A Creative Workshop Inspired by Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child” and its counterpoint - the play of Martin Miller “Legacy”
6 June 2025, Friday, from 10.00 to 17.00, Sofia, Hungarian Cultural Center
*The workshop will be held in English with possible Bulgarian translation
* In cooperation with the Hungarian Cultural Institute
———-
This immersive and reflective workshop is based on Alice Miller’s groundbreaking book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, which explores the hidden emotional wounds of childhood and the lasting impact of early experiences on our adult lives.
Following the play “Legacy” by Alice Miller’s son- Martin Miller, the expressive arts therapeutic workshop facilitated by Elitsa Velikova will initiate discussion and a guided process through the topics of parenting, transgenerational trauma and healing.
This workshop invites you on a journey to reconnect with the gifts of your inner child—gifts that were once used to survive, now waiting to help you thrive. Using expressive arts, journaling, and family constellation practices, we’ll explore how empathy and creativity can guide us back to the truth of who we are.
What if your deepest sensitivity was never a flaw—but a hidden strength?
Through a blend of guided self-inquiry, group discussion, and expressive art practices, participants will explore how early emotional adaptations—particularly the need to please, perform, or suppress authentic feelings—shape identity and relationships. Together, we will work to reconnect with the “true self” that may have been buried under layers of survival strategies.
In this course, we will be able to look at the processes and influences in our childhood that led us to split from our true selves and produce the behaviour or personality we would be approved for instead. We put forward only the things about us that make us loved and safe in the world, and in this way, we form our personality, which in its nature is fake. The rest, the“real Me”, we keep hidden.
We can only be authentic to the degree that we currently know ourselves. Our commitment to unfolding usually ends up being something that we have to take charge of and allow to happen in spite of the world. We end up having to sort through illusion to find what is real about us.
This one day process invites you to take the challenge of looking into what’s real in you - finding your essence again and allowing that to be shared with the world.
You’ll Experience:
• Art therapy prompts to uncover inner resources
• Guided self-inquiry exercises based on inner child’s work
• A supportive space for expression, healing & rediscovery
*** No previous art experience needed—just openness and curiosity
In this course we will look at:
- The false personalities we adopted as a child
- The compromises we still make that devalue our self-respect
- The hidden or rejected parts of us that split us off from our true identity
- Unconscious patterns of behaviour from unresolved childhood and transgenerational traumas
- The gifts we came here with and how to support them to come back into our lives
We will reclaim:
Our essential qualities – PLAYFULNESS, VULNERABILITY, INNOCENCE, INTEGRITY, INTUITION, LOVE and our unique gifts and place in the universe.
Who it’s for:
Anyone who has ever been a child!
Date: 6 June 2025
Time: 10.00 to 17.00 with a lunch break
Location: Hungarian Cultural Institute, 16 Aksakov Str., Sofia
Facilitator: Elitsa Velikova
*** The workshop will be held in English
Price: 120 BGN
To Register use the But button on the site!
Or write to:
Info@artstherapyinstitute.bg
Tel. 0888885306
Spots are limited – reserve yours today!
About the facilitator:
Elitsa Velikova is a psychologist and the Director of the Arts & Therapy Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. She has degrees in Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy and facilitates workshops, trainings and therapeutic groups all over the world.
She’s specialized in a wide range of psychological and therapy methods, such as healing of childhood traumas, holistic counseling, family therapy, self-awareness groups, creative therapies. She’s been the keynote speaker and facilitator in a number of countries, such as USA, China, and throughout Europe.
Since 2004 she’s been working with adults, children and couples in individual and group setting.
https://www.artstherapyinstitute.bg/en/
