Welcome back to the next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast I have with me. I’m going to call her one of our pioneers in the field. And I’m super honored and super excited to have our guest speaker join us today to speak about Filial play therapy. And if you don’t know who I’m talking about already, even by that little introduction, it is Risë Van Fleet. If for some reason you’re not familiar with Risë, let me tell you a little bit about her.
And then we’re going to say hello and get this conversation going. So Risë is a licensed psychologist, a registered play therapist supervisor. She’s a certified dog behavior consultant, and a certified animal pathology and behavior instructor.
She’s written many, many books, award winning books, actually. Animal Assisted Play Therapy, the Human Half of Dog Training, filial Therapy strengthening Parent Child Relationships Through Play, child Centered Play Therapy, a Parent’s Handbook, filial Therapy. My guess, listeners, is that some of you actually have these books on your bookshelves.
She works with children with families, specializes in complex trauma and attachment disorders, also medical issues. That was a cool thing, Risë, that I learned about you. Relationship challenges.
Even though she has such a specialization in working with animals. We’re going to save that. We’re going to hint everyone, we’re going to save that for another podcast down the road have Risë back.
But for today, we’re going to focus on her work with Filial play therapy. She’s received 20 National International awards for her training and writing. I really feel like I could just go on and on and on in this introduction.
So let’s just go ahead and do that introduction. Hi, Risë. It’s wonderful to be here and I appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, thank you so much. So filial therapy, when I think of that, I think of you. I think of the gurneys as well.
But I know that you really have taken you’d learn directly from them and you’re really the pioneer with it now in the world. And so let’s talk about filial, shall we? Sure. We’re talking because we know what it is.
Someone else may not be aware of what we’re talking about. Will you lead us a little bit into your journey with the Gurneys and then how things have come to be what they are. Okay, sure.
I’ll try to be sure. I tend to talk too much, so I’ll try to be succinct. It’s not a word that’s usually associated with me.
After my master’s degree, I worked for several years in mostly residential programs. I was the head of a multicounty program, a very large residential program for both children and adults, and it was very behavioral in orientation. The staff were great.
They really knew their stuff in terms of behavioral interventions. But I started watching the various residents and thought, we’re missing some things here, mainly emotions and relationships. And they had both.
Everybody has both. So I also had a part time job doing some therapy on the side, just very, like, 10 hours a week. And I started getting marital therapy clients, and I realized I didn’t really know very much about marital therapy.
So a workshop came up with Bernard Gurney. I went to it, and I was so impressed. And Gurney is known more now for the relationship enhancement family therapy set of interventions, of which filial is a part.
But what really impressed me is we broke into small groups, and we practiced skills, and people gave us individualized feedback. I also really liked the model, which maybe we’ll talk briefly about, but I just found it really resonated with me. So I had decided to go back to school to get my doctorate.
I got into several clinical psych programs, which were hard to get into and what I thought I wanted. But I had applied to Penn State, where Bernie was, because I thought, this guy has something that I’m interested in that feels like it’s missing from a lot of the other things that people do in this field. And so even though I got into the other programs, I decided to go to Penn State specifically to study with Bernie, Bernard G. Gurney Jr. And I went there. I visited all the other schools, but I decided they weren’t quite what I was after.
And I did find out that I could be licensed as a psychologist if I jumped through a few extra hoops along the way. So that’s why I chose to go there. Bernie was I was assigned to him for my assistantship and helped him out with a lot of the relationship enhancement courses.
He said, you really ought to take my wife Louise’s course on filial therapy. And my first reaction was, nah. I had always loved kids, but I had never thought about working with them other than, like, in the residential setting.
But he, you know, if you’re going to be a family therapist, you ought to know a little bit about kids. So I did take her course, and the reason I balked at it, it was like a three semester course, and then I knew that other students, by the end, you’re running filial groups and it lasted more than three semesters. So that was my I thought I was on a track to do more work with people with serious mental illness.
However, I had my first Child Center Play Therapy client, which was supervised all the way through, and I think about three sessions in, it was like she was playing out her stuff already, and I was so amazed at that. So I eventually, not eventually was rather sudden, switched over to looking much more at child and family kinds of interventions and research and all of that. And so I got to study a whole lot with Louise as well.
I think I’m one of the few remaining people. There’s a few others who have studied extensively with both Bernie and Louise, and they both brought different pieces to what Filial therapy really is all about. And I was very fortunate.
Bernie died a few years ago. Louise is still alive, and I’m still in touch with her, but they were great mentors. But what I really loved was I left that initial training feeling competent, and you don’t always get that when you go to grad school, and I’ve heard that from many people.
So that started my journey on Filial therapy. And even when I was at Penn State, still working on my doctorate, bernie had me teaching faculty from other universities. I got to travel back then and also helping out and training the higher level students that were going through his courses as well.
So I’ve had a lot of different experiences through the years. For me personally, I love hearing that story. That’s something that I didn’t know, and it’s just a really cool story to hear about how you came into it and what a gift that you got to work directly with both of them, what a really amazing gift, and then what you’ve now been able to do with the work.
So let’s define Filial Therapy for our listeners. And I had mentioned this to you before we hit record on this. I hear Filial therapy, the phrase thrown around like, I do filial, as if it’s a catch all phrase to if you ever work, have a parent and a child together, and it’s like, no, that is not Filial therapy.
Filial therapy is a very specific model. And so would you share with us what Filial therapy actually is? Yeah, it’s a little hard to convey because it’s one of those things that unfolds in a practical sense for years and even now, and it’s been since the early eighty s that I learned it, even now, something will happen in a session. I’ll go, oh, I have that covered too.
There’s still these revelations about the method. The Gurneys, I’ll try to again be shorter. The Gurneys were both licensed, there were doctoral level psychologists, and they were trained in all the usual things at the time that they were younger.
And Bernie got this idea in the, you know, play. They both had learned play therapy and they actually really went through a whole process of looking at axeline and taking things apart. And they were both trained in a variety of things, but humanism was also part of it, humanistic theory was part of it, and interpersonal theory was part of it.
And as they teased that apart and saw how well play therapy worked with children, then Bernie had the idea first in the late fifty s, of if it worked so well with us, wouldn’t it work even better with parents? And at the time that was a very radical way of thinking. Most of the literature, and I’ve read quite a bit of it at that time, said, if your child has a problem, the mother screwed up. And thank goodness we’re past that phase.
But we’re not 100% past the idea that came next to Bernie, which is, what if we made parents be the primary change agents for their own children under our supervision as therapists? But what if we did that? And there was a lot of backlash. The very first article that came out in a peer reviewed journal was 1964. There were a lot of people said, who do the Burgers think they are giving away important psychological knowledge to parents who aren’t going to be able to use it.
What was valuable about it is that propelled research being done. And the gurney said, okay, they say parents can’t learn this stuff. And so they did randomized control research where they had people that learned to code the play sessions and they had trained therapists and trained parents conduct.
And the Raiders, the coders were blind as to condition. Lo and behold, no significant differences. And the world has changed a lot, but not that much.
I mean, they had the same problems and things that we have nowadays, maybe in a slightly different form. So that pretty much said, yeah. And I think that study was replicated a couple of times, so they were able to say, yeah, parents can learn it, and they got a great big NIMH grant and went on with it.
So what is filial therapy? It is this idea of parents becoming the primary, and that’s an important word, change agent for their own children. And how do they do that? They do it because we train them, we supervise them to the point where they are very skilled. And I too would say, based on my clinical experience all these years, most parents can become quite skilled because it’s not that complicated to actually have the play sessions.
It is not training parents to be therapists. That’s one of the things I hear people making criticisms of. That’s not it at all.
We’re still the therapist, but we’re helping parents implement this in their own situations. It’s not always what we use or what we would put in place first, but it is always a core for just about everything I do not always, but it’s theoretically integrative. So it involves I’ll run through the list quickly.
It’s in my books and writings if you want to read more. The first book I wrote about this was in 1994. It didn’t have all this in it, but the current volume does.
Humanistic, Psychodynamic, Behavioral, Cognitive, Interpersonal, Developmental and Attachment, family systems, and actually some community psychology is in there. I think I got them all, even though some of those were not in place back then. So family therapy was just coming into its own in the early 60s.
Cognitive therapy was still not really developed yet. But Bernie had that way of thinking. He was the brilliant theoretical mind behind it.
And he said, why don’t we take the best of each of these theories, make it more practical and put it together? So the way we train the parents, the way we interact with the parents, has elements of all of these. The way we do things with children, or have the parents do things with children do as well. And you might wonder why.
How do all these theories work together? Because if you look at the basic assumptions of say, psychodynamic and behavioral, they’re almost in opposition to each other. And the reason that we can put them together, and this was a brilliant part of it, is filial therapy is not based on a medical model, which most of our system still is. It was based on a psychoeducational model.
And that basically assumes that most problems, not all, but most problems that we encounter come from a lack of skill on the part of the participants. And even if they have the skill, maybe they don’t know how to apply it in new situations and so forth. So even if you’re looking at things, I mean, there’s things with biological, neurological, other kinds of bases, but sometimes those things are we know they’re intertwined now with behavior.
And so even those kind of things can actually be very responsive to filial. But Bernie was kind of primarily the humanistic, interpersonal family systems and developmental stuff that’s in there. The other theories play a part.
For example, behavioral piece. There are some behavioral pieces to child centered play therapy in that we have limits and boundaries and that kind of thing. But it’s also we use a lot of behavioral interventions or ways of teaching parents the skills.
So we’re going to teach the parents these skills. We are going to watch them live for a number of sessions until they get really good at using these skills, basically holding these nondirective play sessions, and then we will send them home to do it, but we continue to supervise them. Nowadays we can do video, and we got so many different things at our fingertips.
But back in the days, even when I learned it, back when we had three quarter inch VHS I hate to age myself, but in my mind I’m still in my forty s. And actually I’m blessed with good health, too. So what makes filial filial? And I’m being a little long winded, but it’s helpful to know the background of this is there are some essential features, and I do have those in the book.
I don’t know if you want to go into those now, but there are certain they’re like seven, I think, different aspects of filial therapy that make it filial. And there are other programs that are very valuable in their own right, like CPRT and so forth. There’s even a shorter version that I’ve created and some other people.
I mean, there’s several, but if they don’t meet all seven of those criteria, I don’t think of them. And the Gurneys, I don’t think, do either as being filial therapy. They might be filial therapy inspired or filial therapy adapted or whatever.
So I think it’s important for people to understand there’s a lot of elegance, I guess I would say, in taking all those theories and then translating them into what it really looks like in practice. And maybe we’ll get into some of that. But it’s all about from a behavioral point of view, which is where I kind of started, because that’s what made the most sense to me when I was my master’s program.
Everything else felt a little bit like, how do you know when to do what behaviorally? We often say change the environment, change the behavior. And of course, we’re not in play therapy focus only on behavior. We want to focus on the whole child and the whole system.
And so filial to me is how we change the environment. Because otherwise you can do the best play therapy work in the world, but if you don’t help change that environment that the child is in day in and day out, we can’t really expect those changes to last. I would love to go into the seven things that uniquely make something filial.
Before we do that, will you clarify for our audience? Is child centered the only model within a filial framework, or is filial therapy something you can apply to other models? Because that’s a question I hear a lot also. So let’s answer that one and then go into the if it’s going to be filial, it’s got to have these seven things. Okay, all right.
To be filial therapy, to just call something filial therapy does mean that you’re teaching the parents to have nondirective play sessions with their own kids, and you’re helping them understand. Once they get the skills to do that, you’re helping them understand the play themes, not maybe as in depth or whatever that we might go, but we want them to understand their kids better. So that’s part of this.
And then also they are going to have their own reactions. So what happens is the kids will play in a particular way. A lot of times they’ll play out family themes, and parents start to recognize that and go, OOH, maybe they have the mother doll yelling at all the other dolls in the family.
And the mother might be the one actually holding the play session that you’re there watching with her. And the live mother, the real mother might be thinking, oh my gosh, he thinks I’m such a nag and doesn’t like me and hates me and it could be very distressing. And that’s the other set of skills we need as filial therapists, is how to help parents.
And then that’s where some cognitive therapy actually comes into play, like restructuring the way they’re thinking about things with all of that. But filial therapy can be part of a bigger treatment plan. So because of the population that I work with and have supervised a lot of other people working with, sometimes there’s reasons why we might not start with filial.
I do filial therapy right off the bat if I can, but I can’t all the time. So sometimes we might need to start with some nondirective or even some more directive. And that’s a huge category, of course, as we know.
Play therapy just to kind of get conditions, maybe settle down from an emergency kind of place, or help the parents get to the right place that they need to. Be in to do this or help the kids. Just I’ve worked with a lot of kids that are truly I don’t like the diagnosis, the way it’s written.
Reactive attachment disorder. But because they are challenging even to therapists, some of their behavior is pretty wild, even in the playroom. Then sometimes we will first work with that and then we’ll have the parents come in later.
Interestingly. I’ve seen this many times where the kids will put us through the wringer and they’re just working on their trauma. It’s not like they’re deliberately trying to make things hard for us.
It’s just this is what their life has been and so they share that with us. And we can help kind of get them by listening and being empathic and understanding and maybe giving them some coping skills along the way to the point where their parents can eventually do the nondirective piece, while maybe we continue with other types of interventions that they might need. And what they do is they go back through some of the other stuff, the real trauma stuff with their parents, but it’s usually much shorter.
I just want to recap because I want to make sure that I’m hearing you correctly. So there is the filial therapy piece, which is its own thing, but what I’m hearing you say is it can be applied in the context of other therapeutic interventions or in other frameworks, but one where getting down to actually doing the filial therapy piece. It’s a filial therapy piece.
Am I getting that? That’s what I’ve said so far. And that helps me kind of remember the rest of your question too. The other part of it that I’ll answer is the skills that we learn in filial.
And it’s really huge emphasis on how we become collaborators with the parents. And it’s hard because so many of us don’t have training of how to intervene with parents. I know you’ve done a lot of work about parents as well, that sometimes we have such a negative attitude toward parents.
How do we shift that into understanding? Most of them are just doing the best they can, and they don’t have those skills or the ability to apply them. So we have to have a different attitude toward the parents. So that the empathy skill.
You can use any intervention you’re doing. And especially with parents, there are other skills that are part of Filial that you can use separately. In fact, our animal assisted play therapy, there’s a lot of Filial therapy in it, but it’s not filial therapy.
So I always call those other things where we’re kind of it’s a little bit looser, not focusing so heavily on the actual play sessions that the parents are having with their kids, but maybe some other play activities with their kids. Maybe they’re not ready to be nondirective with their kids yet. I call that Filialesque filial esque.
It’s like Filial, but it’s not really Filial. That’s a great segue into will you list off the seven things that are like no, if we’re doing filial therapy, this is what we’re doing. And this is a way you can kind of tell if it’s really a filial therapy model or if it’s one of the other derivatives.
Maybe I’ll put it as because there’s room in the world for all of these things. So I’m not being critical of anything. It’s just this is how the Gurneys conceived of it.
I’ve used filial therapy for all these decades and I have not had to change hardly anything about it. It’s a very flexible model, but then these are the things that make it itself. And these came primarily from Bernie, but also from Louise.
And then my own thinking, but it’s not all my own. It’s just my own way of putting it. The first one is there’s a value on the importance of play and that play can serve a healing function, a developmental know, all of those kind of things, that play is a really critical thing.
I won’t go into the details because I’m probably preaching to the choir anyway. We all love play. Interestingly.
I was interested in play long before I ever went to school and learned play therapy. I’ve been interested in animal play since the there’s so many parallels. It’s quite interesting.
Parents are empowered as the change agent. So if we consult with parents but we’re not actually asking them to be the change agent for their own child, that we’re not expecting and believing. And that’s the big part, believing that they can be the main change agent.
Because I think we all like doing play therapy. We want to be the change agents, but we can be the change agent for the family. They’re being the change agent for their children.
So we’re actually working through the parents with Filial. So the parents are empowered. And it’s very much an empowerment model, again, developed long before we started talking about resilience and empowerment and all of that kind of thing.
Parents are empowered as the change agents, and that requires a fair amount of us. For some people, I think it’s very easy to say, yeah, I’ve worked with enough parents. I understand they’re really capable of this stuff.
For a lot of others, there’s a process you go through where you think, I don’t really believe parents can handle this stuff, and we have to kind of sort that through. My belief is with enough support and enough empowerment, they can handle a lot, but they really need us to be there to kind of help them through. The third thing is the client.
And this runs kind of in the face of the way our whole system is set up for payment and everything. The client is the relationship, not the child, not the parent. So whenever you’re doing Filial, even if it’s in a bigger treatment plan, what you’re thinking about is what’s good for that relationship.
Because if we can make that relationship between parent and child or caregiver and child so it could be a foster parent. We’ve done a lot of foster to adopt programs where foster parents do Filial all the way over to the adoptive parents, then doing Filial as they’re getting acquainted with you, kind of model. The client is the relationship.
So you’re always looking at not the parent, not the child. I mean, you look at both of them, but you’re looking at the glue between them. And so that helps you make a lot of decisions as you’re going through about, am I doing this for the child’s sake? I’m the advocate for the child, not in filial.
You’re the advocate for the relationship. And that has a lot of practical implications. And I think that’s a huge distinction for our listeners because so many listeners will bring a parent into the process to support the child’s healing.
And I’m just hearing that that’s a really important nuance for listeners to get to determine are we actually doing Filial or not? If it’s about an adjunct support to the kid, that’s different than the relationship itself being the target, that’s a beautiful distinction. Yeah. Then it’s great you picked up on, but that’s true.
I mean, there’s nothing wrong. I think it’s wonderful. The more we can bring parents in, even when I’m not doing Filial, I meet with them maybe every week, maybe every other week, just to kind of keep track on how are things at home.
I might be giving them things to work on at home and listening to what they’re coping with, all of that. But Filial would be that you actually do get it in your head and it’s part of your attitude and it’s really important that we get it in our heads because it shows if it’s not in very subtle ways, we’re not often aware of ourselves, but if you really believe in parents then it shows in your behavior. So that’s another one.
Empathy plays a very large part and empathy is really viewed as being healing in and of itself. And this means we want the parents to be empathic with their own kids. And that takes some work sometimes to get there because some of them come into us and they’re really furious with their kids or they’re ready to ship them off someplace because they are so frustrated.
But if there’s nobody there to help them with that frustration and pull that off and help them get hope again, gain hope again, that maybe this can be repaired when they feel like all was lost, then that’s important. So one of the things we do, even right from the very first phone call or the very first meeting all the way through, is we do a lot of empathy with parents. And by empathy I don’t mean we just reflect once or twice.
We’re trying to get to the deepest feelings. So when I’ve trained lots and lots of people through the years, what I find is most therapists have been trained in how to do reflective or active listening. I prefer calling it empathic listening because it conveys an attitude of empathy, of trying to get inside their shoes a little bit.
But what I find is people do once or twice and then they kind of move on to asking their questions and saying things. Whereas you can get a lot more information by a more continuous process. Doesn’t mean I don’t ask questions, I do.
Doesn’t mean I don’t give some suggestions or teach new things. But the empathy piece is always threaded through that process. Another one of the essential features is that the entire family as much as possible is involved.
So it can be difficult but there are ways to work within the system to make this happen. I mean I’ve done a lot of work with foster kids who are either going to be repatriated with their family or they are going to go on to adoption. And because they are wards of the county or the state or whatever, then sometimes that’s all they’ll pay for.
But we’ve still found ways to get the parents involved with the other kids because coming from a family systems point of view, what you do with one part of the family is going to affect the rest of the family and that’s on the medical side. I mean you mentioned that briefly earlier. One of the things I’ve noticed, if a kid gets cancer, a child gets cancer in the family, then there’s so much family energy goes into helping that child and going to medical stuff.
And worrying about the child. We have siblings and those siblings can feel very left out and sometimes they start acting out or they withdraw. And we don’t want that to happen.
And that was some of my earliest filial groups were with parents of kids with chronic illnesses, acoustic fibrosis, cancer and diabetes and everything. Before you go on to the next one, because I’m writing these down because these are super interesting. I think I’ve got the play right.
The play is important that it’s the relationship that’s the client empathy. Was belief in the parents a separate one or was that part of empathy that’s actually more the empowering parents as the change agent. Okay, the empowering and parents and the entire family is involved.
Did I miss one in there or did we get it? No, I think importance to play parents are empowered, client is relationship, empathy and the entire family so far. Okay, great. Beautiful.
All right, more to go. So in filial, the way I always try to do it if I can, is that you want to have each parent have a play session with each child at least of a certain age each week. So that’s what we’re headed for.
Whether we can do that in session or not depends on a lot of other kind of logistic factors and things like that. But that is a family systems approach. And even though sometimes family therapists will ask the question, well, if one parent is having a play session with one child at a time, you’re leaving everybody else out.
Well, no, in the end we actually do whole family play and that becomes something we add on kind of at the end. But the bottom line is that parents might parent very differently. So you might have one who’s the limit setter, another one who’s the nurturer, to use kind of an example that’s quite common.
And if they were to work together and hold the play sessions with their kids, this is, again, psychoeducational, we want them to learn something different. So I want the limit setter to learn how to be nurturing and have some empathy. I want the one that’s very empathic to also learn how to be firm with their limits.
And so they will do that better if they have individual play sessions. And then a family is made up of lots of diatic relationships plus the kind of that hole that’s kind of hard for even family therapists to define. So then the next one is that we use a psychoeducational model of training.
So the way the parents are trained, it’s not a lot of analysis. We’re not pointing things out to them. I mean, we point things out to them, but it has more to do with their behavior and how they are holding the play session.
And I like to think of the play session. This is still part of the whole thing. The play session.
I often describe to parents it’s kind of like a little I can’t remember what I usually say to them. It’s kind of like a little trial period. It’s just like a little experiment we’re going to do for a half hour every week and see if these skills and this method works to kind of help with the problems you came in with because we do want to see changes in all of that, but also we want to just give that a chance.
If it works, then we’ll spread it out over the rest of your life. But unlike other parenting skills program where people come in and we teach them, this is how you do empathic listening and now go home and try it in different locations. As Louise always said, we’re asking them to go into a highly complex environment and change their behavior.
And if you do that and they don’t do very know because they’re learning a new skill, then they’re going to try it once with their kid and say, oh, you feel such and such. And the kid says, oh, you’re talking funny. I mean, they do that sometimes in the play session too, but we prepare them for that.
But it’s very easy for the parents to become discouraged and not keep doing it. So this is a model where let’s try it as a little experiment. I’m here for the first four to six play sessions that you have with your children, and it might be back and forth between the kids, but I want to see each parent four to six times, make sure they’re getting it.
They get individualized feedback at the end and then we give them one or two things to work on the majority. This is like part of the psychoeducational piece too. I always teach people 75% of what comes out of your mouth after you’ve watched a parent child play session needs to be positive and specific.
Sounds a little behavioral. It is. So you’re going to say, oh, I really like the way you got the feelings here, here, and we’re specific about that.
And then you give them one or two things to work on next time you’re not correcting them and saying, oh, you shouldn’t do that. It’s very rare that you need to do that. You’re telling them what you want them to do instead.
That’s something we do in dog training and horse training and everything too. We communicate not that’s wrong because that doesn’t give them much information about what to do about it. We say, this is what I’d like you to try now, and that helps.
So that’s the psychoeducational training. We support the parents throughout the process, so we are there to help them first learn the skills and apply them secondly, as they hone the skills, as they refine those skills, then they go home and do it on their own. But they come back either with videotapes or sometimes it’s just verbal reports.
I did it with verbal reports for years. But I do like videotapes or recordings so I can give them feedback to kind of keep it going. Then we’re helping them understand the themes and what they mean to the child, which in the long run help the parents understand the kids better.
It’s not the kid is not deliberately trying to get you mad. The child is expressing frustration or they’re expressing something about the trauma where they felt helpless. And so in order for them to be powerful, they’re kind of putting you in a role where you’re the quote unquote victim.
Not that we allow kids to truly victimize parents, but they’ll put them in a role where they’re the tough ones, the child is. And so we help them with that. Then we help them with the whole family dynamics.
Then we help them. It’s a very deliberate process at the end of how do you transfer these skills to daily life? It’s just the opposite of what most parenting skills program are. So instead of here’s the skills, go try it.
It’s here’s the skills, let’s keep it in this contained little area and then at the end we’ll spread it out. And then finally I don’t know how many I have 12345. Well, I think the psycho educational training and the support for parents goes together the way you should do it.
And it’s truly a collaborative approach. And I always mean it when I say to parents, I don’t like the word expert. I don’t like that because we’re never really an expert.
There’s always so much more to learn when we’re dealing with behavior, human or animal. But I’ll usually say, I’m an expert in these skills. They’ll say, well, why don’t you do it? I don’t want to do this.
I’ve been trying things for years now and nothing seems to work. And my response to that is I know first of all, I’ll be empathic. It seems like you’re worn out.
It’s exhausting to kind of have tried so many things and you can’t imagine how you’re being involved now is going to help any more than it has. Listen a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. But then I’ll say the thing is, I know these skills backwards and forwards.
They’re skills that have been used with lots of families with really good results. This whole approach is one that I know backwards and forwards. You are the world’s best expert on your own kids.
They might be driving you crazy right now, they might be really frustrating. But you know what happens every night when you finish dinner? You know what happens every morning when you’re trying to get them ready for school. And so we need to join forces.
And I can help you, but I think ultimately you’re going to be capable of learning this. And so there’s a lot of hope and encouragement, but at the same time acknowledging. And I really believe that even when we get to the phase where the parents are doing their home sessions and they might bring in a recording of it and we watch part of it together, sort of like I might do supervision with a colleague.
I will be thinking certain things and looking at it, but I always start with the parents and say, what do you think that was all about? And because they know the context way better than I do, and you can’t really interpret play without context, context of all the play sessions that have come before, but also of their lives, school, home, church, community, whatever then parents will come up with something and say, could it be this? And I want them to have that freedom to say that to me, where I stop and think, Gee, it could be, yeah, and let’s talk about that a little bit more. Or there’s times where they will come up with something where they take it very personally and oh, my child hates me, and I will listen first, but then eventually come around to say, well, I can see how you might get that idea, but I think there might be another explanation for it. So we actually look at multiple hypotheses of what the play might mean.
And it might mean they’re mad at you right now, they’re angry with you right now, but that doesn’t mean they hate you. They just don’t know how to express it any other way. So we’ll keep at this, because the thing is, your child stayed in there and played with you the whole time.
That should tell you something about how they feel about what’s going on. And that’s it. That’s the list.
But the collaboration piece, I think it goes hand in hand with the empowerment piece because we do have to start thinking of parents differently than I think a lot of times we do. And I can get just as frustrated with parents as the next person, but I think that’s where we have to stop ourselves and think, okay, what’s that all about? For me, we have to look inward and then start reframing for ourselves a little bit. Well, could this parent have done it any differently, given what I know about them? And the answer is usually no.
Exactly. Risë that was, oh, gosh, I’m sitting here with a completely new appreciation for filial. Probably about 17 years ago was when I first saw your videos of you had a series, and it caught my attention then, and to hear it now coming back around, I’m just so appreciating when you were describing it as it really is a model that helps build skill.
And I’m hearing this beautiful undertone of we believe in the parent, we believe in the kid, but we believe in the relationship, and we’re going to empower the parents with these skills so that they can transform their relationship with their child. And I just want to say thank you again, I’m just sitting here with a new appreciation of filial listeners. I’m hoping that you also have a different understanding and appreciation for filial, or if you are a practicing filial therapist, that you’ve also further deepened your commitment to the filial model.
Risë, thank you truly for your welcome. I think it’s one of those things I see sort of a resurgence, and I think, again, people some of the derivative approaches that are very valuable in their own right for certain circumstances, filial isn’t for everything all the time either. But I think people think, well, if I take the shorter term model or whatever that I’ve learned filial, and they haven’t really, because they’re really filial as the Gurneys conceived, it was certainly, and still is, very much family therapy, and not all play therapists have had that training.
If they have, that’s great. But I think I use filial a lot, and it’s not that long term. That’s another misconception about it.
I think my average, it depends on the nature of the problem. So you’re dealing with a heavy duty complex trauma. You might be talking about a year, but my average for other kinds of problems is about 17 to 20 sessions.
So it’s not got to be a real long kind of thing. But I think it’s important. I like learning all the models that are related with it or learning at least a couple.
Like, I always recommend that people learn both filial and CPRT. Filial. The way I train it is exactly the way I want the therapist that I train to go work with parents.
So it’s a parallel training model, and I only train six people at a time, so I can go through that whole feedback process with them. I mean, I’ve done bigger presentations, but you don’t really learn it in that way. But there seems to be I’ve always been curious that so many people kind of I’ve heard people say, well, I’m not going to go to learn filial because it’s so hard.
I thought, it’s not our job to go easy. It’s our job to do what works. And there’s other different reactions that people might have.
But I’m pleased that there are more and more people seemingly interested in the Gurney’s original model, which is what I do. And I’ve never seen change in families, both in the parents and the kids, like I do in filial. And when the parents are doing it, it takes a little bit on the front end, usually two or three sessions, to get the parents trained to start with their child.
I see child change so much faster. Most of the time, it just happens because the relationship is already there. It might have been damaged, and it might take a couple of sessions, two or three or four with the parents for the kids to really believe their parent is being that empathic and different.
But then once they get they said, d mom’s different, dad’s different. Then they start trusting that, and then usually the therapy works so much faster. Not that fast is what we’re after either, but with actual behavior change on everybody’s part, which is what I’m looking for.
So, Risë, it’s a beautiful wrap up point. So for individuals that have heard this and they’re like, I want to learn more. So, listeners, you already heard me mention the books that Risë has written on the topic.
I’m assuming they can get them on Amazon and the main places where you would buy books. Is that true, Risë? Those would be the main most of them. The Parent Handbooks, I saw myself.
Okay, I have two websites, but the one that has to do with more, the animal stuff, it’s just my name, Risëvan Fleet. It looks like Risevanfleet.com and then there’s a shop there.
So I do have most of the books there. I do want to mention that Louise Gurney, along with Virginia Ryan, also put together it’s a book called Group Filiotherapy. I do both group and individual, but that’s also a very good book that I did not mention, but it sort of like, took me back to all the Tuesday afternoons in Louise Gurney’s class for 4 hours, all the wisdom that I was trying to soak up.
And that’s another really good research, but everything that you mentioned in the beginning, I do sell my own stuff and a little bit of a discount usually, but you can always check Amazon for like, the Cilial Therapy book. So, listeners, grab a book, check out Risë’s website, check out her trainings. Risë’s hinted throughout this, too, that there’s some parallel here with the work that she does with animals.
So if that’s got your attention before we have her back again, go check that out on her website too. Find out what she’s up to in the animal therapy world. And Risë, thank you again so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Lovely to learn from you and to have this conversation with you. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate everybody that’s been listening in and Lisa very much appreciate the opportunity.
So take care. Thank you. So everyone, wherever you are, you know what I say at the end of these things, you’re the most important toy in that playroom. So take care of yourselves. And until next time, everyone.
