Parental rage: 'In the play, people get it right away'

In the play a therapist meets with four successive versions of the same patient. Four different actors play different parts of this person’s self: her child self, her adolescent self, her false self and her real self. As these selves tell their stories, we see “the resolution of the trauma, as the patient kind of comes back to herself,” says Harnden.

Harnden plays the therapist, and also narrates. Students in her graduate-level courses play most versions of the patient.

Harnden says the play is based on what she learned working with hundreds of families in acute crisis at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. Children from the age of four to adolescence would present as suicidal, or with other serious psychiatric symptoms. “We focused on working with the families to see what was really going on,” she says.

You Arrive shows the effect parental stress and rage can have on kids. “Their central nervous system goes into a state of ‘fight, flight, freeze,’ where the child feels chronically in danger,” says Harnden. “That can lead to neurological changes … They won’t be listening to the teacher anymore, they’re stuck in that state. The nervous system doesn’t know how to calm down, and that creates changes in the brain.”

External trauma — like a car accident, for example — can cause the same reaction, but the focus here is on family issues.
 

Harnden coaches parents on how to connect with their own trauma that they may be passing on to their kids. “The play shows parents learning how to calm down, to regulate their own nervous system before they regulate the child,” Harnden says. When parents are able to do this, many of the kids’ symptoms settle down.

Harnden, herself the mother of two boys, felt haunted by some of the patients at the Children’s; the ones the system had failed. Writing the play was a way for her to do something with those encounters.

It’s also a way for her to get out an important message: “We’re over-medicating kids, and we need to work with the families first.”

And theatre is a great way to share ideas, she adds. “I wanted to find a way to teach what I had learned, to make research come alive. And theatre is a much more embodied, alive experience than plain theory.”

As Harnden points out, most parents don’t read journal articles. “But in the play people get it right away … in a play format there’s emotion and the audience is engaged … It’s a much easier way to digest theory.”

This form of research, called performance autoethnography, combines the lived experience with theory. In You Arrive the theories and research around the impact of trauma are combined with a real story of trauma.

Harnden says, “We learn when we can connect on a human level …if we can tell a story when were teaching and make it come alive others can internalize it more deeply,” Harnden says.