Brandy Brawner in conversation with Alok Srivastava

As a psychologist who has worked with acting out populations for 30+ years, I see the challenges and benefits of using video as a therapeutic modality from both an artist and therapist’s eye. Years before studying psychological theories and concepts, I was a filmmaker who learned the language and techniques of the craft as both documentarian and dramatic director. When I finally applied my skills to working with interested children, adolescents and adults, I often witnessed a profound healing effect. For even though the visual/aural medium of video is usually considered the domain of entertainment, commercialism, news and events, it has tremendous imaginative and therapeutic potentials beyond these more traditional categories. 

In this presentation, we will explore how the language of film (building improvisational stories shot by shot – changing angles, parallel storytelling, jumping through time and space – addresses many of the deep archetypal needs our society often denies marginalized populations. For people who find themselves restrained and contained by negative projections and shameful stigma, video therapy offers opportunities to stretch well beyond habitual limiting patterns and inferior expectations, to break the bonds that tie them to a literal concrete world. If we use the language in conscious ways, with an intent that allows participants to move from passive viewers into active creative collaborators, then marginalized and “unseen” individuals can express many of their psychological and emotional needs on a very large canvas and what was once felt as improbable or impossible actually takes shape (on a screen) in the visible world. Video therapy allows latent inner qualities to find their way out into the world, taking form as images, sounds and role-play, which encourages self-reflection while simultaneously opening up ways for participants to be witnessed by external others. As a result, dynamic new relationships inevitably develop between once voiceless/invisible individuals (who now have voices and faces) and members of a variety of communities.

About the Speaker: 

Brandy Brawner, PhD, is a private practice licensed psychologist. He is also an independent film director (a feature film presently streaming on Prime Video), as well as a professional scriptwriter. Since1986 he has worked with emotionally disturbed children in residential treatment centers, both in special education and as a video therapist, as a counselor/video therapist with delinquent teens in group homes, as a Community Theater facilitator with the Resolve to Stop the Violence Program in the San Francisco County jails, and as a film and video teacher in a number of Bay Area middle and high schools. As a drama therapist and psycho-dramatist, he has facilitated thousands of therapeutic groups in psychiatric hospitals, including 8 years at the Langley Porter Institute, University of California San Francisco.

(Brandy Brawner at IMDB; http://www.brandonbrawnerphd.com/ )