Heidi Jackson is a graduate of Lesley University’s Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Drama Therapy program (2023) and a Licensed Associate Professional Counselor and Provisionally Registered Drama Therapist (anticipated full RDT May 2025) in Monmouth County, NJ. A lifelong theatre and film performer, teaching artist, collaborator of original theatre pieces, and explorer of negotiating with embodiment, relationship and the vulnerability of both, Heidi came to her professional DT training after a long break from school, a full life as an NYC actor, birthing twins, moving all over the country and a ton of life. Heidi has worked in places as diverse as a therapeutic boarding school, court systems and public schools; indie films, fringe theatre, tv, and co-hosting a national live tv game show. She currently works as a full time clinician at Integrated Care Concepts and Consultation in their Integrated Adolescence PHP and IOP programs, working with clients from ages 12 to 18 and their families, utilizing often playful, trauma-informed therapies, through a drama therapy, relational lens. Heidi is especially interested in grief, love, how to find a way in to repair amongst the broken and how an embodied approach can help find the “back door in” to connection to self and others.
Heidi's Presentations
Workshop
A Back Door Into Connection
The Use of Drama Therapy Techniques for an Embodied and Potentially More Joyous Family Therapy
Drama therapy is an embodied healing art which works to make what is internal, external, always active and in relation to. In working with families, it can be remarkably effective to help find a back door, a softer way, into connection, in however big or small ways. Drama therapy and applying its core processes can do this, and because it is rooted in the body, it can allow participants and families to not just rewrite their stories, but to begin to live new stories in the here and now. New family narratives can be woven through embodied, enacted, creative expressions. In a family, the body experience is always in negotiation-how do we embody ourselves in the same space and tolerate it, find “refuge” in it no less, especially when being in the body can feel so dangerous for kids and parents carrying around so much trauma and even simply the reality of being a human in a body? Families often find relating to each other excruciating, but trudging through, acting through, playing through-however haltingly- can be the door through which we reach one another.
This dynamic and experiential workshop will highlight the use of the seven core processes of drama therapy as well as specifically use of therapeutic theatre creation as described in the Coactive Therapeutic Theatre Model (Wood & Mowers, 2024). Real lif examples and opportunities to play with one another will offer a chance to experience how these techniques integrate with the concept of interbeing in families and how we, as clinicians can hopefully create a more joyful embodied, love-filled family therapy experience.
