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Introduction
This reflective experience report explores a decolonial psychodramatic encounter with my inner child, catalyzed from viewing Ka Puna Te Wai, Ko Te Kāwai Puna (Rakena, 2015), a short film centering intergenerational connection and Māori identity. The encounter is recounted not as a case in the traditional clinical sense, but as a lived, embodied moment that exemplifies relational presence, cultural memory, and a turning toward personal and collective pain.
Psychodrama, rooted in action and relational truth-telling (Moreno, 1946), offers a method of accessing what lies beneath language, beneath time, what is unspoken yet fully felt. This piece is offered as a contribution to the expanding psychodramatic field through a decolonial lens: one that questions the supremacy of cognitive knowing, the dominance of individualism, and the suppression of emotional, spiritual, and ancestral relationality.
Narrative and cultural context
Watching Ka Puna Te Wai stirred a wave of distress in me. The film depicts tūpuna and mokopuna at the water’s edge, playing, watching, holding each other across time. But I could not feel held. I saw my child self, not in the film, but within me: a boy alone in a paddling pool, age seven, playing silently, unnoticed.
From somewhere within me, I stepped into the role of witness. I stood behind the child, not as a rescuer, not as a therapist, but as tūpuna. As presence.
In psychodramatic terms, this was a moment of spontaneous doubling. The child did not ask to be seen. But I saw him. I remained. I did not speak.
Ko wai au?
Who am I, in this moment?
Am I the one who left him alone?
Or the one who returns?
This was not a clinical exercise. It was a rupture. It was decolonial in its refusal to abstract the pain or convert it into growth. It was a return to what is still true: that a child stood in water, alone, and no one came.
But I can be present here.
Poetic witness: Ko Wai Au
Ko wai au?
I am the one who watches.
I am the one who was not watched.
Ko wai au?
I am the echo that finds its voice.
I am tūpuna now.
The pool glints.
The boy turns his head but doesn’t see me.
Still, I stay.
The pain flows on.
And yet, so does presence.
Decolonial commentary
Much psychotherapy, including psychodrama, has been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions: that healing is linear, that catharsis is the goal, that interpretation is necessary. But this moment offered something else, something older.
From a decolonial perspective, Ko wai au? is not only a question of identity, but of genealogy, land, water, and spirit (Mika, 2019). Wai is water. Ko wai au? -Who am I? -also means: What waters flow through me? Whose voice do I carry?
To witness the inner child without intervening is to undo the colonial drive to fix. It is to honour the wound without attempting to colonize it with meaning. It is to say: Your pain is real. I am here now.
This kind of presence is, itself, an act of resistance against abandonment, silence, and the internalized voices of imperialism that told us we were only valuable if we achieved, contributed, or overcame.
Implications for psychodramatic practice
This reflection suggests a shift in psychodramatic stance: from directing toward doing, to facilitating being-with. In group contexts, it invites directors and auxiliaries to practice non-interventionist presence when appropriate, to allow surplus reality to include not only action, but shared stillness.
Furthermore, integrating poetic, cultural, and artistic prompts (such as film or ritual) into psychodrama may support deeper access to ancestral knowledge and intergenerational material, especially for participants whose histories have been shaped by colonization.
It also raises ethical questions: How do we, as practitioners, avoid becoming new colonizers in the inner worlds of others? How do we recognize when our impulse to heal is really an avoidance of witnessing?
Conclusion
Ko wai au? I am still learning.
But I know now that presence is powerful. That standing behind the child I once was, not to change him, but to accompany him, is a decolonial act.
This work is not finished. It flows on, like water. And perhaps that is the most decolonial truth of all: we do not end things. We return to ourselves, to our ancestors, to the pain, and to the presence that was once missing. This is not weakness. It is wholeness.
