Why “You Are Enough” Rings Hollow: Confronting Harm in Acting Training

By 2016, the life I’d built around acting no longer felt sustainable. Days were consumed by survival jobs, nights by theatre and classes at an acting studio, and my rare days off went to film work. What had once been my passion felt like a cycle I couldn’t escape.

I finally reached out to my acting teacher for help. I figured his experience as both an actor and studio owner would give him perspective. But when I told him how I was feeling, he responded: “I’ve never met someone who really wanted to be an actor who’s experienced burnout.”

I was completely devastated. At a studio where “You are enough” was etched on the walls, I was told that I wasn’t. Despite how hard I worked and how fiercely I wanted it, burnout made me the exception to the rule.

When my teacher dismissed my exhaustion as proof I didn’t belong, it created an atmosphere where my options were to be silent or to be judged. I could not have an honest conversation about my concerns or struggles with the very people I had chosen to be my mentors.

I was already struggling with imposter syndrome, and this interaction confirmed my worst fears. I started sifting through every positive thing anyone had ever said about my work and wondering if they were all just lies to protect my feelings. I wondered if I’d been deluding myself this whole time. My teacher’s words compounded the damage and told me that I was right to doubt myself.

Looking back, my reaction was less about me and more a reflection of the studio environment I was in.

Harm in acting studios shows up as humiliation during moments of vulnerability, weaponized shame, exploitive practices, favoritism, and boundary violations. It’s often systemic, trauma-exacerbating, and masked as “tough love.”

Early on, I read about directors and teachers like Patsy Rodenberg, Larry Moss, and Peter Brook. Every word about their reverence for the theatre and what a noble pursuit acting can truly be had me expecting this same reverent approach in my acting teachers. I had this image in my head of mentors genuinely invested in my growth as an artist because of a steadfast belief in what theatre can accomplish. The way these greats spoke in writings like Patsy Rodenberg’s “Why I do Theatre” or in Peter Brook’s The Empty Space left me with a belief that acting teachers were these almost mystical oracles guiding us to become harbingers of a changed world.

In reality, the studio became an environment where an unwritten pursuit of approval was baked into every class. Students who gave the most unpaid labor and received the highest praise ended up cast in the studio’s theatre productions. Instead of focusing on the artistry, class became an ongoing casting call with our classmates as our competition. The focus in lectures turned towards who will make the cut and become successful (read: regularly employed).

There is nothing redemptive or transformative in reinforcing these negative patterns, and there is hard data showing how damaging it can be in artistic spaces. The practices of tough love, including harsh criticism and methods of emotional withholding or breaking someone down to force resilience have been shown to be damaging. A 2023 study by Anna Ramstedt at the University of Helsinki looked at these same methods in music higher education and found consequences spanning from loss of self-esteem and motivation to more serious mental health concerns such as depression. Additionally, this impacted skill acquisition, indicating that this strategy is not only damaging to mental health of the artists but also is an ineffective teaching method. 

These pedagogical methods of breaking an artist down have also been reflected in stories from notable actors. In a 2025 Big Issue article, Joanna Page recalled that the critical environment from her own drama school experience caused her to become more guarded and less vulnerable. Gillian Jacobs recalled in an article in Daily Actor how her time at Julliard “killed” her dream of a life in the theatre and the methods had her believing that she was “no good.” 

When we hear these stories from now-successful actors, it begs the question how many will we never see because they never recovered from the blows and left acting entirely.

The study Childhood Adversity and the Creative Experience in Adult Professional Performing Artists examined the impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) like abuse, neglect, or family dysfunction on working performing artists. Artists who had experienced four or more ACEs weren’t just carrying more shame, anxiety, and cumulative trauma. They also showed deeper creative absorption, more transformational creative experiences, and a stronger drive to view the world through the lens of their art. They were also more prone to deep experiences of shame and anxiety. Early trauma had turned art into a way of making sense of the world but it also left invisible scars and deep vulnerabilities.

However, two additional ACE studies, one from 1998 and one from 2025, also found that childhood trauma is linked to an increased risk of depression and anxiety, as well as higher rates of self-harm, suicidality, and long-term physical health decline.

After my teacher’s comments, I lost my motivation, stopped auditioning, and fell into a deep depression for weeks. I eventually recovered and returned to acting, but it left a deep wound that I have wrestled with ever since. Years later, I spoke with another classmate thought the teacher had said that to “push me,” that maybe he thought he was “helping.” That made it even worse.

Because here’s the trap that line of thinking creates: If I had been crushed by that comment and quit acting, then he could say, “Well, she wasn’t meant for it anyway.” But because I didn’t quit and found the resilience to continue, he could claim that his comment was the thing that “pushed” me. In both scenarios the outcome benefits the teacher, not the student.

This dynamic functions as a filter. Students deemed “weak” are discarded, while those who succeed despite harm become evidence of the success of the training methods. The few who achieve visible success become marketing assets, feathers in the teacher’s cap, while everyone else is rendered expendable.

It is deeply troubling when teachers respond to a plea for support by pushing students further into crisis, shoving them off the proverbial cliff, and then taking credit for their survival. Your students don’t survive the fall because you shoved them off the cliff. They survive in spite of it.

In the aftermath of that experience, I began to look more critically not just at teachers but at the patterns I had seen across many studios.

I became especially wary of the “guru” teachers who treat their studio or technique as sacred, as if it alone offers the truest and most grounded method of acting. I learned that those who viewed their practice as the “one true way” of acting had a stronger tendency to ignore the real-world struggles of their students. 

Over time, my negative training experiences piled up, not just as isolated slights but as the fabric of the training culture I found myself in. I’ve been the actor who worked three jobs to keep the bills paid while others got opportunities in exchange for free labor. I’ve been in the room where cliques went unchecked and shame became my constant scene partner. I’ve watched teachers exploit students by having them write plays for their community theatre and then stripping them of credit. I’ve seen boundaries crossed under the guise of teaching “vulnerability,” blurring the line between challenge and harm.

It’s insidious: Harm gets disguised as care. And actors, desperate for opportunity, give and give until they’re drained, only to realize the well was never reciprocal. While not universal, this pattern is shockingly common and often goes unexamined.

It took me years to unlearn that dynamic and to find the kinds of rooms that actually practiced what others only preached.

I count myself lucky because I did eventually find safe places to train. Safety came in the form of exploration with dignity intact, moments of failure without punishment or shame, feedback that didn’t undermine my worth, and transparency and honesty in casting. But it took three different states and nearly a decade of auditioning, coaching, and cycling through studios. Safe studios exist, but I’ll be honest: in my experience, they are far rarer than they should be.

In those spaces the teachers are working actors, coaches, or mentors who had already built careers and are invested in helping others. They are artists first who understand both the rigor of elite training and the responsibility that comes with teaching at that level. They are deeply intentional about the environments they cultivate, fostering both excellence and humanity. Students in those classes turn the grace and compassion of the teacher back towards their fellow classmates. It cultivates a truly collaborative environment where the work thrives.

When you're in a space that genuinely honors your humanity, everything changes. Grace is no longer something you have to fight for or earn.

Students deserve to trust that the place they’ve chosen to train will not weaponize shame in order to “push.” Most importantly students deserve a place to train that centers their humanity, not as a free laborer or marketing tool for the studio but as a whole artist and person. In a field that so often preaches empathy, integrity, and radical honesty, we should be demanding better. A truly safe studio recognizes the artist is a whole person and treats them accordingly. 

If “You are enough” is going to be on the wall, it should live in the pedagogy, not just the branding.