The second biggest pillar of my early training was play therapy. I probably did more play therapy than anything else during grad school because I had a part time job placed in an elementary school treating about 15 children per week.
Children taught me a lot about how to bring spontaneity and playfulness into my work. Children will not put up with a neutral, distant person and will tell you whether you are doing right by them, whether you like it or not. If you listen, they will teach you how to be the therapist they need, but you still need to play and experiment for them to know "yes, more" or "no."
When I was thrown into play therapy, I never really received any clear instruction on how to be therapeutic. I even took a semester-long class on child therapy but didn't learn a thing about technique, just a bunch of theory. Now, it is true that some of the developmental and dynamic theories were informative and I found that children's imaginative play often paralleled real-life themes. For example, one five-year-old only watched Lion King up to the point of the father's death and then rewound the tape over and over again. Other children play out generalized themes of powerlessness, fear, family stress, social stress, anger or sadness. But, this work was plodding and it was often difficult to know how to make this play helpful in the real world. Furthermore, many young children quickly grow out of pretend play beginning around age 7 and move into board games and other rule bound games.
It was through hours of playing Uno and Sorry and Trouble that I began to understand that children at this stage were practicing a variety of skills: turn-taking, following the rules, reciprocity, fairness, impulse control, controlled aggression, good sportsmanship, decision making, frustration tolerance, planning, etc. I really began to understand moment to moment activities in terms of what skills or neuro-cognitive functions were being expressed and exercised.
I also had the amazing fortune of learning Ross Greene's Collaborative Problem Solving Approach early on and co-led parenting groups with him in an outcome study comparing his approach to Russell Barkeley's Defiant Child approach, which is a classic behavior management approach. I was beginning to see behavior as being the shaped by external reinforcements (as highlighted in behavior management), neurocognitive drives and deficits (Ross Greene), and internal psychic and relational drives (psychodynamic).
I was becoming more and more interested in diving deep into the moment-to-moment world of play and overlaying these paradigms onto the immediate behaviors and experiences. I started to care more about how things are being said and done versus what was being said or done. In fact, I rarely ever asked children how they were doing or bothered with helping them "open up." Instead, I just played as hard as I could. I tried to really imagine all of the imaginary actions happening between characters. I competed in board games with gusto. I began to figure out what the issues were as they emerged in moment to moment play and tried to figure out ways to correct them without leaving the play.
This obsession with the moment to moment process has carried with me throughout my work and remains a core aspect of how I work and what makes me effective. I listen and observe on so many levels at once: what's being said or done, how, when, why now, how it's connected to history or to other relationships, what's the deficit or the struggle, what's the yearning or aspiration, what's the hurt and pain?
In future posts, I'll give a nod to cognitive-behavioral approaches and then spend a lot more time on modern relational approaches as applied to individual and family work.