Welcome back to our next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. I have with me an extraordinary guest today to talk about an incredibly important topic for all of us as play therapists to be thinking about on a regular basis. We are going to be talking about multiculturalism in play therapy.
And if you don’t already have her book, I hope that you will go buy her book by the end of this podcast. But I have with me Dee Ray. Many of you may be familiar with D Ray and her work.
She’s been in our field doing extraordinary things for quite a while now, influencing and teaching so many of us. Dee, I am so excited that you are here and that we get to talk about multiculturalism in play therapy. So thank you so much for being here and for joining me.
I’m excited to be here and it’s fun to be asked. Yeah, I know your podcast has such a great reputation, so, yeah, I’m happy to be here. Well, thank you so much.
In the event that there’s someone who is not familiar with you, I want to share a little bit about you just to orient our listeners into who you are a little bit. So D Ray is Regents professor and Elaine Milliken is it mathis. Mathis professor in early childhood education and the counseling program and co director of the center for Play Therapy at the University of North Texas and play therapists around the world.
You probably know that University of North Texas is really in many ways one of the really like the crux of where so much of our play therapy research and information comes out of. So you are part of the hub, one of the primary hubs. Dr. Ray has published over 150 articles, chapters and books in the field of play therapy. Dr. Ray is author of A Therapist Guide to Development, advanced Play Therapy, Playful Education, and co author of Multicultural Play Therapy.
She’s a founding board member and past president of the association for Child Adolescent Counseling, as well as current board chair of the Program for Child Centered Play Therapy and Child Parent Relationship Therapy. Dr. Ray additionally operates the counseling practice Empathy Well in Highland village, Texas, where she facilitates play therapy training and mean, truly, you’ve done so many things for us in the field.
Thank you so much. Thank you. It’s a life mission, right? Everything about my life is something to do with play therapy.
Yeah, well, it shows. And we are all impacted and grateful as a result of that. And we’re talking about multiculturalism today.
So how did this topic become so important to you? Enough to write a book. What? Co write a book? You’ve got two co write a book? Yeah. You’ve got two other really important authors in this contribution as well.
Yeah, that’s why I’m always a little nervous when I come by myself to talk about this topic, because everything I do in multiculturalism is multiple people. We’re kind of working on it together. Hope to talk about that a little bit today.
But yeah, I think my background is obvious in terms of my race, and I’m white and identify as a woman. And so in the play therapy world, that is the most common intersection is to have white women make up the majority of play therapists. And so that’s always been noticeable to me.
I guess I started in the more professional in terms of being a part of the organization of sufficient play therapy and all of that back in 1998. And it was very noticeable that and even worse then in terms of everybody kind of looked like me right then I would go home and the children that I’m serving, because I’ve mostly served diverse groups of children and in multiple settings and in community settings and school settings and all of that. And so there was always something incongruent about that that felt inconsistent with me.
So I think that’s something that started to kind of grow in me that, hey, something’s not right here, something doesn’t seem right about this. And then over time, then getting more and more experience in terms of working with children of diverse and intersectional identities and seeing that, oh, yeah, I’m missing knowledge and I’m missing experiences and needing to understand about how do people who come from various cultural identities, how do they experience play. So that’s kind of the beginnings of it.
And then the other part of my job is I teach. And so having students come through. We’ve been very fortunate at the University of North Texas to have a lot of diversity of students both culturally within the US.
And then also internationally. And so we have a lot of international students come in. And so that was always very eye opening.
I was director of the clinic their experiences, because we are in the middle of I don’t want to pick on my area because there’s certainly areas across the United States that are limited in how people look at other you know, in our area, we have a lot know, kind of have racial bias. I feel bad, I’m talking bad about Texas, but I don’t think that we’re unique in that, unfortunately. But we would have clients come in and then our play therapist would experience racism and bias from our clients.
And so that was always very, again, very eye opening. And then trying to work with counselors on that and trying to I’m sorry, I forgot to turn off my email, so I’m going to do that really quickly so it doesn’t beep while we’re talking. But then I’m trying to help.
How do you train play therapists who are of multicultural backgrounds so that they feel competent and that they are dealing with constant microaggressions, actual overt racism, working with them on that? And that’s where it came into. I could go on. I’ll try not to talk on and on before you ask another question, but that’s where the co authors of this book, yumi Ogawa and Iru Chang, come into the picture.
Because Yumi and I have known each other. She was a student at UNT, like, over 20 years ago. She’s a very experienced and seasoned play therapist trainer now and then eru over, I think it’s been probably almost 15 years that we’ve known each other.
So we started having conversations, a lot of conversations, which really took off during the pandemic and also during the race reckoning that was occurring in the US. That we had already had a lot of talks about culture and how it affects play therapy and the limitations of play therapists culturally and what can we do, how can we make differences? The three of us had had a lot of conversations already. We’re very close.
And then that just kind of took off when we had time to spend together on Zoom. And so we met regularly throughout the pandemic, and we’re like, hey, we need to write down some of these things. We need to really write down these conversations and how important they are and what they mean and can we make a difference in play therapy? And so that kind of came together.
And then, on the other hand, about four years ago, for at least six years, I have wanted to change up the play therapy room because the play therapy room, as much as I respect and admire my predecessors and the people that came before, they do come from a very kind of middle class white background. And so when we’re bringing children into the play therapy room, that was feeling limiting. That was feeling like, hey, I don’t think we’re hitting the mark here.
I don’t know what’s happening here. And then a lot of hesitation on my part is, should I be doing that? Do I know enough to do that? I don’t think that I know enough to do that. So I kind of kept away from it.
And then it’s kind of like how the universe works in these amazing ways that students came in who were brought in just because they wanted play therapy training, but they also had this multicultural focus. And three of them particularly, which is Regine Chung and Crystal Turner and Elizabeth Aguilar came in, and that’s what their focus they wanted to do, hey, we want to do something with the play therapy room. I’m like, oh my God, it’s come together.
We can figure this out. And so the four of us have been a research team for the last four years on trying to figure out what needs to be happening in the play therapy room to be more culturally inclusive and how do we change what’s in the play therapy room to be more culturally inclusive? So you asked a very easy question, and I gave a very long answer. So I apologize for that.
But that’s kind of where it is right now. What’s so perfect? And even just the community? They talk about just a community conversation, and it sounds like it’s been an ongoing discovery and an ongoing process, ongoing conversation, which is part of what the learning around this topic, in my opinion, is all about. So let’s make sure now we’re going to get into the therapist and what the therapist needs to be aware of and how the therapist can be thinking about multicultural play therapy.
But let’s also make sure to come back to the room itself, because my guess is that some of our listeners would be really interested in hearing a bit about that. So let’s just start with the broad topic. What is it? How would you define multicultural play therapy? Multicultural play therapy, offering the intervention of play therapy from a culturally inclusive lens, like, how do we make what we offer available to all people and speaking to all children? And this is culture is so wide, it’s so much even bigger than race and gender and just so many identities that our children are coming in with.
And so multicultural play therapy is, are we offering an intervention that a child feels like, oh, this is my room. Right? We kind of make an assumption of that, of, oh, the child’s going to feel a place of belonging here. But do they do I send out messages of cultural inclusivity in the way that I speak, in the way that I am nonverbally, in the way that I present myself, in the way that I am in the room? Is the room itself culturally inclusive, the thing that we all want? Which is how does a child have a sense of belonging in the room? Are we really doing that if we’re not considering culture? So multicultural play therapy is yeah, that is part of if I want a child to really feel a part of this experience and feel a sense of belonging, then everything about it has to be culturally inclusive.
And I have to be very aware of that. To me, that’s what multicultural play therapy is. So when you begin to educate play therapists on this, and a play therapist says, where do I start? How do I even begin to think about this topic for myself? Where do you start? Well, I think the starting point is something that people this is nice to see.
It’s been coming up in the play therapy conferences and across the world and certainly across the US. About this term called cultural humility. And to me, that’s the starting point that is cultural know has those kind of two pieces to it from a multicultural framework, which is that intrapersonal piece, where am I doing my work? We say these phrases.
I really like to stay away from a lot of the phrases, I can’t do the work. But it really is doing the interpersonal part of cultural humility is, am I doing my work? Do I really recognize when things are triggered for me around culture? Am I getting, like, something happens in the playroom or outside the playroom that something happens and I get an automatic thought, which is just normal, right? Like, I think a lot of play therapists beat themselves up or something about, oh, that’s wrong, but that’s normal because we’re raised in a society that’s biased and has a lot of discrimination. So to have kind of instant thoughts that come in is normal.
But what we want to do with them is start to examine them. I want to let them into my awareness. I want to see, oh, wow, where did that come from? Wow, that came from something that a parent said when I was seven years old, and I’m still carrying it around, but I want to examine it and see it for what it is.
Yeah, this was part of my upbringing. This is part of the messages that have been sent to me through the wider culture. And it’s a problem, right.
And not feeling generally what I find with play therapists is we have kind of reactions that maybe not the most helpful in terms of we’ll sometimes have a denial reaction. Well, that was wrong, and I shouldn’t think that. And so I’m just not going to think that anymore, which is not helpful because I need to be able to examine where did this come from? Why is it there? Why is it still here when I’m 55 years old? Why is it coming up? Or they’ll have the, oh, that’s okay, now I’m going to make everything better, and I’m going to make sure there’s no more racism ever and blah blah.
And that’s not helpful either, because then you move into that kind of savior mode of all of that. And so really trying to examine that intrapersonal piece of cultural humility about where are my blind spots and where should I start looking at things more carefully for what’s happened for me? And then the interpersonal to me is this huge piece that really fit when you study multicultural orientation. Is this idea cultural humility? Interpersonally is about my curiosity about others and me not placing myself over others in terms of my beliefs or what I see or my values or how I live my life is in some way better than how others do.
So interpersonally, it’s being very curious in terms of how other people see the world, how they see their values, how they live their life in consistency with their values and seeing that as, oh, wow, that’s really cool, right? That’s really cool. They very much see things very differently than me, and I’m curious about that, and I want to know their world. And again, that’s not about, oh, I want to know about this group or that group.
I want to know about this person within, how they culturally identify. So the word cultural humility, I know that many of our listeners may be familiar with. And one of the other words that you use in your book, which I hear less people talk about, is cultural opportunity.
Would you describe the difference between cultural humility and cultural opportunity? Because I know that the language is important language and for us to know both. Yeah, and I want to make sure because I’m an academic, so I have to do citations, but I want to make sure I give credit to Owen Group of the research group that studies multicultural orientation, which has been kind of my theoretical framework for this. But it’s this idea of cultural humility is the cornerstone.
Like, I can’t get anywhere until I’m looking at myself, wanting to know about others, seeing how I can elevate others experiences. That’s the cornerstone. And then if I have that, then I start to see more cultural opportunities, whereas so I’m not busy defending whatever’s going on.
For me, culturally, I am now fully into another person’s world, and I can kind of grab onto those cultural opportunities, which is my willingness to engage in cultural conversations, cultural play, anything that the child is bringing up culturally, I’m willing to engage in that. And so I use an example of because I think for play therapists, it’s easy to ignore those things in the play therapy. If we don’t have good awareness or if I’m nervous or defensive or any of those kind of things, then I won’t engage in those opportunities.
And children are throwing them at us all the time. They’re coming out all the time, and they’re very simple, just sharing the story of I was actually coming back from the playroom with a child, and he was a Latino six year old boy. And we’re walking along and I’m a very pale person, and his skin is darker than mine.
And we’re walking along and we’re kind of playing we were playing that game where you walk into the squares of the tiles right as you’re walking down, and we were walking that but our hands kind of just like, hung beside each other. And he’s looking at my hand, and we’re both looking at this part of the hand, the back hand, the back part of the hand, and he stops, and our hands are kind of swinging together, and he stops, and he looks at both of our hands together, and he says, oh. And then he flips his hand because his palm is lighter than mine.
I mean, lighter than his backhand. And so the palm, he puts next to my hand, and he says, oh, look, we’re the same. And so there’s so much that goes into that.
When you talked about cultural humility, an instant thought might be, oh, gosh, no, I don’t want you to feel like you have to be lighter. Right. That can be that defensive piece.
But really recognizing, wow, he’s trying to tell me something here. And he has matched something about our relationship with culture. I looked at him and I’m like, oh, you wanted us to be the same.
And then I flipped my hand over to you. And I like, and sometimes we’re the same, and sometimes we’re different. And so being able to tell him, yeah, we can be in this relationship together, but we don’t have to look the same, and you don’t have to look different to be important to me.
And I followed up with and the relationship is important to me, too. So being able to kind of speak to that, that to me is a cultural opportunity to engage in. Otherwise, if I’m not operating from humility, then I miss the opportunity.
I might be like, oh, no, well, look, we’re just the same, but no recognizing, no, there are differences between us, and you see this, this is important to you. When you look at me, you see the color of my skin and the color of your skin, and that means something to you. So I want to be able to engage in that with them.
So that’s the grasping of cultural opportunities. How can I lean into those? Yeah. Would you just be willing to name some of the common fears that come up for play therapists when they think about leaning in? Because I think sometimes it’s just helpful to name what are the fears that show up in these moments that prevent us from being able to really connect with ourselves and connect with the child? So many, right? And they’re going to be different.
One of the things I found, too, working with play therapists of color, is there are different fears that come up when these situations come up, so many different ones. So speaking from my perspective, in terms of my identities, the fears are, am I going to say the wrong thing? Right? Am I going to say the wrong thing? And the child’s going to feel bad about themselves and their culture? Am I going to make it worse, basically, right? Am I contributing to all the discrimination that goes on in our wider culture? I think that’s a really big fear. The other is really not even a thought through fear.
I think it’s this automatic fear and that has increased over the last few years is just a frozenness, oh, wait, we don’t talk about that, right? We’re not going to talk about that. We’re not going to talk about any of that because that’s bad. And people are going to get their feelings hurt, and things are going to be bad, so let’s not talk about it.
So the fear is more of this automatic response of freezing of okay. And so I’ll just reflect you’re excited about that, right? I won’t lean into the opportunity because I’m like, oh, we don’t talk about that. So that’s a fear, I think, when you don’t accept yourself, and that’s a lot of stuff.
I talk about play therapy is that unconditional positive self regard? When you don’t accept yourself, it’s hard. There’s a lot of fear of leaning into these conversations because it would be about, oh, wow, I really am racist, or I really do have biases. That’s bad, I’m bad.
So I’m not going to engage in these conversations because it would be too hard for me to look at my own biases. So I think that’s a fear, and it’s a very kind of subtle fear that a lot of people don’t want to look at. But I do see it, and then I don’t want to speak for people that I work with, but I know what has been shared with me is for play therapists of color, there is this fear of what’s coming after that.
Is the child going to because there has been so much racism experienced and microaggressions experienced, is this going to affect the relationship that I’m going to lean into? This race thing, or whatever it is, whatever identity is, I’m going to lean into it and the child is going to see me as only my race or only this identity? And so I don’t want to really go into it for that reason because it’ll be opening the door to more racism that I’ve already experienced my whole life. Right? And again, I’m very hesitant to speak for people that I’ve worked with. I’m just sharing some of the things that have been shared with me because I do think we kind of come from these different perspectives when we come in and different dynamics are happening in the playroom.
I so appreciate just normalizing this whole process, that things come up, thoughts come up, reactions come up. It’s not about somehow preventing that, because that’s almost prevent. Like, you can’t in many ways, but how do we stay really curious and how do we stay really introspective about it and really questioning? So I’m saying that to lead into my next question, which is, okay, so there’s a moment when something is said and it doesn’t land well, and there’s something about something that does land hurtful.
How do you go about repair when there has been a rupture, how do you go about repair? Well, to me, that is where the cultural humility and the third pillar around cultural comfort comes in is recognizing, I’m going to make mistakes. That that’s going to happen, and my comfort level needs to be high enough that I can recognize those mistakes and speak to them. Right.
And this is definitely within the cultural realm, but in the broader sense of play therapy, too, to me, authenticity is everything in play therapy. And so that is where the play therapist needs to be coming from to have therapeutically changing relationships. And when I make a mistake being able to so these are things we’ve all experienced in play therapy of, oh, I said something, and I know immediately that was messed up.
You’re like, oh, goodness. And then you’ve got the experience of, oh, wow, when I’m laying in my bed at night, I realized, oh, man, that was not okay. That did not work.
So again, like, how you go about going back and what I would say comes into the part of repairing, right, repairing. And it’s leaning into that authenticity of that’s got to come from cultural humility, cultural comfort, and then that gives you a cultural opportunity of, okay, so when I say something being like, OOH, I didn’t mean to say that, I actually have said that in play therapy, like, where the child will do something, I will say something, it’s way off. And I’ll be like, oh, yeah, that’s not what I meant.
And I’ll say, I’m sorry, that is not at all what I meant. Here’s what I meant. Or, oh, I said that the wrong way.
And I think you might have heard it this way. I have those conversations with children. I find a lot of play therapists are like, really? You say it.
I’m like, absolutely. In any relationship that you’re in in life, I actually just had this conversation in supervision today about in any relationship in life, we’re people, so we make mistakes. And that doesn’t matter.
Wherever you’re coming from, whatever your identity is, you’re going to make mistake it’s in your relationships. That’s just how humans work. But what’s the broader message that you’re sending of I care and I value and I want to know your world, then that’s the part that our clients are so amazing and children are so amazing at.
Yeah, you can make your 32nd mistake, but they’re seeing you in the context of all the other things that you’re providing that you want to provide them. So they give us a lot of leeway. First of all, I think the first thing is I do, I’m like, okay, it’s not the end of the world.
I made this mistake because overall, I think it was just my limitation as a human, how I made the mistake. And so how in our relationship can I go back and repair this? And so now I’m going to go back into, hey, that’s not what I meant, or I said something and it was just wrong. Like, it may not even be that’s not what I meant, because sometimes that’s not the best answer.
It was just wrong. I didn’t think it through. I wasn’t sensitive to what it was.
And so that was wrong, and I want to apologize. So I definitely have those conversations. Of course, everybody’s going to be like, do you say that to a four year old? No, it would be age appropriate for what I would say, but I’ve definitely told four year olds of, oh, I was wrong about that.
Right. And again, they’re very forgiving in that if I’m practicing overall from this more humble place, then they’re very much like, oh, yeah, that’s not what she’s really like all the time. Yeah.
Thank you. Does that address what you’re saying? Absolutely. I’m just thinking through just the different questions that listeners might have as we’re just hearing you share here.
And I know that’s a fear of what if I rupture? And then there’s a fear of, I don’t even know what repair could look like. And so I appreciate you just offering a possibility of what repair could look like. I talk about that a lot with kids.
And again, when you’re talking about if you have especially cultural differences and making mistakes culturally, where is it that a child who has had it, let’s say a child who has experienced bias or discrimination, where are they going to get an adult that comes to them and says, hey, I messed that up. I really messed that up. And what an amazing opportunity for them to see, oh, adults can be this way.
Right. People can be like this, too, because, again, kids are so forgiving in that. And what a great opportunity, because all they typically see from adults is defensiveness or authoritarianism or that kind of thing.
When they see an adult come in saying, oh, man, I just did not do that well, then that is such a great thing for them to see of, oh, this is how relationships could work. And when people, some people who do things that hurt me in terms of maybe doing some kind of microaggression, it allows them to that, oh, okay, that’s that person’s limitation. That’s not about me.
That doesn’t have a meaning about my worth, because they just took responsibility for it, that it was on them. Let’s go to one concentric sphere, more out and talk about the family. So when we’re thinking about multiculturalism and play therapy, how do we begin to think about it in the context of the family system or working with parents and caregivers as well? Yeah, well, I think it’s too hard, so we just don’t think about that.
That’s tough because one of the things about working with children and this is like one of the exercises that I do with play therapists to get them thinking along those lines is and so if anybody’s at home and wants to do this now. I think it’s a really good idea. I just have people do a stick figure of themselves, a stick figure of the child, and a stick figure of the parent, and then you write down all identities for each of those people, and that reminds you that your child is not typically completely identifying as the parent.
Parent has their own identity, not identifying as a child, and then you’re identifying as you, right? And all these intersectional identities. And we have to balance and address and be sensitive to all of those. Right? And that makes the job really hard, which is why I said, let’s just avoid the question.
No, but it makes the job hard because I don’t want to just see the identities of the child. I do need to see the identities of the multiple people in the family, what are their values? And again, we work with a lot of intergenerational families in terms of immigration. And so you have a parent who has these particular identities, and the child has very different identities.
And then how do we hold value for what the parent and how they see themselves and how they want their child raised, but hold value for what the child how they identify and what they need and what they want? And so, again, I’m back to a lot of cultural humility on my part of not choosing, because that would not be humble, right? Like, for me to say, well, the parent is more important, or the child’s identity is more important, but seeing it, no, they’re in the most important relationship of their lives. So my job is to be as humble as possible and then try to elevate both of how they identify and then how they communicate that. And then when I’m giving services, making sure I’m very sensitive to this is how the parent sees themselves, or parents or siblings see themselves, and this is how my child sees themselves, and how can I help with that communication? So a lot of it is when I do family activities, is bringing that out to you because culture will if you allow culture to come out, it comes out pretty well, right? People do like to present themselves, especially if you’re working with families.
And so, again, leading into, okay, so mom, you’re seeing yourself as you want your child to continue just, for example, you want your child to continue speaking Spanish and holding on to your Catholicism. And following that, I’m kind of speaking to a particular client right now, holding on to the Catholicism and making sure that drives your family values. And then this eight year old who has no interest in speaking Spanish and is embarrassed about the families because, again, they’re on their own cultural journey because that’s a developmental thing is your cultural identity is developmental.
So they’re on their own culture. So they might be at a stage where they’re like, oh, I’m not going to speak any spanish, and I don’t want to go to church. And so how do we bring those together so that all the values are respected? And again, I talk about it very polyanish about, oh, yeah, just bring it up, and that’ll be great.
But no, really trying to kind of get them to hear each other. And in the end, the parents do the parental thing, but can they also respect their child wanting something different, even if they keep the same traditions and how they handle things? I’m hearing you were saying that for you that authenticity is one of the key pieces for us as play therapists. But I’m also hearing that it sounds like that’s almost a treatment goal.
Also from this perspective of how do we really support the authenticity of each of the family members, the child, the caregiver, and that each individual of the family gets to be authentic within their identities? And how do we hold that? Does that feel accurate? I love how you’re conceptualizing it as a treatment goal. That’s awesome. Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, I think that is it, because to me, that is the core of relationships with everybody, with our professional relationships. But our personal relationships is how do we communicate with each other, who we really are, and trust each other, that we can hold that for each other. Okay, let’s jump over to the playroom because I said that it’d be fun to come back and talk about that.
So when we think about as play therapists, how do we look at our playroom so that our playroom is able to it’s culturally sensitive. It’s culturally aware in and of itself. What does that look like? What does that mean? Yeah.
Okay, so I’ll just take the next 20 minutes. So this has been the research agenda, and actually it’s been a long term research agenda. And we’ve been running research on what do people see as a multicultural playroom with participants who have multicultural intersectional identities.
And so that’s been a huge piece of what I’ve been working on with the Play Therapy research team. And just two weeks ago, for the first time at the University of North Texas in 40 years, we changed the rooms. And I’m kind of scared to tell you about it because now we’re going to run a research study to see does it make a difference? Because we’re not just doing it, we’re going to be like, okay, so does it make a difference? So Crystal Turner, who is one of our doctoral students, is going to be researching this about is it going to make a difference? So we’re taking one room that is a traditional Gary Landruth toys are in this room.
And then we have a matching multicultural room where we have changed what’s in the room. And then we’re going to look at how children are engaging in the materials. So just tell you we’re in the middle of that, which is always very exciting.
It was 10 hours two weeks ago after spending many hours on coming up, what would go into this room. But we used research from participants to say what should go in the room, because I’ll just say, traditionally, what has been the go to, especially in the child centered play therapy world, has been, okay, well, if your population is this, just make sure you have these dolls, right? This is what your population. And that just doesn’t cut it anymore because our children are so diverse and identities are so intersectional.
Like, we’ve got religious and gender and race and all these identities coming together. And so it just doesn’t cut it to say, okay, I’m going to put dolls of this shade in the room. And that’s really how traditionally play therapy has operated.
So what we did is we went into each category and what we were looking for is how to help children have a sense of belonging in the room, how to have a sense of pride and also challenges. Like culturally, can they identify things in the room that help them express or understand pride and challenges and then expression. So we were looking at those things about when children come to the room.
Can they do that? What we’ve done is we’ve put a multiple number of international, cultural, gender, all kinds of we went into the diversity of sensory neurodiversity, different kind of things in the room to try and capture. If a child walks into this room, they are going to see a world of diversity, which is the world they live in. And so then can they use the room more effectively? Because it might or might not.
What we hope is we’ve offered something to all children, but it’s almost impossible right, to make sure you have definitely a discussion was, are we going to have 26 dolls in the room that are all different? These were all huge discussions that we had. Or are we sending the message through the entire room that this room can be a lot of different things and it can fit any kind of child and in the way that you need it, which I think that is what our goal was. But I can’t tell you whether we met the goal because that’s what we’re going to look at.
But it really is if you’re doing it right now, as a play therapist, do you have materials in your room that a child sees their world in? Right. And children don’t live in a monochromatic world, chromatic world. They live in a diverse world.
And so do we have things in there that, oh, this is something that reminds me of religion, so I could explore that in here. Oh, this is something that reminds me of gender, so I could explore that in here. This is something that reminds me of race.
I could explore that in here. We’re looking at diversity of food and material, like just the touch of materials and having natural things in the room and having obviously identifications with certain cultures, like dress that cultures wear, food that people eat, dolls representing. So really, it’s a matter of the play therapist really being aware of that.
Because, again, when we did the study with the participants on making a multicultural play therapy room, what was most important to them we did the study was the play therapist. The play therapist. We can put any material we want in the room.
It’s not going to make a difference if the play therapist isn’t intentional with their cultural inclusivity. And so that’s the first part, is that we got to be taking care of the place. Therapist, plate therapists have to be working on their multicultural orientation, their humility, their comfort.
They’re leaning into opportunities. But then part of doing that is then you’re going to look at your room and be like, no, if I’m doing all of this, I’m going to go into my room going, oh, this is a problem. I need to kind of figure this out.
And then also about developing multicultural play therapy room. Don’t do it in a silo, don’t do it isolated. I cannot tell you these discussions.
It’s been easily 100 hours this past year, just in the discussion group of the research team of what do we think we hold up a toy or pull up a toy on Amazon and be like, what do we think about this? And what would this mean to any child? What would it mean to particular children? And then being able to do that in a consultation with other people is, to me, essential to that. You know what? I’m just loving what you are saying so much. The very first episode of this podcast is on the therapist is the most important toy in the playroom.
And you’re giving new meaning, right? So if we’re looking at it from a multiculturalism perspective, it’s the therapists and their own work and their own cultural humility. And then the second is, what does your playroom say about you? And so you’re giving this other layer of beautiful nuanced for me, appreciation, understanding of our playrooms, that when a child walks in, what they see is also an indicator of where we’re willing to go. Yes.
And so if they don’t see themselves in the room, what are we saying about where we are willing to go from a cultural perspective? Like, what conversations are we not willing to have? Do we not want to have? Are we not comfortable having? Well, it goes back to that. Toys are their words, right? And so if I don’t have certain things in there, I’m basically taking away words which saying, hey, this is not okay to be talking about in here or playing with in here. Yeah, so amazing.
I want to hold up your book for those that are watching this. And I’m just going to give a shout out because I said at the very beginning, but this is the book, everyone, for those of you that cannot see me holding this up right now, the book is called Multicultural Play Therapy. I’m assuming dee that play therapists can get it at the normal places where you rutledge is the publisher, so you can get it from them, Taylor and Francis, or you can get it from the center sorry, I should say from the center for Play Therapy.
You could also get it. Beautiful. I really believe that this is a book that just every single play therapist needs to read.
It’s just a phenomenal book, and it’s the person and it was a labor of love, like a complete labor of love from the beginning to end, every author, because it’s an edited book. So the chapters in it are just the most amazing play therapists who just have the widest and broadest perspectives on multiculturalism. And then, of course, doing it with human beings was a blessing. So as we are finding a place to find a stopping point in this conversation. But honestly, I could talk to you about this all day long, and you can tell I can too. Very chatty.
Just loving this so much. What words of advice do you want to give to a play therapist? Maybe this is the first time they’re thinking about it, or maybe it’s kind of been in the back of their mind, and now they’re listening and they’re like, okay, I really do need to think about this more. What would you share? Well, I don’t want to be self serving, but I do think the book is a good place to start because it’ll really get people thinking about maybe this isn’t something I’ve thought about before, but yeah.
To me, going to trainings because there are more trainings and the association for Therapy now is promoting it’s part of our requirements now to have cultural diversity training. And so really seeking that out in very open ways of, hey, I just want to learn more and look at myself more about what I need to change about me for this. To me, starting with a lot of introspection and books and trainings can do that help facilitate that for you.
But then to me, I’m going to go back to kind of what I’ve been talking about. Teaming, consulting, building relationships with peers who have different perspectives is just essential. And doing it in a way of, oh, I don’t think my perspective is wrong, but in a way of, oh, wow, I can’t wait to hear other people’s perspectives because I need to integrate those.
But, yeah, seeking out consultation, having those groups of people to talk to, and we have them. We do have play therapists of color and play therapists of various identities. And so really seeking those people out as colleagues, not to train you, not that they’re responsible for you, but for you to be seeking out, hey, I want relationships to be broader, and I want relationships I want to understand more.
Yeah. Beautiful. And I know today’s conversation was about multicultural play therapy, but you also do trainings just in general on many different topics.
Do you want to just share where people can just find more out about you, about trainings, whether it’s at unto me, there’s a lot about me. But on the center for Playtherapy website, CPT Unt.edu, I think you’re going to put that up at the so there’s a lot about the trainings we do there, and we have child centered.
And the center for Play Therapy runs multicultural webinar series every year. Started that in 2020, and this will be our fourth one. So that’s coming up in the fall.
And it’s a webinar, so anybody can go to that. So if you go to that website, you can find out about that. And then empathywell.com is my private practice, and we are always doing trainings well. We have one coming up in the fall, and then we’re going to have a whole slew of them in 2024. Beautiful.
D, I really just can’t thank you enough for this conversation and then the research you’re doing and that you’ve done and just really what you’ve contributed to the field of play therapy. Just on behalf of all of us who have benefited from you, thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me.
I feel honored to be here, so I appreciate it. Yeah. Okay, listeners, I know I said the beginning.
I know we just talked about it five minutes ago, but I’m going to say it again. Go get this book. This is a really important book to begin your own conversations and to be thinking about.
I hope that you will share this podcast also with whomever you feel like could also benefit from learning more about multiculturalism in play therapy. My hope is that you will have conversation with your colleagues that if you work in a training center or have conversation among amongst each other, talk about your these different pieces that Dee is giving us some insight into. And wherever you are in the world, take care of yourselves, be well and always a reminder that you’re the most important toy in the playroom.
So take care of your hearts, everyone, until next time.
