Roleplay

The purpose of it comes back to neuroscience

It can be very helpful to roleplay a conversation you might need to have or one you never want to have. It could be a conversation you’ve already had and you want to try it differently.

"Every time you learn a new fact or skill, you change your brain." Dr Lara Boyd

Fears for upcoming difficult situations are based on past experiences of similar kinds of conversations. These memories sit in the nervous system as sensations, images, fragments – and they are still open (not integrated) and alive because the amigdala (the danger alert part of our brain) does not timecode these experiences, it records the threat as real and current, in order that we are awake to danger.

Here’s the opening: since these memories are not fully integrated, they’re open to being changed if we give ourselves a different experience. So for example, if we respond with:

• Warmth instead of coldness

• Gentleness instead of urgency

• Understanding instead of isolation

and by naming emotions with warmth and curiosity, without trying to fix or change us, it reaches the amygdala. The nervous system goes, “Oh… someone is here with me now. I’m not alone.” And new neural connections form, gently layering in safety where there was once fear. This is how we resource ourselves with roleplay.

When you give yourself different experiences of dialogue to the ones you normally have, you are creating new neural pathways. It’s surprising how much is opened up by giving ourselves the opportunity to practice, in a low stakes environment. It’s very difficult to do new things in stressed situations that are already charged. We aren’t going to do anything different, we are going to do our patterns, the things we always do, we are going to do the things that have always kept us safe. So, a role play is a low stakes environment, where there are no consequences to getting it wrong, or putting your foot in it. This is a place where you can learn.

There are different ways you can do it.

·       Your partner can role play the other person as a) realistic (resistant, defensive) or b) empathic.

·       You can be the other person in the role play and you role play from their perspective.

·       You can ask two people to have the conversation so you are witnessing. You get to see someone else holding your perspective which is helpful if you are feeling very alone with the issue.

I tend to advocate for doing an empathic roleplay (the first option) as the first step, after talking through your situation and receiving empathic listening. This is so your nervous system gets the experience of being heard, in a situation, where you might fear not being heard. This is a resourcing strategy to support you as you go forward. It can relax your nervous systems so that you are more resourced and grounded to have a conversation.

My Keep your NVC fit (roleplay) is a short practice so use this space to practice a smaller thing. It can be very helpful to roleplay expressing something to someone, or making a request and having it heard and responded to, rather than trying to unravel a complex or historical conflict.

It's really helpful to get clear on what you actually want to say so you can work with that in the roleplay. Tuning into Observation, Feeling, Need, Request, might be a resource for this or maybe you could have an empathic listening session with someone to get clear on this. If you don't know yet, that's ok, we can still work with that and I'll explain more in the session.

In this excerpt from Marshall Rosenberg’s book Speak Peace in a world of Conflict, he outlines how he utilises roleplay as a strategy in mediation, to model a needs-based way of listening and responding to someone you are in conflict with, and how this softens and transforms division.

So Roleplay can be an end in itself to create a shift within yourself, or to enable clarity regarding a situation, and it can also be a strategy within conflict situations.