I started writing my thesis in October 2015, and if all had gone as planned, I would have completed in by May 2016. Needless to say, all did not go as planned. When I began spiraling back down into the depths of depression in January 2016, work on my thesis was put on hold along with everything else. It was almost a full year before life and medication changes made it possible for me to start working on it again.
I'm writing my thesis on serious play, and using that concept to bring martial arts into Expressive Arts Therapy (ExA) practice. For me, serious play is about bringing a playful approach to a serious experience or endeavor. A playful attitude opens us up to creativity and options that would not have occurred to us otherwise, while maintaining an underlying awareness of the seriousness of the issue helps to keep us from pushing too far. It allows for both cooperation and competition, and disrupting the status quo. It was through experiencing this training attitude at Valkyrie that I realized its therapeutic power, leading me to expand on a term already used in ExA to describe it. Through the use of a serious play approach, I am opening the door to using martial arts in therapy, particularly as an option for working with issues around violence, anger, fear and trust.
At this point, I am beginning to write the most interesting part of my thesis, the results section. I have finished the first drafts of the introduction, the literature review and the methodology section. As my primary methodology is a heuristic approach, the results section is largely based on my own experience and exploration. I plan on also including the results of some arts-based research conducted with some of my fellow Valkyries. However, I'm currently stalled. With the returned depression problems I've been having over the last couple of months, I haven't made it Valkyrie in ages in order to ask people to participate. I've also been lacking the motivation to write on my own experience, as well as the ability to think of what to write about. With yet another medication change last week and feeling some improvement (evidenced by writing this), I'm hoping that the necessary shift has begun, and I'll be able to get back into again soon.
While the stretches of being unable to work on my thesis have been extremely frustrating (and guilt-inducing), I think that in the long run it will actually make for a better final product. Faced with the first strict deadline, I probably wouldn't have tried doing the extra arts-based research with other Valkyries. Now that I know my next chance to take my exams won't be until June 2018 (since I won't be ready this summer), I can afford to take the extra time. I also have an extra 2 years of experience to draw on for the heuristic-based sections. I look forward to being able to dive back in and, given how I've been feeling the past few days, I'm hopeful that it will be soon.