Career
Trained as a nurse and social pedagogue, I worked for 10 years in a group home with chronically suicidal people, later mainly adolescents, and during this time I completed several further and advanced training courses, including Quality Management, Project Management, NLP, group analysis, first psychodrama courses, diagnostics, and so on. After a three-year „break“ from having children at home, I returned to work in 2004 for a children’s and youth welfare association in Berlin, where I am now one of the two managing directors. During my time there I qualified as a Psychodrama Trainer (DFP/FEPTO/PIfE) and as a Supervisor with a special focus on child protection and intercultural aspects (Berlin Ventre for torture victims).
Basic understanding
Psychodramatic work is fundamental for me. This means expanding the variety of spontaneously available roles (or possibilities for action). This opens up room for manoeuvre in social relationships. Competences and resources can be gained, better solutions for conflicts can be found.
With the help of
- situational representations
- visualisations, sculptures, constellations, scenes (systemic: „enactement“)
- inclusion of physical sensations
- reference to the immediate and wider environment (incl. values, norms, beliefs/convictions)
- change of perspectives
- trial action with concretely worked out steps of action in ongoing processes
the relationships between persons, groups or teams become visible and accessible for processing.
It is especially important to me to take social into account constructions such as gender, nationality, skin colour, etc. , including the resulting, concretely felt situation.
In team supervision and counselling as well as in organisational development, I accompany you with an open format and method (eclectic) in the preparation, initiation, implementation and evaluation of change processes.
I mainly apply the supervision concept according to E. Holloway, in which the change of perspectives and the joint development of a weighted expertise specifically related to the respective work context is central:
„To supervise is to look from above, to look at another’s work through the eyes of the experienced clinician, the empathetic teacher, the critical expert.“
(E. Holloway, 1995)
Other fields of activity
For many years I offered the open self-awareness Psychodrama groups and nowadays I give ongoing post-grduate Psychodrama Training course (in Berlin and abroad).
I participate in the psychodrama project "Traces of the Holocaust in the Present", in which a space is created to learn about the different ways of internalising experiences in the roles of „perpetrator“ and „victim“. This experience – at the site of the real events, e.g. in Auschwitz/Birkenau – can lead to an encounter with „the other“ and „the stranger“. The goal here is not reconciliation, but the opening of dialogue, through which some wounds can heal, new ways of living together can be found.
I am presiding in an organisation an organisation that works to represent the rights of young people vis-à-vis the German state.