Why Acting Isn’t Therapy Even Though it Feels Amazing

I had the great good fortune to hear an actor speak last year who said something to the effect of, “when I stopped using acting as an opportunity to express myself, that’s when I became an actor.”

And that– whoooo- I felt that. I felt that in my transverse abdominis. gutted. winded. sore. 

seen.

relieved. He did it too. 

This incredible actor (who I won’t name in this post because I don’t know what the legal or social implications of that action would be (I don’t remember signing an NDA before attending this talk but I’d rather not risk it) who turns in truly embodied, truly visceral, truly electric, exciting performances- he used to use his work as an outlet for his own shit. 

In some ways, I think I’ve always been using my acting as a means to release an emotional pressure valve. 

As a child I was described as “sensitive.” Apparently as a baby I’d cry so hard I’d make myself throw up.

I’m still a very good cryer. As a tween I had my first real bout of depression. It was around this time I learned to mask symptoms so as not to worry the people who love me. I adopted the stony apathy and black clothes of the goth kids– or tried to anyway.

Mercifully, that was also the year I tripped into the theater department. 

You know what? I wasn’t even supposed to be in that class. 

The Hand of Fate

Picture it: 2004, an LA suburban middle school, Green Day had just released American Idiot, and a tiny alt Faith is called into the office. She is terrified because although she dressed spooky and had some friends with behavioral issues, she was still an honor roll perfectionist with major authority issues (despite all the anarchy symbols she’d drawn on her converse).. 

Turns out, I just had to pick a new elective. Due to some clerical error, the class I wanted had filled up but there were still open slots in three other classes: Autoshop, Underwater Basket Weaving (kidding, I just don’t remember), and Drama.  I decided on Drama.

Unfortunately, the class that filled up was Cooking II and I don’t think my culinary skills have ever recovered. 

At the risk of romanticizing my own life, I often wonder how different my life would have been if my junior high weren’t full of burgeoning foodies. If I never walked into that cafetorium theater, never took class introductions as an opportunity to say “hi!” in the most high-pitched, attention-seeking, squeak I knew how to muster– and then got praised for it, never threw a chair in my final, a performance of a melodramatic monologue about suicide titled “Lisa could’ve been president,” – oh what might have been.

But all those things did happen.

Suddenly I was encouraged- nay, invited to emote. For a masking neurodivergent  perfectionist is there anything more luxurious than clear instructions on how the people around you would prefer you behave? Is there anything more liberating than putting down your own bullshit and entering a trancelike state of play in which you are not yourself but have given yourself over to the possession of a totally other personhood? To delight an audience with- perhaps not shapeshifting… soulshifting?  Isn’t there a thrill in the reckless abandon necessary to take up  the circumstances of a character whose problems are usually much bigger than yours? 

Isn’t there something so seductively satisfying about being able to release your own emotions through the channel of your art?

The bad days, the dark side of this coin is what happens when the work doesn’t come. When you aren’t invited.

Out of Work and Emotionally Constipated

By the time I was pursuing my career in Los Angeles, I was all but dependent on acting as a means to emote– to release the pressure valve.

Predictably, that was a disastrous way to approach a career in showbiz. As I discussed in my first blog post, there’s just rarely enough work for that to be a good idea. I used to moan to my friends about feeling emotionally constipated when I wasn’t working. 

Acting isn’t therapy, even if it feels like it sometimes. Yes, it can function as a release valve, but clearly I needed to develop some new coping mechanisms that empowered me to take care of my own shit no matter what was happening in my career. 

The mystery actor in the Q&A went on to elucidate that. as an actor, you are “taking advantage of yourself by sharing with people who are not responsible to that part of you.”

In therapy, when you spill your guts, there’s a trained professional who can help you cope and recontextualize. If you go too deeply into your shit during a theatre rehearsal, I sure hope there’s a great, sensitive director or somebody on set to help pull you out, but it’s not guaranteed– and ultimately it’s not their job. God help you if it happens on a film set and you need to reset for another take.

Acting might feel like therapy because it feels like an opportunity to express ourselves but your coworkers are not responsible to that part of you. The audience certainly isn’t. We exploit ourselves, we take advantage of ourselves when we dredge up unprocessed personal shit– and that hurts us more than it helps the scene.

Every time.