICT through course readings. Yet despite this newfound familiarity, I retained an unconscious assumption that to be an effective therapist, my cultural context must be set aside to overcome personal vulnerability. While training courses can emphasise the need for awareness of one’s own worldview, this often does not solidify into ‘concrete strategies’ allowing students to deconstruct damaging perceptions instilled over their lifetimes (Jun, 2010: 28).
When dramatherapy trainees begin clinical sessions, they may lack experience in exploring intersecting identities and their influence on interpersonal interactions. This can lead to engagement in aversive prejudice, where individuals see themselves as embracing egalitarian ideas while simultaneously holding unaddressed negative attitudes towards certain groups (Neville et al., 2013). Dramatherapists unaware of cultural biases internalised throughout their lifetimes may recreate harmful societal dynamics despite the desire to support their clients. Powell (2016: 112) emphasises how awareness of and exploration into ‘conscious and unconscious stereotyping patterns and assumptions’ linked to cultural context can diminish their influence over the self and others.
The experiential training model
Powell (2016) agrees that intellectual understanding alone is not enough, and that lived experience can encourage increased tolerance of discomfort inherent within racial and ethnic identity exploration. I believe Powell’s Embodied Multicultural Assessment model, with additional focus on ICT’s various manifestations, could prove invaluable in helping dramatherapy trainees develop cultural empathy and increased self-knowledge. In her 2016 article, Powell highlights a dearth of research into embodied exploration of multicultural identities in dramatherapy training, and outlines a model geared towards increasing cultural awareness by facilitating group trainee exploration of intersecting identities.
Powell’s model utilises Hays’ (2008) ADDRESSING framework and Landy’s Role Theory to help trainees self-assess cultural influences and varying privileges and disadvantages afforded by their intersecting identities. The ADDRESSING framework explores how intersecting identities impact lived experience, for example, questioning how an individual’s cultural heritage informs their perception of gender roles. Hays’ framework challenges generalisation and stereotyping by emphasising the complexity of experience resulting from each person’s multiple intersecting identities. Landy’s taxonomy of roles allows trainees to explore the multiple roles they play linked to society, family and biology, noting which are visible and which are obscured (Powell, 2016). Creative exploration encourages trainees to challenge restrictive roles, preparing them to facilitate this for clients. Powell highlights how one can cease to play certain roles, which is sometimes unfeasible for an identity. Instead, trainees are encouraged to consider how others may perceive their identities, and societal internalised messages of what their identities mean. Engagement with how their identities influence interpersonal interactions can help trainees challenge ‘conscious and unconscious stereotyping patterns’ in multicultural settings (Powell, 2016: 112).
Powell’s model combines intellectual and experiential work. Trainees complete questionnaires and engage in embodied activities in groups (e.g. discussing roles in small groups, writing monologues for different roles, and sculpting roles). Finally, facilitated group processing sessions allow reflection on the experience and its ramifications for trainee group dynamics and clinical work. The model aims to develop trainee tolerance for discomfort when faced with personal privilege and traumas in interpersonal interactions, specifically with clients. Dramatherapists can benefit from investigating the roles they inhabit, increasing awareness of their influence on the therapeutic relationship and enabling the dramatherapist to play with said roles without becoming defensive (Powell, 2016).
Powell’s case studies demonstrate how the model encourages exploration of privileged and marginalised identities, and their accompanying anxieties. One trainee, Jeana, discusses identifying her avoidance towards exploring her privileged socioeconomic status, working with roles including ‘Entitled One’ and ‘Avoidant One’ in group sculpts (Powell, 2016: 118). Jeana voices how the sculpts’ physicalised nature provides greater clarity and relatability than merely discussing perceived roles. Trainee Nicole verbalises the feeling of having to ‘fight all the time’ to prevent her marginalised ethnic identity from disappearing (Powell, 2016: 119). Nicole identifies feeling racially and ethnically isolated within the educational system, as well as wider society, after participating in group sculpts. Powell’s case study participants found commonality in the ‘Fighter’ role, ascribed to identity categories specific to each person, while simultaneously being encouraged to recognise the complexities of their myriad intersecting identities. Powell (2016: 120) emphasises how awareness of visible and invisible roles can increase trainees’ understanding of their ‘fluid’ and intersecting identities and enable recognition of these same elements in clients. In addition, Powell’s model can help practitioners recognise countertransference linked to intersecting identities that mirror or contrast their own, encouraging a stronger understanding of self and future clients.
Studies have demonstrated how empathy can be enhanced and sustained through experiential learning that promotes an exploration of the intersection of cultural identities and their impact on intercultural interaction (Constantine and Gainor, 2001). Powell’s results suggest how models utilising dramatherapy-informed techniques can develop trainees’ ‘cultural response/ability’ through increasing engagement with cultural influences on the self and others (Sajnani, 2016: 5). I recommend incorporating specific discussion on, and creative engagement with, how ICT and its offshoots (including PCSD, horizontal hostility, and siege mentality) inform cultural perceptions and interpersonal interactions into Powell’s model. I believe this can enable greater insight into the origins of the emotions, roles, and perspectives identified and explored. Trainees can be encouraged to avoid generalisation by integrating knowledge of ICT into client observation and conceptualisation. Hays’ ADDRESSING framework emphasises how intersecting identities and experiences differ from person to person. This can promote recognition of ICT’s influence while rejecting assumptions that all clients belonging to a traumatised cultural group share homogeneous experiences or perspectives.
Conclusion
Retrospective examination of my experiences in conjunction with Thorn’s case study highlights the extent to which ethnic and racial identities and their accompanying ICT can influence interpersonal interactions. Ability and willingness to recognise and explore ICT’s impact can contribute to practitioners developing the cultural empathy clients require. This can reduce the influence of unconscious societal bias on the dramatherapeutic relationship. Consequently, it seems vital that dramatherapy training courses facilitate participants’ experiential exploration of cultural identities in conjunction with developing intellectual understanding of ICT. Powell’s experiential model promotes collaborative engagement with intersections of ethnicity, race and other group identities. This encourages deeper understanding of the trainee’s socialisation and subsequent relations with clients. By creatively engaging with our intersecting identities, with their respective privileges, disadvantages and traumas, alongside those of clients, we as dramatherapists can develop insight that strengthens practice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my Anglia Ruskin University lecturers for encouraging me to take my work forward, to Mandy Carr for her invaluable feedback, and to Gahlia Brogneri for the opportunities she provided. Thank you to my family who have surrounded me with love, and taught compassion by example. And thank you to my Drama Youths; may the future hold nothing but joy for you.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
