Thank you so much for joining me for this next segment of the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. This one is just you and I back in conversation and I wanted to revisit the topic of parents and caregivers. I know throughout this podcast series there have been a handful of episodes that have been dedicated to supporting parents and caregivers.
But this particular time I want to hone in a little bit more on regulating parents and caregivers. I get asked this question a lot. It’s one of the most common questions that comes up in trainings or people will reach out to me and request this.
We spend so much time talking about regulation for the child and how play therapy can support regulation for the child and I just don’t hear as much conversation about, well, what about the parents? We know that they need to be involved. We know that it’s essential for them to have a part in the healing journey of the child. And some clinicians have the parents and caregivers in the room, some do a little bit of that and then also sometimes just work individually with the child.
Some just make sure that they’re connecting with the parents and caregivers regularly. Now, having said that, I also know that there are some circumstances where access to the parent and caregiver is really tricky and so there might not even be a lot of communication with them. I think that in general, as a field, we understand that it really is important that we are working with the parents and caregivers.
But when we’re working with them, what are we doing? In addition to helping them understand what their child is exploring in the play therapy process or to help them understand how we are working towards achieving the goals that have been set therapeutically? What else are we doing? And that’s what this conversation is about because I just think really holding a lens that we are not only the external regulators for the child in their own processing, but we’re actually also that for the parents and caregivers. And that language, if that’s the first time you’ve heard that language from a Synergetic Play Therapy perspective, we believe that the therapist is the external regulator that that’s their primary role clinically so that they can support a couple of things. One is the child being able to modulate the intensity of the thoughts and the emotions and the body sensations, et cetera, that are coming up as they’re working through the things that have been challenging, but also recognizing that there is an integral part of that that supports the child to move more easily towards this challenging.
Information for Trauma integration. And also in that and I’m saying this because we’re going to translate this over to the world with parents and caregivers here in just a minute, that part of the responsibility of being an external regulator is not just the therapist does something for the child. The therapist is also doing something within themselves as well so that they can engage in a co regulatory process which is different than I am going to just regulate you.
It is more of and we are going to regulate together and that is super important. I wish I could say that I was the one that created the term external regulator but I didn’t. It’s actually adapted from Dr. Alan Shore’s works and his writings on being a regulator for like the parent is a psychobiological regulator for the child. And I said I’m going to translate this over to parents because from my belief, we’re doing the same process with parents and caregivers. So let’s start to break this down.
When we first interact with a parent or a caregiver, they’re coming into our lives because something challenging has happened, right? They’re bringing their child to therapy because something’s not going well. Maybe it’s at school. Maybe there has been a trauma that’s happened.
Maybe there has been something that’s happened in the family system that is really impacting the whole family or impacting the child. Maybe the child is struggling internally in some ways. Maybe there are other issues that are arising such as maybe the child they’ve learned that the child has some sensory processing needs or maybe they’ve discovered that the child has some significant food allergies and it’s creating fear.
Or there’s so many reasons. But every one of those reasons that I just mentioned and every other reason you could think of impacts the parent and the caregiver because the parent and caregiver is connected with the child. And so there is a high probability that the parent or caregiver is showing up in some form of their own dysregulation.
Maybe they’re in shock, maybe they’re in disbelief. Maybe they’re in denial which by the way, does have its own corresponding dysregulated affect in the system. It’s a bit more checked out, it’s a bit more hypo.
Maybe there’s a significant amount of grief with what’s going on and then we know that the body holds the grief and expresses the grief. So maybe there’s anger and frustration. Maybe the parent or caregiver is just super annoyed with their child or super frustrated or even at times like wishing that their child wasn’t actually their child.
I think that’s important to name because sometimes that’s true for some of the parents that we work with. But my point is that they’re coming in and they are needing something too. It’s not just they’re coming in to tell us about the kid and then everything’s about the kid.
We’re also there to support the parent in their own experience of whatever is going on with the kid. Now, I’m going to bring in the concept of the setup or the offering from Synergetic play therapy. Because what we understand is that when we are in relationship with someone, our nervous systems say hello to each other.
And what that means is that the parent or caregiver, as they are communicating, as they’re expressing, as they’re sharing their concerns, as they are engaging with us, we’re going to feel it. We’re going to feel what’s going on inside of them. We may feel their agitation.
We may feel some of the anxiety that they’re holding. This idea of the offering is that an individual will set, in a sense, another individual up to experience how they are experiencing the world, how they’re experiencing themselves in that moment. Let me give a really perfect example that I think a lot of play therapists will relate with.
So a parent or caregiver comes in and they say something like, oh, we’ve tried everything. Nothing’s worked. And what you’re doing, it’s not working either.
Or I’m not sure if what you’re going to do is going to work. If we just for a moment imagine being on the other side of that messaging, there’s a feeling of, oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get this right. There’s pressure to get it right.
There’s pressure to what if I screw this up? What if I’m another disappointment right to this parent or caregiver? Well, if we just pause for a second and just get curious, can you see that that’s exactly what’s going on inside the parent or caregiver? They’re in such a place of self doubt. They feel like they’re getting it wrong. They feel like they’re screwing it up.
And something as simple as that language towards the therapist actually gives the therapist a moment of potentially understanding what’s going on inside of the caregiver. And when we talk about the need for regulation, it starts right here. Because I don’t know of a play therapist when that lands in their system where they’re not going to get slightly activated in some way.
Now, that doesn’t mean that they take it personally, but there’s still an activation, right? You feel it. And so if we are working with parents and caregivers and we are dismissing and that is the word that I really want us to focus on, we are dismissing the impact that we are experiencing in our own bodies. We are dismissing the felt sense that’s arising inside of us.
We’re dismissing the overall experience of, again, what it feels like emotionally to be with this parent. We are two things. Number one, going to have a really hard time attuning to this parent.
And number two, our body is going to get activated and dysregulated and we’re not going to tend to it, which means that we’re going to have a harder time being present and actually modulating the intensity that’s arising in our own bodies. Very similar to what we’re doing with the children in the playroom, where our role is to help modulate the intensity that’s going on in their bodies and ours too, while we’re playing with them. But now in this conversation, it’s recognizing that we are impacted.
And my job as an external regulator is to recognize that something’s happening in me. And then the second part of that in that Dysregulation is to find a way for me to first regulate myself. So how do I do that? Maybe it’s taking a breath as I acknowledge what those words felt like as they landed in me.
Maybe it is taking a pause. Maybe it is grabbing a sip of water so that I can feel the coolness of the water go down my throat and orients me back into my body for some grounding. Maybe it’s actually naming out loud something around, wow, there’s a lot of pressure here.
It sounds like you’re really worried that I’m going to get it wrong. Yeah, I hear that. I feel that, right? I feel that you really don’t want me to not be able to figure this out.
And that’s a lot of pressure. It’s a lot of expectation that’s happening right here for yourself and for what we’re about to do in therapy. So maybe it’s naming it.
There’s so many different ways that we can begin to connect. And from there, as we are now in a sense connected or regulated in our activation, it is really only at this point that we can now become an external regulator for the parent. Okay, so now I want to shift our conversation into what does this now look like if we’re going to teach parents how to become external regulators because that’s really where I really want to land in this conversation with you.
So one of the things that I have seen over the years pretty consistently is that oftentimes play therapists ask parents and caregivers to do things that they have zero template for. So what do I mean by that? I mean that they’ll make a suggestion such as, okay, so this weekend I really want you to spend some really connected time with your kid. Now as play therapists, we know what that means.
We have a sense of what that language means. But some parents may have no clue what you just said. When we say, oh, some real connected time or just really be together, we know that we’re talking about attuned focused attention where you are really paying attention to the child and really helping them feel that you’re there and that you’re interested and that they’re important.
We know that’s what that means. But for someone that hasn’t had that experience, hasn’t had someone connect with them before, what they might think is, oh cool, so we’re just going to watch some more TV shows together. Not to say that that can’t be a form of connection, but it probably wasn’t what you were thinking when you gave that homework assignment.
So we give parents homework assignments that they sometimes don’t have template for. Another really big one is to begin to share more about your emotions with your kid or have more dialogue in the home that’s centered around emotions. Well, again, if they have no template, what does that mean? You want me to talk to my kid about me feeling angry? What does that mean? You made me mad.
What does that mean? What if they’ve never had someone that’s actually modeled to them? How do you talk about anger? How do you talk about sadness? What does that look like in a connected way? So the first thing that we do when we are working with parents is we recognize a couple of things. The first is that we treat the parents how we want them to treat the child. So we interact with them and how we would love them to interact with the child.
Because of what I just said, we are creating new templates for the parents and templates that they may not have. So one of the ways that we do that, that I just named is we model it right? So us connecting to ourself, us becoming the external regulator, they get to feel the breath, they get to feel what it feels like to have somebody really attune and listen to them and modulate some of that intensity that’s coming up in the dialogue. They get to feel that that’s modeling.
From there, we can also role play. I love role playing with parents and caregivers. I find it incredibly fun if we can think of so let’s say that there is a situation where the parent or caregiver is just really struggling to they don’t know how to make reflective statements.
They don’t know how to do empathic listening. We may need to practice that, scheduling some extra time with the parent or caregiver to practice some of these skills, to practice maybe even certain kinds of play, especially if the parent is going to be part of sessions to role play with them, to teach them right, to educate them. Maybe what you’re working on is the parent is trying to figure out how to set boundaries at home and okay, maybe they don’t have a template for what does a boundary look like without just yelling at the kid and biting their head off.
So what’s another way? Well, role play, it’s such a great way to practice. How do you set boundaries right? What does the language look like? Another one that we do as external regulators is we educate. So I have been amazed over the years of how many shifts happen simply because a perception shifts.
So once the parent or caregiver has a deeper understanding of what’s going on with their child, it’s almost like there’s these moments where things just start to click because the parent then starts to engage with the child. Not from a place of oh, my goodness, you need to be different, but from a place of oh, my goodness, I had no idea this was this hard for you. And this is why.
Wow. I had no appreciation for or very little appreciation for how challenging life is or how challenging that situation might be for the child. So as we educate parents so from an Spt perspective, I educate parents all the time on the nervous system.
I do a lot to reframe behaviors and help parents understand that behaviors aren’t random and that really all behaviors are communication and ultimately attempts at connecting with ourselves and attempts at regulation. I try to help the parent make meaning out of what’s going on, to help them understand that everyone is learning and that it’s okay for the parents also to be learning as well as the child’s learning. And I do a lot of reframing and a lot of education for this reason.
Right. I really want to support the parents and caregivers in wrapping their minds around their child and their child’s behavior in a new way that allows for more spaciousness and allows for more connection. Because we all know that when we’re mad at someone or we’re blaming someone or we feel like we’ve had it with someone, there isn’t a lot of opening for connection.
We just want them to stop, right? We just want them to knock it off, right? So to speak. All right, the last piece that I am going to share here is that as we’re doing these pieces, whether it’s educating, role playing, modeling, I want us to have a deeper appreciation that partly what we’re up to as well is we’re repatterning the parent’s nervous system. So I want you to imagine this as the parent is sharing frustration about an event or an experience that happened with their child.
If our response is as we’re empathically listening, we take a deep breath. Gosh, this is so hard. I’m just going to pause this for a minute.
I’m going to take a breath. You’re welcome to take a breath if you’d like to take a breath. I mean, even as you’re talking and describing what happened with your child, I can even feel the tension in my own body.
This is a lot that you’re holding. This is a lot that you’re carrying. I’m catching a glimpse of what your life is like.
I’m going to take another breath with you for you. Can you just imagine the settling that might happen even just for a moment inside the parent or caregiver’s nervous system as someone was engaging with them in that way. What we just did there is we repatterned the nervous system slightly.
We put a pause in that sympathetic arousal and activation in the agitation and we created a moment of connection. Now, as I just said, what I said, those moments when I took a breath or invited a breath, I’m curious if you took a breath and if you did, you’re going to really understand the power of what I’m talking about. Because as you took a breath, even as you’re listening to this, you just connected to yourself, right? You just regulated temporarily in that moment in the midst of this whole conversation.
So check this out. We’re not even having a conversation in real time because you’re listening to this after I record this and I just co regulated with you. I think that’s pretty cool.
So the same thing that we can offer parents in the therapeutic journey with us is that we can co regulate with them to help repattern their system. And then what it does, which is so beautiful, is that the next time their child is agitated and overwhelmed and feeling frustrated, they have a little bit of an easier time taking that breath, creating a pause, which then does the same in the child’s nervous system. And then they then get to become the external regulator for the child where the child begins to have a pause, right? The child then gets to have a moment where they’re connecting to themselves and being able to experience their own activation in new ways.
So lots of parallel processes here, right? We work with the parents in a way that helps them then be able to turn around and offer a similar experience to their kids. We also work with parents. We connect with ourselves so that as we’re working with parents, we can modulate our own activation so that we can stay present, we can continue to be attuned with the parents and caregivers.
That is what I wanted to get into in this conversation is don’t forget our role with the parents and caregivers. We are just as much of an external regulator for them as we are for the kids. And so often we expect them to be able to do things and behave in ways that they literally have no template for.
So the question that I’m going to leave us all with is are we willing to do what we can to create the new templates for the parents and caregivers? And based on your therapeutic approach, how might you be willing to do that? That’s the question for all of us. Thank you everyone for tuning in for another episode from this podcast. I look forward to the next time that we get to be in conversation, which, as I say, that you might think that’s strange because you’re not in front of me.
But I just want you to know that as I’m talking, I imagine you with me, and I imagine being in conversation with you, and I imagine you from all different parts of the world, and I imagine the questions you might ask so that I can dialogue back with you. So for me, these conversations are very real and alive for me in the moment. And my hope is that they are experienced in you in a similar way.
So until till our next conversation, be well, take care of yourself. You are the most important toy in the playroom. And I’ll also add and also in the room with the parents.
