In the 1980s I had an illness doctors couldn't readily diagnose. This was California, so I got told a lot that it must be "mind-body illness" or "stress".

That wasn't total nonsense; my parents had primed me to be stoic and take abuse in relationships, and I had--stayed with an abuser for three years before I broke away, sick and exhausted. I did need to unlearn that vulnerability.

So I tried Psychodrama and Encounter diligently for several years, at Prometheus Center in Palo Alto. I made a few friends, I saw OTHER people change a lot, but the techniques seemed to give me diminishing returns.

So one day I tried an automatic drawing as a sort of oracle, to see if psychodrama was helping. Just turned off my conscious planner and started doodling in ink, so I couldn't erase or censor anything.

The result surprised me. It had done exactly what I'd asked for: laid out two possible therapeutic paths and where my unconscious thought they led.

The upper part is Path One. That little drooping dripping phallic figure is me as a lonely single, sexually ashamed--thanks, mom!

The butterfly was the logo of the psychodrama theater, so the upper path surely means that community. What does it lead to? Ugly caricatures of my parents, and prison bars! I think my unconscious is warning psychodrama was just reinforcing my parental programming. Not ideologically--but I was an intellectual introvert in a hothouse of theater types. Buncha drama queens. They didn't respect me much--reinforcing my parents' message that I was unworthy.

Path Two, below, taking up the bulk of the drawing, seems to lead down into the dark, to face a whole group of creatures--a stoic stone child, a sensual friendly catgirl, a worried uncomfortable woman, a nature-loving horny centaur.

All those figures are straight out of recent dreams I'd had; presumably, aspects of me I was having trouble acting out--trouble living.

Beyond them is a dark dungeon with a suspension bridge over an abyss where monsters lurk. But a confident scout-girl seems willing to guide me, and that dark path leads out of the caverns into the sun.

What the drawing said to me was "For you, psychodrama's a dead end. Do dreamwork instead--lonely and difficult and dark though it seems."

So I did. And dreamwork came through.

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