THE METHOD

What Costume Therapy Is

Costume Therapy™ is an embodied methodology that uses physical transformation, role enactment, and facilitated social experience to engage identity, trauma, memory, and future orientation.

Participants do not merely explore ideas about themselves — they enter alternate self-states, experience them somatically, and observe their impact in real time. These experiences are designed to create meaningful, memorable events that can reorganize internal and relational patterns.

Core Mechanisms

Costume Therapy works through several interacting mechanisms:

Embodiment
Costume and physical transformation alter posture, movement, voice, and perception, allowing access to self-states that may be unavailable through discussion alone.

Adrenaline Activation
The method intentionally engages heightened arousal to support learning, memory formation, and emotional access. Adrenaline serves as a catalyst for change rather than something to be avoided or down-regulated.

Role & Improvisation
Participants engage in role embodiment and improvisational interaction, allowing subconscious material to surface through action rather than interpretation alone.

Social Field Engagement
Experiences unfold within live relational contexts, activating interpersonal dynamics that reveal and reshape patterns of self-expression and connection.

Interpretive Facilitation
The facilitator actively witnesses, reflects, interprets, and assigns meaning to what is observed, offering symbolic and structural interventions that support integration during the experience.

Trauma & Memory Engagement

Costume Therapy engages trauma through embodied action rather than narrative reconstruction. Emotional and traumatic material is accessed through physical and relational experience, allowing it to be metabolized as part of the event itself.

The method also emphasizes future memory formation. Participants do not only revisit past material; they create new embodied memories of agency, expression, and relational presence that can be recalled and re-entered beyond the session.

What Costume Therapy Is Not

Costume Therapy is not:

• A passive expressive exercise

• A purely symbolic or metaphor-only practice

• A self-guided or interpretively neutral process

• A regulation-focused or containment-dependent modality

• A replacement for psychotherapy or medical treatment

The method requires active participation, willingness to engage physically and socially, and readiness to encounter oneself through action.

Why Costume

Costume operates as material culture, symbolic language, and physiological intervention simultaneously. Changing what the body wears changes how it moves, how it is perceived, and how it perceives itself.

In Costume Therapy, costume is not decoration — it is infrastructure. It creates immediate access to alternate self-states and supports rapid shifts in perception, behavior, and emotional availability.

Ongoing Development

Costume Therapy continues to evolve through applied research, documentation, and interdisciplinary dialogue. The Institute exists to formalize the method, establish ethical standards, and support future collaborations in research, education, and practice.