Wilderness Wisdom for the Everyday:
Using Folklore and Myth in Dramatherapy

We experienced how people can be drawn together by myth and fairytale, pulled by imagination on to the common ground of human experience…By physically entering the stories, we were able to absorb the experience they offered into our very bones.

 

-Dramatherapy with Myth and Fairytale: The Golden Stories of Sesame, by Jenny Pearson, Mary Smail, and Pat Watts, (2013), pp. 29
 

Amidst the current crises and chaos of the world, the arts as a source of healing is a growing interdisciplinary area of research (Fancourt, 2026). Long before this current wave, artists’ intuitive sense of the therapeutic role that creativity brings has been seen through the development of creative arts therapies. As an alternative to talking therapies which are goal-oriented like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), expressive agency through creativity and imagination prioritises embodied and experiential therapeutic encounters (Pitruzella, 2016). 

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Dramatherapy as a psychodynamic approach uses the oblique image and story to allow for the unconscious and repressed to emerge in ways that can be blocked by direct discussion. The specific modality I am training in is the Sesame Approach begun by Marian ‘Billy’ Lindkvist, which is based on Jungian analysis and uses movement, touch, story enactment for a wide range of clients with mental health conditions and both cognitive and physical disabilities (Lindkvist, 1998). Exploring where the image and story lead client and therapist is a core part of archetypal psychology, where understanding our present psychic realities leads us back to our common shared humanity (Hillman, 1975). For instance, myths as part of humankind’s legacy offer up the images, symbols and archetype can amplify the internal turmoil within the psyche, with these stories becoming useful resources for therapists (Kozlowski, 2012).

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In a dramatherapy session, unlike an aesthetic storytelling performance, the therapeutic story is offered so that there is space where the ‘client’s unconscious mind will ultimately decide whether the story is relevant to his or her problem’ (Hammel, 2019, p.267). Assuming a role in a story is something that allows clients to have agency in identifying and exploring aspects of a roles that they might never have associated themselves with. While some roles are human and more familiar like witches in forests, others are animals like in The Bremen Town Musicians, or geological processes in the form of The Snow Queen. Maitland proposes that fairy tales offer us an experience to ‘laugh at the powerful and the frightening’ (2012, p.270), and this becomes especially true and freeing when therapeutic play facilitates the exploration of a story’s relationships. 

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Even outside the context of dramatherapy, stories that contain elements of wildness afford humankind a way of listening that moves one from the outer ear to the inner ear (Deardorff, p.116). From the Garden of Eden to the Legend of Redhill, tales are told to impart knowledge and an understanding of how we can navigate the world. Some of these stories warn of the need for balance, like Sedna from the Inuit religion, where human needs cannot supersede those of the environment that provides the sustenance that every living being depends on. For a therapeutic way of going beyond the duality of hierarchical and communal structures in society, we can change into ‘a consciousness that recognizes the need for affiliation, healing, balance, and inter-being’ (Murdock, 1990, p.183). In our times of ecological destruction and climate grief, inter-being extends to non-human beings that inhabit the world alongside us. Responding to these societal needs through dramatherapy, stories and teachings from the wild are especially useful for navigating an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape. 

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Living in the climate emergency of the Anthropocene, there is recognition in the Creative Arts Therapies of the need to align professional practices with the urgent ecological and mental health challenges in the world (Laughlin and Seabrook, 2025). Responding to questions on how individuals can seek mental health help for climate grief, Kathleen Little Leaf, who is a mental health therapist working with indigenous communities, offers the simple advice to honour the thoughts and concerns that we have towards the environment while we are individually in the process of accessing the mental health help we need (2021). While many individuals and communities may not have climate grief as a priority for therapy, the therapeutic qualities of folklore and myth may open some room for exploring and listening to the wisdom of nature. 

In the Catalan fairytale The Water of Life, the private world of four siblings expands to strangers who have been petrified in stone by magical forces. Their motivation was to bring wholeness to their own home by finding the water of life, and the element of water symbolising fluidity and flexibility works on multiple levels (Crimmens, 1998, p.113). Setting off on a quest to benefit their own household with the advice given by a wise woman, the sister accidentally spills some of the water and restores the petrified people to their human bodies. Going back and forth from the spring, she goes down the mountain path releasing people from their stony prisons until her own brothers are rescued as well. 

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Perhaps what we need now – more than individual self-care – is a recognition of how interdependent our lives are with each other and nature that is all around us. As a city-dweller all my life, there is a persist sense that I am estranged from the land and this connection may be one that urgently needs healing. Seeking out folktales and myths through my training as a dramatherapist, I am particularly drawn to the stories that contain wilderness wisdom and the widening possibilities for how we may live.