DARJA STOCKER

I studied scenic writing at the Berlin University of the Arts and spent the following years working as a playwright for professional spoken theater. To research my plays, I conducted in-depth interviews with those affected and experts on the respective topics. I investigated the dynamics of intimate partner violence among young people and later turned my attention to the mechanisms of structural violence against refugees, homeless people and activists. I often spent weeks or months on research trips. Most recently, I was interested in how men who were affected by domestic violence as children volunteered for the military and became perpetrators. Another, more recent piece dealt with adults who were abused as children in monastery homes. Some of the conversations with victim-survivors were so overwhelming that I couldn't simply transfer the content to the stage artistically. After all, who would benefit from simply reproducing the power and control patterns? I therefore studied trauma therapy methods intensively and came across the concept of the “inner stage” in Ego-State Therapy. After intensive self-study, I incorporated aspects of the interventions described there into my artistic work. I created transformative scenes in which the inner parts and helpers of the characters appeared on stage and the protagonists no longer had to face the perpetrators alone. Since the end of my studies, I have also been working as a coach, mentor and workshop leader alongside my work as an author. The newly acquired knowledge about ego states was now also indispensable in this work. I later decided to learn the method professionally and trained as an Ego-State-Coach and Counselor. My experience as a playwright and lecturer proved to be a rich foundation for me during the training: choosing and weighing up the words carefully, setting up characters, initiating dialogues between parts, getting to the bottom of conflicts, trusting the impulses of the here and now - I knew all this from the theater. Like playwriting, ego-state work offers space to be creative and spontaneous and at the same time requires you to know and master your toolbox. I am currently training in “Somatic Ego State Therapy”, which specializes in working with people suffering from post-traumatic stress and trauma. The focus here is on bringing together the mental understanding of one's own history with the knowledge of our body, its impulses and deepest sensations. ​