How Psychodrama Therapy Rewrote My Family Story

Source: Priscilla Du Preez / Unsplash

I sat in front of my “real father” as he stared right through me like he always does. “I don’t see you,” he said in a stern voice. “You never have,” I whispered quietly back. “No one is going to hurt you,” my protector, a seven-foot burly Alaskan man, asserted in a deep, booming voice while sitting between us. I felt his bravado coarse through my body, and the tears started flowing as I expressed all the words I was never allowed to my father—my life’s greatest antagonist.

The saddest part is that it wasn’t always so bad. There was a time when I absolutely adored my father. He was all I knew—my everything. “Daddy’s girl” wasn’t enough to capture my love for him. I remember he would take me all over Seoul, snapping pictures on his film camera, dressing me up in 80s dresses in the 90s since Korea was behind in the times compared to the rest of the world back then. He was a girl dad, arranging bows in my hair before that term existed.

Anytime he had to leave, I would cry like it was the end of the world and yank his socks off so that he wouldn’t have to go. Maybe it’s because I was his first child, a girl, or because I look so much like my mother, but he loved and adored me in a special way that my younger brother never knew. He was my hero and protector until he became my greatest enemy.

It happened subtly at first. Who believes children anyway? His tyrannical reign in our household was normalized in my immigrant family. It was all about respecting your father, even as he instilled terror and embedded all that fear so deeply in my nervous system with just his menacing presence.

Thankfully, I also spent a lot of time at my maternal grandmother’s back then, in a house full of aunties who made me feel safe and secure and who always had my back. They were my mothers and protectors who weren’t afraid to stick up for me to my father.

But then everything changed when my parents and I left Korea, leaving behind our community, our people, and my greatest allies and supports. In America, it was just us versus the world. I was the first to learn English and quickly became my family’s translator, burdened with this heavy responsibility at the young age of 5. As I continued to assimilate and get with the times, my parents remained steadfast in their Christian faith and their Korean patriarchal values.

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when people immigrate. They’re often frozen in the time and space in which they left. While the rest of their home and host countries continue to grow, adapt, and develop new ideologies—the immigrant remains stuck and unchanged. My parents are mentally and spiritually in Korea circa 1994—while their bodies are currently in 2024 Los Angeles, California.

Adolescence is already tough to manage. Throw in some dogmatic, authoritarian parents into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. The older I got and the more I started thinking for myself and finding myself down paths my father would never dare go down in a million years, the bigger the chasm between us grew until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I spent my adolescence and early 20s running away from him until I just couldn’t. I tried therapy, no contact, family therapy, psychedelics like ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, and various trauma-informed modalities—but nothing worked. My resentment toward him and my hopelessness remained as tough as the shell I had to build around myself to survive.

Then, at 32, I found psychodrama therapy, which changed everything. I was able to reimagine the tableau of my childhood in my family of origin and created new memories that now live in my body and nervous system. I rewrote the story of my life, and this time, my father, the antagonist, became another victim.

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Psychodrama therapy is a powerful form of group therapy and role play that was popularized in Bessel Van Der Kolk’s Bestseller, The Body Keeps The Score. Individuals process their childhood traumas in a group setting by assigning roles for each other and acting out early (sometimes even preverbal) memories together, building new attachment templates for people with deep-rooted childhood traumas who feel like they’ve tried it all and nothing is working.

My story started out with my “real father,” my protector, and me. After airing out my grievances to my father, the facilitator asked me, “What is it that you think your father needed? Was it ideal parents or an ideal community?” Immediately upon hearing the words, I knew that’s what my parents and myself lacked—an ideal community.

When we came to America, we left behind the rest of our family, friends, and community. For many Korean Americans, the church is their main source of community and a taste of home. It’s the first place Korean immigrants go to find familiar faces. But the church is more than just a place of worship. It’s also a place to conduct business, market, network, socialize, and/or find a spouse.

The woman I asked to represent this “ideal community” stood behind my “real parents” and said:

“With me, your parents would have understood nuance. They would have had friends with children, who some go to church and some don’t, and that’s okay. They would have had hobbies and interests and people who understood and saw them. They would have had a life outside of church. They would have been able to trust their world. They would have felt safe and seen.”

I let those words sink in, and although I could have rationalized this before on my own, for the first time in my life, I could actually feel it—my parents were just victims, too. My dad was just as scared as I was, and the only way he could feel powerful was to exert his dominance as the father over us. He was just another victim of patriarchy that asserts that this is how a man should show up in the world.

“Maybe you need to feel what it’s like to have an ideal father,” the facilitator suggested next. “What does that look like?” I laughed. “Let’s try it out,” she said. “Can we ask your protector to transition into the role of your ideal father?”

“Sure,” I said, a little scared of what this was going to turn into.

“How would you sit with your ideal father?”

I truly had no idea. “I’m not sure,” I replied.

“What if you try sitting on his lap?”

“Um, I don’t know. This feels a little weird,” I hesitated.

One of my group members chimed in at that moment and repeated a quote we had been echoing throughout the weekend by Bayo Akomolafe. “The way is awkward, not forward.”

“Okay,” I sighed as I climbed onto this gentle giant’s lap, resting my body against his. He was a father himself and immediately knew what to do. He cradled me in his arms and started rocking me and singing a lullaby. At first, I was laughing at the image of myself, a grown but small five-foot woman in her 30s, being rocked like a baby by a man just a few years older than her. But then, as I let myself relax, the laughter turned into sobs as I let myself sink into his arms, and our breaths became one—co-regulating, calming my nervous system the way one does with a newborn.

My left brain obviously knew this wasn’t real. This wasn’t my real dad. But my right brain, my body, and my nervous system needed to feel this—that feeling of being held and loved by my father.

I sat there crying while my ideal father said all the things I needed to hear. “I’m sorry. I love you no matter what, even if you don’t go to church.” The rest of the room and my group members who were crying with me disappeared, and it was just me and my dad. For a moment, I was Daddy’s little girl again. This was the love that I had been grieving and longing for so long, looking for it in all the wrong places with all the wrong people.

Although the moment was brief, it was enough to remind me that there was a time when my dad held me this way. There was a time when he was the one co-regulating me and helping shape my attachment. All of a sudden, my heart opened for this man who had caused me so much stress and fear throughout my life. We’re both victims. We both just want to feel safe.

At the beginning of the workshop, the facilitator told us: “Trauma says, ‘I need to stay hidden, I can’t be seen, I am alone.’ But grief says, ‘I need witnessing.’” As Gabor Maté, physician, addiction medicine specialist, and trauma expert, says: “Children don’t get traumatized because they’re hurt. They get traumatized because they’re alone with the hurt.”

In one weekend, a room full of 10 strangers in an Airbnb together witnessed each other’s traumas and grief and became the ideal community I always needed. I can’t say that all my childhood wounds are completely healed but this is the closest and most whole I’ve felt in my life so far.