Welcome back to the next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. So grateful that you have taken the time are taking the time to listen in on this conversation. We have another amazing guest joining us today in this conversation where we’re going to be talking about attachment trauma and attachment trauma specifically in the context of foster care and adoption.
And I have with me the amazing Ann Beckley Forrest. And for those of you that are not familiar with Ann, let me introduce you to her. So she’s a licensed clinical social worker.
Many of you may know her from the EMDR field because you’ve made quite the name for yourself in the EMDR in the EMDR world. You’re certified in EMDR, you’re an MDR approved consultant and trainer. You’re faculty member of the Child Trauma Institute, you’re co founder of Playful EMDR, an online hub for training, and you and also Annie Monaco wrote a phenomenal book called EMDR with Children in Play Therapy Room, an integrated approach for anyone listening.
If you do EMDR with kids, please buy this book. This book is like a foundational book you need to have on your shelf if you are incorporating EMDR into your work with children. Her specialties are very much attachment and child and adolescent trauma, but you also do also work with adult survivors as well.
So thank you so much for bringing you. I know this topic is really also personal and near and dear to your heart and I’ll ask you about that in a minute. But thank you for bringing yourself to this conversation as well as all of your expertise to this topic.
Thanks Ann. Well, I am always happy to hang out with you Lisa. And by the way, in that book Lisa wrote a great chapter on integrating Synergetic Play Therapy, which a lot of us are a very big fan of, and integrating that with EMDR, which is a natural fit.
So Play Therapy was my first love and then EMDR came along later. But I’m interested in that dialogue and that integration and there is really a huge wave of play therapists getting trained in EMDR right now, which is exciting and I think holds a lot of promise for this topic. This population we’re going to talk about, as well as a lot of other kids too beautiful.
And for those of you that are not EMDR trained, we’re going to go into this topic in a way that doesn’t require you to have EMDR training or background, just if you’re listening going oh, do I need to have that? No. And it’s also something to consider getting if you are going to be working with complex trauma. So let’s start with why is this topic so meaningful for you, Ann? Well, on the personal level, as you know, Lisa, I am an adoptive parent myself of two beautiful daughters, both adopted when they were pretty, you know, anyone working in play therapy and child therapy.
We are encountering a lot of kids who have different, either different kinds of shared placements, kinship care, foster care, adoption and it’s the whole range right, from kids who are adopted young to those who for whatever reason, their first parents aren’t able to care for them and they end up in new families. And so I think that it’s really important also to me as a professional and I was a play therapist before I was a mom or kind of right around the same time. So really my thinking about this, I’ve kind of grown up with the two things happening in tandem.
I do feel passionate about it and I think there are a lot of issues that are different than if you are working with a family where everyone’s been together from in utero onwards. I think especially when we think about attachment, it’s not like an on off switch, there’s complexity there. So that makes it a good topic.
So let’s actually define attachment trauma and then let’s go into how do we begin to conceptualize working with families where adoption or foster care or is part of the system right, that we’re trying to support. But let’s begin with how do you define attachment trauma? Well, it’s interesting because there are some writers on attachment who don’t really like the term attachment trauma. I mean, obviously trauma, we’re all kind of aware of what that means.
Those moments of loss or separation, that’s part of the story, right, the day that you were removed, let’s say, from your first parents or the disruptions that happen when kids are waiting for parents that aren’t there. Which is why some writers talk also about more like attachment wounding or this idea of this is from Shirley Jean Schmidt who writes mostly about adult work, but she calls it the important good things that didn’t happen. And so being able to kind of step inside the shoes of a small child and look around for the important good things that didn’t happen turns out to be just as important as identifying those critical moments of loss or disruption or fear that also are part of the landscape.
But that’s not the whole story. One of the things so I had shared with you before we hit record on this. So when I began my play therapy career, international adoption was an area that I just focused in on a lot.
And what I often found was that I also needed to be paying attention to, if I had the information, what happened even before the child was born. So even looking at any disruption or if we want to use the language that you just shared, what was the quality of the pregnancy experience potentially for the child? So would you put what happened in that window also in this category? Sure. Yeah, well, and also, the more we learn about our own neurobiology, which I know is an interest that you and I share, the more we understand the role of the parent from the first moments of life as a kind of co regulator of experience on a neurotransmitter level as well as children are habituated to the sound of their parents voice before they’re born.
All of that and then extending into even the really early days of life. And this is the time when they’re in kind of traditional domestic voluntary placement adoption. Sometimes the adoptive parents are getting the baby at three or four days old and we sometimes have to sell them on the idea that what happened before that matters in the neurobiology.
Because even though there’s not this declarative memory of first family, there’s implicit memory there’s somatic memory. So a lot of times in the adoption world, I think it helps that I’m an adoptive parent sometimes I’m able to lean on that a little bit in my effort to convince adoptive parents that this stuff’s important and that you don’t get to kind of start the clock over on your neurobiology at the moment. Once you’re kind of chosen and adopted into a new family, obviously that’s easier.
When kids are older and they have history, it’s easier for everybody to be on board with that. I think infant adoption sometimes people were even kind of hooked into that with this idea that the child would have no wounds or no grief and loss over their first family. And even when there’s not declarative memory, that doesn’t mean that there’s no loss.
And certainly the neurobiology impact is there even for kids who feel relatively secure in their attachment to their adoptive parents. So we have to honor that, make room for that. I think I find that when we’re talking about what are some of those unique things about working with family systems where adoption or just a child again being placed into their home or some kind of placement disruption has occurred.
I find that education is a huge piece that’s very different than a lot of families I work with where there wasn’t some kind of a placement disruption at some point in the journey. Do you find that also that education is huge? Yeah, I think that it’s almost like the disruption to continuity people learn when they learn each other in tandem from the beginning. That learning kind of flows back and forth.
They learn their child’s cues. They learn what works to reassure them, what doesn’t. Then people think, oh, I can just apply that knowledge.
I’m a great parent. Let me just apply that knowledge in this new scenario. And what they find out is that you still have to learn the dance steps from the beginning.
You have another person’s nervous system that has to tune to yours. And certainly there are things that people do that make it go better or worse. And one of those things is, I think, assuming that you can use a lot of kind of behavior modification or make a good choice.
Choosing mind, to borrow Paris is Goodyear Brown’s phrase those kinds of strategies to mold and shape and they just tend to fall flat with kids who’ve had attachment disruptions or wounding, I think, because the adaptations for survival make those not those don’t work as well because kids often are very defended from directions, let’s say. And I think about a lot of the foster kids or adopted kids, especially kids who for whom that transition happened a little bit later in life, even in the toddler years and beyond, they’re very defended from being told what to do. And that’s kind of an interesting twist or adaptation on being kind of disempowered by this very big kind of earliest event in your life of being taken from the people that you know and placed in another situation.
And of course, for the kids who’ve had multiple placements, that adaptation for survival makes perfect sense. Another big theme that I saw for adaptation was the people pleaser that I’m going to act the way I think that you want me to act so that you’ll like me, so that you won’t give me away, right? Or so that you’ll stay connected to me in some way so often found exactly what you were saying. And then I also found the high level people pleasers and I’m going to conform at all costs and I’m going to be perfect and I’m not going to ruffle any feathers.
And I just think it’s so important for therapists to recognize that both are coming from a deep seated place of fear and from a place of it’s hard to trust, it’s hard to trust the situation because I’ve been hurt before. And I think that’s in a way, I think those kids are almost harder to reach and engage because sometimes they no longer hear their inside voice at all. Really.
Of course, we haven’t even used the word dissociation yet. But that’s also at both ends of that continuum is also caught up in dissociation and really internal kind of fragmentation that happens. And I think the kids who down regulate their big feelings in order to survive and to please people, sometimes they’re harder to engage.
They look engaged, but there’s not a lot of juice there. And I was just thinking, as you were talking, this is really the appeal of really the very foundations of play therapy with being able to spend time with kids in a child centered or nondirective way as a part. Of an overall treatment approach is so important because it short circuits either end either that adult pleasing or adult defying adaptation system because at some point we don’t have anything kind of left to defy, or we’ve been able to hold space with support because sometimes those kids need us to help guide them a little bit through the environment.
But a lot of times after a period of kind of experimentation, those kids will loosen up and kind of free up and being able to do that, I am reminded of a prompt, a Santre prompt that I used with a kid, I’ve used with a number of kids around this issue of adoption. Because one of the things is sometimes the kids themselves, they don’t want to touch it either, right? They’ve kind of internalized that sense of like, this is dangerous territory emotionally and maybe they’ve gotten that from watching their adoptive parents freeze whenever they ask questions or maybe they’ve internalized it from other sources, but they need some emotional distance to be able to do that work. And one of the kids that sticks out very clearly in my mind, I said make up a story in the sand about somebody who’s adopted, but not your story, make it up.
And in the context of the story, the kid, I think it was animals, the animal who was like the main character had all these weapons trained on him. And I’m like, oh, I’m doing my kind of child center tracking reflection. I see there’s a lot of characters with guns pointed him and he’s like, yeah, because if he’s bad, he’s going back.
And this was not a kid who could have approached that kind of content directly, but in the kind of projection or the fantasy of making up a story. It was there. Of course, that helps us then to understand the way forward on the caregiver side as well as helping him to kind of master some of that distress.
I want to switch for a moment here into the caregivers. You’ve used a term that I think is is really lovely and it might be a new term for some of our listeners, which is first parent. And many individuals may be more familiar with the term bio parent.
And so would you flesh that out a little bit about the use of first parent versus bio parent and then we’ll talk about how do we bring them into the process of healing? Sure, yeah, well, and bio parent was an improvement for some adoptees over like real parent, which had all kinds of stuff going on with it. So then the pendulum kind of swung to bio parent, which is accurate but somewhat reductive, I think to reduce that initial attachment relationship even if it’s complicated, fraught perilous in some cases, but to reduce it to simple biology doesn’t really make sense. Not to mention the fact that my specialty is younger kids and biobiology is not really part of their vocab.
So that’s not the best term, I don’t think. And so first parent is something that comes up in some of the really, I would say there’s a movement now being powered by adoptees that is really helping us to take a look at language and stance and attitude and how are we honoring all the parts of the so called adoption triad and centering. All of those voices, as opposed to what I think has tended to happen, which is adoptive parents were the center of those conversations.
Maybe previously I’m not going to remember the name of the podcast, but maybe we can add it later. But a colleague of mine who’s a therapist who’s an adult adoptee has a podcast now. I think it’s called Adoptees Dish, like that.
It’s interesting because she’s a trauma therapist so she brings that lens, but she also brings the personal lens of being an adult adoptee. So I think we have a lot to learn from centering all the different perspectives and we struggle with that in child therapy in general. We struggle with not having the parents reactivity, be the source of treatment planning, but instead to kind of enter the system as another attachment figure even to the parents, which I think is what I try to see that even some of the things that adoptive parents sometimes we’re wringing our hands because they don’t seem to get it or foster parents, but also see how a lot of that is based in fear reactions too.
And also their own sense of inadequacy because there can be a helplessness feeling that can come up of why am I not enough? Why? Am I not enough? Why am I not able to help this child? Or if there is an individual that has the fantasy, like you were saying, that everything should be fine the moment that they’re with me now, right? So this child’s with me now and now I’m able to so why aren’t we okay now without recognizing that there was this whole history that walked in the door with this child. And I think that that’s hard sometimes for adoptive parents and even foster parents to really reconcile that the child’s walking in the door with a history and it’s a history that they weren’t a part of, but that is impacting what’s happening now in the current relationship. I think that’s a challenging one.
I agree. Well, I realized this both also on the personal level that we talk about our own personal trauma histories and of course foster parents and adoptive parents, like all parents, also come with their own attachment ones, their own trauma histories of different kinds. But when you take a child into your life to care for and love.
You also acquire vicariously their trauma history in the same way that first families or people who are raising their biological children, anything that happens to my kid now goes on my trauma list too. And that now includes the things that happened to my child before I knew them. In the case of an adoption situation, those things are now on my list of kind of traumatic things that are part of my nervous system because I have images that go with them, I have beliefs about the world that go with those.
And depending on how adept my own system is at holding trauma and threat, I may be having any number of reactions. And the most common one that I’ve seen is really a kind of freeze response on the part of the adoptive parent. Whenever the distress from earlier experiences is rising in the child and we know about with kind of the polyvagal lens in the attachment relationship, a child who is witnessing a freeze response is often going to really disorganize their own neurobiology.
Like they don’t really know what that freeze response is and without co regulation now I’ve just sort of intuitively learned that all of these thoughts and feelings are dangerous just from watching my adoptive parents freak out. And that runs counter to the literature which I try to explain to adoptive parents is really your child needs their own story. They need all the parts before adolescence, even all the hardest parts.
This work of approaching the big feelings, digesting them and making them part of our kind of narrative coherence we need that job done by twelve or 13. Which is why play therapists are uniquely positioned to help families do it. Because I say, how do you want this to turn out? You think that your kid’s going to turn 18 and then find out these hard things about their first family.
It’s kind of a hard agenda to put on families and I think we have to do it gradually and we have to build a relationship and a context. But I’ve often said that to adoptive parents. I’m like play the tape to the end.
Your kids, 18 years old, 19 years old, maybe going off to college, meeting their roommates for the first time that first night everybody stays up late and tells their life story to each other. Do you want your kid to be frozen in fear when it’s their turn? Or do you want them to by that point, with your help and mine have kind of navigated some of the tougher waters? What it means is we do sometimes have to be somewhat prescriptive because that doesn’t always come up on its own. I have a story that is coming to mind because I think it’s important when we’re supporting families around this, because I’ve seen this, it’s almost like the adopted family wants to create the story for the child versus co creating or helping the child understand their experience in this story.
And I’ll give the example here. So one of the sessions that I had just happened to be on the anniversary of the adoption anniversary, and so adoptive mom brought in a book, right, that she had made, which was all the photos and this I have those and this whole thing, right? So we were sitting together and we’re going through the book together, and there was a photo where mom was telling part of the story and the daughter was telling part of the story too. And mom, this was the first moment that I saw you.
And it was such a magical moment. And mom is just glorifying this moment. And the daughter paused, mom, and looked at her and said, mom, look at me.
I don’t even know who you are. That was not a happy moment. And you just saw all the color, like, leave Mom’s face, right? Because mom so much wanted the daughter to have this happy story about what it was like in their coming together, but their reality was for the daughter, that was actually a very terrifying moment.
And also, and I know we’re going to spend a little bit of time here, they were from two very different backgrounds, which meant they had two very different color, skin, different language. And so not only from the child’s perspective, not only do I not know who you are, but you don’t look like me, you don’t sound like me, you make no sense to me on multiple levels, tastes, all of it. Right? Anyway, I’m just putting it in there that I think that part of what we’re holding with families is holding multiple perspectives of the adoption story and helping the child come to terms with their experience of the adoption story and the adoptive parents and what is their together story.
But it’s not a one sided type of a story. And this impulse to kind of tie everything up with a bow and this is actually not just in adoption. This is the source of a lot of unprocessed trauma in childhood.
Really comes from a desire to protect and to protect kids from big feelings. But in that rush to protect them from hard feelings, we often leave them to have their big feelings by themselves because they don’t go away just because I say so, right? See this over and over again with like, unresolved loss or all kinds of things that can happen in childhood when adults, the adults around the child say, don’t feel, don’t cry, it’s fine. It’ll be great.
Let’s focus on the future. We miss the chance to say, tell me what you’re feeling. I think that’s a perfect illustration of a lot of the issues that arise around.
And it’s not a one shot either. It’s not only about the birth narrative, it’s about kind of life in general. And you raise an important issue with regards to cultural and racial differences.
And that’s not just initially right, it’s not just about the child, oh, I have to get used to this new culture or the way my birth parents, my adoptive parents look. But also there’s ongoing issues, especially in this culture where race and the assumptions that people make about each other based on appearance and the kind of category activation that goes along with the microaggressions that often can accompany that. These are very real issues in the lives of a lot of our kid clients, and often for adoptive parents or foster parents that are from a different culture or maybe from majority culture, like a white culture, they don’t have that kind of radar for that, and they’re missing a lot of it.
Or if it’s coming up, they’re trying to tie it up with a bow and sweep it away. Like they don’t really want to think that it’s possible that this life that they’ve built for their child includes a fair amount of racial discrimination or race-based teasing and that’s painful but I always say it’s painful but it’s worse for your kid. So who’s a grown up? Let’s get you to because I do think people adopt because they want to be good parents.
It’s not an accidental choice but then what are the tools? And sometimes, along with the whole, like, let’s hold space for the loss side of the birth story and the adoption story, the other big challenge is let’s also hold space for what’s going on and not even hold space, but lean into the tools that your child needs for survival in the culture. And that’s often very challenging work. So let’s move the conversation into repair.
We’ve talked about a lot of the different possible dynamics that can come up that we may need to be paying attention to and address. But what does repair of attachment trauma look like? What can it look like? There’s this term mentalization in a lot of kind of attachment literature and this is from the eyes of a play therapist. This is a very interesting word.
So it’s this idea that especially the parent hold the child’s mind in mind, see things through their eyes, be careful with attributing things, be more nuanced in that and more experimental. And then you think about the play therapy space is kind of a perfect space to explore some of that. I actually think about kind of leaning away from content based therapy where we’re having these kind of like intellectual conversations or problem solving which is a lot of times what ends up happening when parents are in the room.
Even for people who use a lot of play therapeutically, when parents are in the room, it often devolves into a kind of like problem solving or family mediation kind of experience. And especially if you want to target the attachment repair, those don’t tend to go very well. Like they have a nice conversation in your office and they go home and recreate the same patterns.
So I think of it more as like, can I give them some experiments in the form of play to do together? And then use tracking, reflecting, use noticing, use support some maybe directives or prompts, but to kind of facilitate that mentalization. So especially the parent being able to notice what the child enjoys and what they don’t and pick up on the subtler cues. There’s lots part play therapy models that try to do that.
I’m thinking about like, therapy or different kinds of developmental play approaches. I went to a great Ed Lyrian workshop with Terry Kotman. It was all about these big games families could play.
I still use a lot of those. And again, maybe there’s a little bit of insight there, but the focus is really on experiential and know, expanding the space for the parent to kind of notice what’s working and not working in the connection hearing you emphasize and you haven’t said this word, but this is what I’m hearing. I’m hearing you emphasize attunement.
How do we create a play experience that isn’t about a cognitive process and more about helping the parent learn how to attune and notice the child, get curious about the child, pick up on the child’s, nonverbal cues, all of that kind of stuff, which, as we know, is part of what’s necessary for secure attachment, right. To be able to engage in contingent communication. Am I hearing you correct? Absolutely, yeah.
And the other kind of layer to this is going back to this idea of dissociation and fragmentation, is that especially kids who spent significant amounts of time in fear early in life, in fear or terror or pain or physical discomfort, hunger, medical stuff, we know that in order for protection, the nervous system fragments. And kids may have parts of their neurobiology that are holding in a kind of frozen state some of those experiences. And we know we’ve come a long way, even in ten years, in terms of talking about this, having language for this.
People talk about parts work all kinds of different ways, there’s different flavors for that. But it all is basically describing the same phenomena and how to respond. And so that’s the other piece of the education for the parent.
And the kid is like, oh, we have parts. And sometimes when we feel threatened or triggered, a part might kind of take over. And that part might be more angry, more aggressive.
But still, that’s part of your child that needs love and understanding and attunement just as much as the ones that you find easy to be around. And I’m working argue maybe even a little bit more, right? But that’s not what happens. What happens is they get that part experience of the parent is often rigidity or escalation increased threat rather than decreased.
So I’m actually working with a wonderful family right now, and this is an international adoption kind of later. In life. And the mom has had to do a ton of work to retool her entire approach to discipline from the way she was raised, which was pretty old school cause and effect, choices and consequences.
And it’s been really moving to see how she’s kind of gradually leaned into that. The kid is very creative, very imaginative. We’ve done a lot of puppet play around his parts, the different parts of him.
The baby part that wants to be loved and the part that’s going to stick up for him. The way he had to in the orphanage, the way he still has to when he gets teased and picked on at school because he would escalate to the point of some dangerous behavior, pulling a kitchen knife or those kinds of things. And she has learned to respond in those moments with I love all your parts, even the angry ones.
And that one sentence, I think has been a game changer for them because really, some of the more extreme behaviors are really gone. And I think he’s not as fragmented because and she told me recently, kind of a funny story that they were in it over something. I don’t remember the context, but she says, you know what I’m going to say.
And he’s going to be like, yeah, I know you love all my parts, but he didn’t pull the kitchen knife. Right? That’s more a kind of defiance that’s in the realm of normal development, right? So it’s not just about attunement with the behavior when your child is like, oh, gazing into your eyes, but we’re talking also about attunement in times of extremity and this idea of like, all these parts, none of them are bad. They all were created for a reason, to manage something unmanageable.
That is an idea that I think parents can get on board with. Will you say a couple of pieces around when the family is in contact with the first parent? And where, how, when do we actually go back to the original attachment wound? Yes. Well, and that’s a really especially because of doing kind of trauma narrative work.
That’s something that I think sometimes as therapists, we’ve been pretty quick to just sign on for whatever the adult bringing the child wants and don’t understand that. We also have a role as an attachment figure to kind of open up the thinking and say, is there a way in which a relationship with this child’s first parents could be difficult in the moment, but taking the long view help them to digest and heal. Ultimately, because pretending that big feelings do not exist is not really going to work.
It hasn’t worked. And especially if we look at lifespan, maybe it works right now. You get a little peace and harmony.
Right now, you don’t have to deal with your child’s big feelings around visits, let’s say. But we also know that a lot of adoptees in young adulthood have a lot of emotional struggles based on their kind of unresolved attachment wounds and then they turn 18 and now the choices are all up to them and they’re not ready to launch into their own lives because there’s still so much unfinished business. And that’s the whole idea of doing as much of this work as we can before adolescence.
Because in adolescence the focus developmentally should really shift towards the young person kind of centering themselves on their own life goals and their own aspirations. But if you have all this unfinished business, that’s going to be harder. So I say if you can make access safe, then your child probably has a right to it.
Now I have seen adoptive parents lean too hard on that and force contact on kids who don’t want it. So obviously attunement is still in play here. But I think instead of the default position was always like well, if my child ever asked me about anything, I would answer instead being like let me assume that there is work to be done here and facilitate openings for that kind of processing because it probably will help the child be in better shape for adolescents.
So I do things like narratives with kids asking the parents to dig deeper into the information that they do have. There’s some really interesting work you and I were chatting right before we got on about in the MDR world because trauma processing is such a big thing. There’s a woman in Australia who, Ariana Strewick, who’s written a book called Waking the Sleeping Dogs and it’s all about the traumas that no one wants to talk about.
Usually having to do with first families because they’re afraid it’ll destabilize the kid. But that if we can find some ways to do that and she’s even done some really creative things. She has a good website, it has a lot of free stuff on it so people should check it out.
But like sending postcards using case workers or courts or whatever to send postcards to first parents that just have a simple message can you write one sentence giving the child you gave birth to permission to heal and then they get the postcard back and that becomes something they can use in processing. So right, isn’t that kind of chills like even that tenuous little tie? So I just think the creativity of that and of course, there’s many scenarios in which foster parents and first parents and caseworkers there’s a lot of triangulation going on. There’s competition in that relationship.
And to try to center the child’s point of view in all of that. And this kid really has a right to some kind of healthy, safe contact that makes sense whenever possible, as you’re talking. I had a reminder of a client that I worked with where the child really wanted to try to make contact with first parent.
And adoptive mom was really hesitant about that because I think adoptive’s mom’s intuition was first parents not going to engage and that this is going to land as a disappointment. But client was super adamant about it and what I will say is that there was a decision to move in the direction of with like a significant amount of holding and what ended up happening was moms. It was accurate in that the first mom was not interested.
But just even getting that even though it was painful is what my client needed foreclosure or I wouldn’t say full closure, but to begin to break the fantasy so that we could start to work on reality. Yeah. Well, if you think about it, there’s a narrative, huge feelings that have to do with that that the child’s dealing with alone.
Exactly. And by leaning into it together with support. Exactly.
Then especially at a stage developmentally where the child’s still able to receive that support. This is why taking the full life view and thinking like, how do you want this to go? Because if you don’t meet this need now mom, it’s not like it’s going to go away. Exactly.
It’s just going to continue to perhaps derail the kind of connection that she needed with her current caregiver. Right, exactly. Well, Ann, this has just been so amazing and I feel like this could be like a six hour conversation of the complexities and it’s there you go.
It’s such an important conversation for individuals who want to learn more about you, your work. Where can they find mean? I have my own website for consultation and playtherapy training which is Annbeckleyforst.com. But then I have a joint website with Annie Monaco called Playful EMDR, which is know, as you were kind of saying up top.
It’s really kind of a hub for play therapists who also want to get trained or who are trained in the EMDR protocol as one of the ways we can kind of complement and supplement our play therapy strategies for trauma work. And I would love for people to connect. And actually, because these topics attachment dissociation complex trauma wounds are so complicated.
Annie and I, our trainings around this keep getting longer, and so we’re actually putting together it’s not up on our website yet, but it should be by the time this drops, like, five days in Buffalo in the fall, not the winter. We want to really do a deep dive into some of this and have time to use a lot of experiential tools, clay puppets, sand tray, all of that. We did something kind of like that in Austin last year at Marshall Lyles Workshop and it was a big hit.
So that’s kind of the direction we want to go into training wise. Amazing. Well, thank you for bringing you and bringing your knowledge and expertise to the conversation.
I just so enjoy you and appreciate you. Well, thanks for asking, listeners. I hope that you got something really valuable out of this conversation and that this is an area that you’ll continue to learn about, study about, get curious about.
It’s really important. The ODS of a play therapist in their career, not having a child walk through the door that doesn’t have adoption or foster care or some type of a placement experience in their history. I think that’s a pretty I’m not going to say that they’ll never happen for a play therapist, but I think that most of us at some point are going to have a child that walks through the door where this is part of their lived experience.
So let’s become knowledgeable in this area even more. And as always, listeners, wherever you are, take care of yourselves. Tend to yourselves.
Lean into the big feelings inside of yourself. You are the most important toy in the playroom. Until next time.
