Drama Therapy

Nat had been a Registered Drama Therapist since first affiliating with the North American Association of Drama Therapists in 2003. In 2018 he became a Board Certified Trainer (BCT) enabling him to oversee training for students of drama therapy particularly those who have chosen the Alternative Track as a route to earning their own certification.

As an RDT, Nat has worked with various populations including prison inmates, the elderly, veterans, as well as with individual clients.

He studied Drama Therapy at the Omega Theater Center in Jamaica Plain, MA and received his MA through the Independent Study Program at Lesley University.

Nat is a contributing author to The Heart and Soul of Psychotherapy, A Transpersonal Approach through the Theater Arts, Drama Therapy, Psychodrama, Transformational Theater, published by Trafford Press in 2013 and edited by Saphira Linden.

In 2004, Nat helped found AndStillWeRise, “theater that transforms”, a Boston-based theater company comprised of ex-prisoners and their loved ones.  ASWR is a collaborative theater project dedicated to healing, public awareness, and social change through empowering the voices of formerly incarcerated people by establishing a safe and creative training environment using a variety of theater exercises and therapeutic modalities.

For more than ten years, the company has used storytelling and acting to create performances and workshops that move audiences toward a greater understanding and sense of compassion for the struggles of individuals who have spent years behind bars and are striving to reintegrate into society.

Nat’s practice is based on the “Twelve Principles of Omega Transpersonal Drama Therapy:

  • Assuming health rather than pathology
  • Shifting the identity from a limited sense of self to the essential self
  • Embodying/role playing therapeutic issues
  • Making the unconscious conscious through symbolic/metaphoric approaches
  • Working with archetypes
  • Embracing love while holding all emotions as sacred
  • Creating a sacred space
  • Fostering an experience of interconnectedness and unity
  • Seeking mastery through self-discipline
  • Achieving balance
  • Identifying and achieving one’s life purpose
  • Creating one’s life as a work of art

Nat has taught Drama Therapy workshops internationally in Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand.  In addition to his affiliation with the NAADT, Nat is a member of the Creative Therapies Association of Aotearoa, (CTAA), New Zealand. He has contributed to chapters in two books that cover the depth and breadth of the field of drama therapy. In The Heart and Soul of Psychotherapy, A Transpersonal Approach Through Theater Arts, edited by Saphira Linden and published by Trafford, he co-wrote a chapter on drama therapy in prison settings with Dev Luthra called “And Still We Rise: Prison Onstage, Inside and Out” and in Edition 3 of Current Approaches in Drama Therapy, edited by David Read Johnson and Renee Emunah and published by Charles C Thomas Ltd, Nat co-wrote a chapter on the Transpersonal Approach with Peter Kovner and Saphira Linden.

He is currently a practicing drama therapist based in Maine.