Actors and therapy
Heather Graham
“Acting is telling a story, and you’re part of telling that story. In some ways therapy helps more than acting class. You realize why you operate in certain ways.”
Heather Graham [in our interview several years ago about making "Lost in Space"] expressed one of the most valuable and positive reasons for therapy or counseling: knowing your emotions and dynamics better, so you can portray being a human more authentically.
Therapy can also help with relationship problems, or painful life events.
Jennifer Aniston
Following the breakup of her marriage with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston said, “I believe in therapy; I think it’s an incredible tool in educating the self on the self.”
Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon and her husband Ryan Phillippe have been open about using counseling, and she has said, ”It’s always struck me as odd that people grabbed onto that story and made it sound so negative. In what capacity is working on yourself or your marriage a bad thing?”
Maggie Gyllenhaa
Like many people who use the experience as a strategy to know themselves better, Maggie Gyllenhaal says she began therapy without a “specific, clear, rational thing” that made her start, “but as soon as I did, everything in my life changed, almost immediately.”
She continued, “There’s another part of me working that isn’t the intellectual side – the unconscious – and that was not awake most of my life. Not actively. There were times when it would push through, but now I feel I’m really honoring it.”
Katy Selverstone
Actor Katy Selverstone addressed one of the concerns actors and other creative people may have [in the article Soul Workout by Laura Weinert, Backstage] – “I’ve heard people say therapy destroys your spontaneity, that when you understand too much about yourself it messes with your imagination, and your work is going to become less interesting as a result.”
But she disagrees: “I don’t think that’s true. My therapy was much more about not being neurotic than about being neurotic. Everybody is neurotic in some way, right? My experience has never been like, ‘You’re going to be like a blank slate, I’m going to strip you down, and you are going to be normal.’ There isn’t any such thing as normal; there’s just what is right for you.”
Claire Danes
Claire Danes also finds value in counseling: “My therapist gives me permission to accept that I’m human.”
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Jennifer Jason Leigh sums it up nicely: “I’ve been going to therapy since I was twenty one. I think the more you know about your own psyche, the more you can know about other people’s, and can play them better.”
See related article: Learning to befriend our demons.
related pages:
counseling / therapy [includes media sources of above quotes]
depth psychology
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acting and therapy, personal development for actors, entertainment psychology
Tags: emotional challenges, emotional toll of acting, personal development, self confidence.
12.27.05 | 
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