We have crossed the hundredth episode mark, everyone. That’s right. The Lessons From the Playroom Podcast is officially moving into its 101st episode.
This feels like such a great milestone. I am so grateful. Whether you have been listening to this podcast series from the very beginning or you found this series somewhere along the way, I am so grateful to you.
I’m so grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for learning and growing with me.
Thank you for telling people about this podcast series. We are now in so many countries around the world. This truly is a global community that comes together and has reflection and conversation.
I’m so grateful for the guests that were with me during the first hundred episodes. And I am so excited, everyone, for what is about to come. In the next many episodes of this podcast series, we’re going to have deeper conversations.
I’m going to bring in more guest speakers. I’m going to bring in some of the key leaders in the Play Therapy field. I want you to hear from them.
I want you to learn from them. I want you to know them a bit more. I’m so unbelievably excited about what is to come.
And I cannot imagine a more perfect person to help launch us into this next experience of the Lessons From the Playroom Podcast than the one and only Dr. Ileana Gill. So join me.
Celebrate with me this 101st episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast as Dr. Gill joins me as we discuss and explore what it means to be culturally aware and culturally competent, a topic that is so relevant and so important to us during these times. Enjoy.
Thank you again so much. Thank you for being a part of my life. Thank you for being a part of this podcast community.
I so look forward to continuing this journey with you. Hi listeners. Welcome back to Lessons from the Playroom Podcast.
I am unbelievably honored right now to be able to have a conversation with Ileana Gill who is joining us to kick us off. Everyone, we have crossed the hundredth episode mark and I cannot imagine a better person to celebrate and have a discussion with than Ileana just in case, for some reason, you are not aware of who Ileana is. Let me share a little bit about her before we jump into our conversation.
So before we even got into this, I was saying, Ileana, there were so many things that I want to be able to say about you because you’ve just been such a huge influence in the field. But here are a couple things, listeners. She is a founding partner, senior clinical and research consultant in a private group practice, the Gill Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education in Virginia in the United States.
She is an approved marriage and family therapy supervisor, a registered play therapist and supervisor, a registered art therapist, a circle of security, certified parent educator, a level two therapy provider. She is the former president or one of the former presidents of the association for Play Therapy and has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Was it in 2011 when you received that? Am I remembering that correctly? Yes, I think yes.
So deserved. Originally from Ecuador, Eliana is also bilingual and bicultural. And you’re a grandma.
Yes, you’re a grandma. How many grandkids do you have? Four. You have four? They come from how many children do you have? I have two children, and my son has three of the grandkids, and my daughter has a little girl.
Wonderful. Well, Eliana, as I just shared with our listeners, I’m so grateful to have this conversation and the privilege to interview and speak with you. And we’re going to be talking about cultural competence, which is such an important topic right now for all of us to be paying attention to and to be exploring within ourselves.
So can I start off with some questions about you? Sure. So, Eliana, how long have you been a play therapist and what got you into this? Well, I think it’s been about wow, that’s a good question. Probably since 1980 or somewhere around there.
And I worked a lot with abused children, so that’s been my professional career. And I started working with them sometime in the quickly discovered that verbal therapy was not really a good starting point and not always something that children easily did. And so at that point, I was really interested in alternative ways of communicating with kids, ways to make them feel welcome, well, ways to help them feel safe in an environment maybe different than their own.
And so I started looking around for So what do I do? I was always interested in art. And then around that time and I’m not good with dates anymore, but around that time, the association for Play Therapy with Charlie and Kevin was just kind of getting started. And I think I attended the first conference, which I think it was in New York, but I’m not really any more dates and things.
And I got there, and that was it. I was like I went to a couple of workshops, I think Charlie and Heidi, and it was so energizing. It was so alive.
It was so awake. And I couldn’t wait to get out the door and start trying to introduce some of this to the kids that I was working with. And so I am definitely convinced that working with the population that I worked with and the difficulty in really connecting with them and reaching them and the way they were all bound up, often in secrecy, probably really initiated this interest.
But having said that, I’ve also done a lot of looking back at my life, and I realized that whenever I had really difficult things happen in my life, I tended to turn to something that was either involving metaphors or playfulness. And so, like, I remember in Ecuador, we would have these massive earthquakes. And so I remember doing the shimmy after an earthquake, and I remember setting up cards and then blowing them over.
I had so many experiences like that when my parents got divorced, taking toilet paper and wrapping the toilet paper around the two dolls that were my mom and my dad so that they couldn’t get divorced and just experience after experience of utilizing that for myself. And so I think that was also just kind of deeply buried in there, just this love for expression and an alternative way of communicating and of self comforting and all of the above. And I think that contributed greatly to just this interest and this way that I resonated with anything that was playful because there was energy involved in that.
There was something you could do, and that seemed important to me. Well, you were one of the first people that really started to speak and write about working with the trauma experience with children and traumatized children and abused children. I remember when I first started as a play therapist, your books and your videos were the very first things that I started to read.
I still have an image in my mind of part of a video of you doing a santre with a young man in the video. What do you think it was about those particular children, the abused children, the really traumatized children that really grabbed your heart because you continue to work with that population and be a voice for that population. Yeah.
And, you know, it’s interesting because I started working with the Parents So in San Francisco in 1973, worked with this child abuse council. And one of the first things I did was something called Parents Anonymous, and that was a group where you worked as a co therapist with a parent who had been abusive to their child and now had learned different ways of parenting. And that group really was very compelling because you could see that these were people who had frustration and pain and their own heartache.
None of them got up in the morning and said, I’m going to hurt my kids today. It was all from a place of injury of their own. And also frustration, lack of resources, so many things that came into play and I remember listening to those stories and then in this group the kids were being babysat in the next room.
And then I remember after the group just seeing the mothers with their kids and just feeling really strongly that I really wanted to be of service to this relationship. Well that meant two people, right? So that meant, yes, I want to work with the parents and I have always continued to do that work and recognize that their histories of childhood trauma really affect how they behave with their own kids. And I thought, wow, it’d be great to kind of contribute something to these children so that they don’t end up repeating histories just like their parents did.
And so that was the motivator behind that. But it came from the place of really empathizing with parents and thinking that definitely there were ways to show them how to be different, but it was also work that had to be simple and had to be in vivo because it was very different for me to explain, listen, this is a parenting technique. Do this and that and that.
No, I had to be there when the upset happened and when the parent heard the shark music and when they had this kind of intense response. And then I could actually say wait a minute, let’s sit down a minute, let’s figure out what just happened there. Something got to you.
What was that? And just have conversations with them and then give them alternative ways of being. So I felt like that work was really powerful and also something I think we all keep doing things that we feel we can do pretty well. So I felt like I was pretty successful with most of the parents that I worked with and listened to them really hard and connected with them.
So it motivated me to keep doing it and trying to find ways to make those connections stronger and then obviously to help the Dyad and that led me to eventually working with kids alone. Thank you so much for sharing that. My guess is that’s wonderful and new for people to hear and know this side about you.
So I appreciate that. Ileana another piece as you were talking that just became really poignant to me was so not only were you one of the leading voices for traumatized children but you’ve also been one of the leading voices around cultural awareness, which is really part of the conversation I want to have with you today. I mean the book that you just put out is the second edition.
It’s not the first time that you are trying to bring awareness and attention to cultural issues to the play therapy world. So can we go into that a bit more? Sure. And I have, I think, been introspective about this particular topic most of my life from direct experience initially being immigrants not having I mean, Spanish is my first language.
I did learn English very early, when I was in second grade, when we were here in the United States for a year. And so I kind of recognize, however, that was kind of a special thing that I got the language early on, but being in a place where you can’t communicate with people has an impact on you. The other thing is feeling different know, and my name, for example, always set me apart.
And in school the teacher would always go, now, I’m not sure, how do you pronounce this? And it was always like everybody had to pause and look at me and I had to explain how you said the name. And eventually the teachers turned it into Elaine. And actually that worked for me because I felt like it didn’t put a spotlight on me anymore.
And all I wanted as a kid, I remember being seven and eight, was to blend in just like everybody else. And I didn’t like this concept of being seen as different and not fitting in. And so there was a lot of exploration of that, definitely with my mom, a lot of concern that I would get, quote, Americanized or that I would learn bad habits from American kids, and we don’t do this in my country.
And there was a big struggle around that. My mom had a very heavy Spanish accent, so she didn’t learn English early like I did. And so everywhere we went, people would immediately know and they would say, Where are you from? And blah, blah, blah.
And again, I had this kind of as a child embarrassment about it that started me out kind of on this road of trying to figure out the whole process of acculturation and really over the years kind of thinking, through my own heritage and making conscious decisions about, wow. These are values from the Latin culture that are amazing, and I want to keep those, but these are some values that I don’t really like. And yeah, I’m going to kind of set those aside.
And so we come from a classist system. For example, I hate that. I just hate that.
And I did from the time I was really little. So lots of conversation with my parents about that. And I don’t mean really intellectual conversations.
It’s much more, you shouldn’t be playing with that child. You need to be playing with this child. And I was like, what are we talking about here anyway? So trying to, for some reason find my own way.
And I think definitely when I look at my brothers, they were much more in the mold of a traditional Latin male with those values. For some reason, it didn’t take with me. And I don’t know how to account for that other than to say that things affected me differently.
I have an experience. I will just say really quickly that in South America again, we were sort of middle class family, and so we had servants in the house, which even to say, now I feel it’s embarrassing in some ways, and yet that’s how we grew up. And so I was given this is the language I was given this little girl.
Her name was Chavita, and she was there really just to play with me or, to quote, be my servant. But I thought of her as my playmate. I thought of her as my so in my room, I slept on the little bed, and she slept on the floor.
And I thought, Why is that? That’s so weird. One day, I would have her come up into the bed so she would be more comfortable. And my grandmother came in and saw that, and she got really upset, and she actually spanked her.
And she said, you know better. You can’t be in the bed with her. And my grandmother, who I loved, she was like, my most cherished person.
And I just felt like, wow, what is all this? I don’t understand this anyway. And that experience in and of itself just kind of put me in a different headspace about trying to understand why people were not equal to each other. And mind you, I was nine or ten years old, but this is where these things were born.
And then I came to the United States as a teenager again, and now I’m staying. So now I’ve kind of decided that and my parents had decided to know three of us would be educated in the United States, and the resources were different here than they were back in Ecuador. And so we stayed here.
But I think since that time, I just paid attention to that whole concept of social justice and why people are viewed differently. And then all the other experiences started where I now understand that the terminology is I am white passing. I don’t think I’ve ever used that, except maybe the last two years when I first heard it, but just the concept that I don’t necessarily look Latin, quote, unquote.
So I had experiences at work where people would say, we want to put someone on the panel. And then I said, well, I can talk about that, and I’m Hispanic. Oh, no, we want someone who looks Latin.
And I’ve done trainings where people have come up to me and said, had no idea you were from Ecuador. You don’t look like you’re from Ecuador. And I always say, So what’s your idea of what people in Ecuador look like? And they, you know, if pressed, they’ll, you know, dark hair and kind of brown.
I said, yeah, you know, we have tons of brown skinned, dark haired people in Ecuador, but also have cousins who are blonde and blue eyed. So, you know, just kind of giving a different perception that we have just a huge range of what Latin Americans can look like. But anyway, that term has been interesting for me because I can see now that that carries with it a certain amount of privilege.
And so my sister, for example, is very brown skinned, and when we’re together, people don’t believe we’re related, and they also treat her differently than they treat me. And when I see that in this country, I get really upset about it. And my sister has learned to live with it, and so she just says, it’s okay.
It doesn’t matter. It’s like, what’s that expression? Water off the duck’s bath. I don’t care.
But I get really frustrated with how that’s viewed, so and we have the same problem in know that there are nicknames in Ecuador for everybody little Fat One, little Skinny One, Little This, Little that, and another one’s around color. So people are called different skin colors, and that’s kind of like, acceptable to everybody. So I don’t know.
It’s been really a long journey trying to sort all this stuff out and figure out again how to be of help to other people that come from countries that I’m familiar with. And yet we may have different experiences of being Latin. As you’re talking, there’s this word that keeps popping into my head, which is assumptions.
And I’m just so aware of how we just make assumptions about people because of what they look like or how they speak and how much that can cloud our ability to connect or actually become curious or to stay curious, which I think really opens up a conversation for us. As play therapists, what does it really mean to become culturally competent? What does that require within a play therapist? What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, it’s a very complicated issue. I think it’s not a class you take that way, which I think for a while people have checked the box off and said, okay, I did that, therefore I am.
And the terminology is interested. So we went from being sensitive to now being, quote, competent. And what does that mean? How do you make that big step? But the things that I am aware of by now are that you have to do your own personal exploration.
That there is no way to become culturally competent without first really taking a deep dive into yourself and your perceptions and the assumptions you make and the stereotypes you have and the places from which you come, the values that you have or have discarded. But just a real digging in. Not a superficial one, which I think we all have done, but something a little more intensive where you really are face to face.
They’ve done all these new I guess they would be called questionnaires or assessments now, where you get to kind of gauge your stereotypes. And I think those are so useful because I can go into something and say, yeah, I’m pretty much aware of the issue of, for example, body size. Yeah, I think I’m pretty much okay with that I’m very respectful, I’m very sensitive.
You take that assessment and you go, wow, I have a lot of prejudices attached to the pictures that I saw, and you have to respond really quickly so you can’t really censor yourself. That kind of work is really important because I do think that most of us, again, have done it just kind of by checking off a box as opposed, know, even going and talking to your family members and doing that kind of a deeper exploration of how these ideas get developed in countries. I know, for example, in South America, our Asian population is very segregated, and for a long time, I didn’t think there were Asian Ecuadorians.
Well, it turns out they are, but they’re hidden away, and they’re segregated. And once I went by and I went, what’s this? And my grandmother said, that’s where the Chinese live. And so she couldn’t tell me anything more.
And one day I had a cousin, Margarita, and she ended up running away with a Chinese boy. She fell in love with him. I don’t know how she met him, but she fell in love with him and ran away.
And when I saw her dad, her dad, I asked over her. I said, how is she? He says, I don’t know anyone by that name. And so the fact that she took that step basically caused the family to turn their back on her.
That’s how strong these things are. And so for me, it’s been important to know that, because I have in the past noticed this kind of it’s an ambivalence, it’s an uncertainty, it’s an unfamiliarity, and I’ve had to work with that and just acknowledge it first and foremost and then say, you know, I would like to change something. What can I change? How do I go about doing so? You know, I’ve been reading a lot in the last two years.
I think we’ve all been reading. But in particular, Kendi’s work really struck a chord with me because he’s talking about action. And this is, I think, the bottom line for all of us.
It’s not enough to say, oh, yeah, we need to be careful about that. Oh, yeah, we need to not send that message. But then the next step is how do you implement that practice? If you have recognized a value, how do you translate that into something that’s concrete and visible to other people? And so that’s where I think that big bridge is in terms of all of us as therapists.
And I want to say something about play therapy in just a second, but for all of us is that sense of what steps do I need to take to build an antiracist practice? So that book in particular just really stirred me to let’s think about action. Let’s not talk about the rest of it anymore. Let’s assume that’s a given now.
But what is the action, and how do you implement those small things and just taking a look at everything that has to do with how you work, how you market yourself, how you market your practice, what the rooms look like, what kind of toys do the play therapists bring in. And over the years, I’ve been really fortunate to work with kids from lots of different cultures. And because what we do in play therapy is give kids an opportunity to express themselves, we can get some expressions of very racist values that just kind of start coming out in the room.
And so I’ve always been really mystified by that because as a well, I was initially trained as a child centered play therapist and I really value that. Over the years I’ve become more integrated so that I value lots of different approaches. And I think I can move flexibly kind of in and out.
But in the old days when it was child centered, I would sometimes find myself reflecting, so you took the little black toy and the little black child is now buried. And then a child would say something like he’s gross. And I would say, so the little black child is gross.
Now that unfortunately just doesn’t work for me anymore. And even though it’s not something, again, that I was trained to do, I really feel like at some point you have to have a line that you just don’t allow to be crossed. And so this is the stuff I’ve been kind of trying to talk with people about that if you think about the fact that we all, as play therapists, have an opportunity to work with kids and their parents and that one of the variables that comes up is the child’s perceptions of race and culture and cultural differences.
That we do have to be ready to take some action, that we can’t just do reflective work. And again, I don’t want to tell people what to do. I just want to encourage people to think through what might be the best possible response in this kind of scenario.
Has it ever felt uncomfortable to not say something if you know that the parents are actually really feeding into? We had a little child in our office this past year with one of our therapists who believes there’s a second civil war coming, who is purchasing a lot of rifles and guns because there is a civil war coming and that the black community is organizing to come and basically take away white children. This is what the parent is telling the child. So what does the play look like? Clearly it has to do with being guarded and having shields and guns and there’s a lot of play around black people and white people, and the black people are coming to get us and we have to kill the black people.
Well, so as a play therapist, how do we respond to that, right? Do we do reflective stuff? Do we start trying to see if we can get, well, let’s see how that black person might feel about being hunted down and killed. So maybe we want to hear, if the black person had a voice, what would he say? What would she say? Is that something we can do? Or do we take a stand and say it’s not okay for white people to kill black people? So depending on what the level of comfort is, hopefully my hope is that people begin to role play, begin to anticipate the kinds of things that might come forward and then begin to think about if I was going to take a proactive stance here, what would it be? And I think people have to try different things out because some people are not going to be comfortable taking a stand. If you’re talking with a child centered person, unconditional acceptance is the bottom line.
And so maybe that’s not going to fit. So what would they do with that issue? Do they then invite the parents in and do some coaching? Do they do some family therapy? I mean, what do they do? So this book, when we were putting it together, that was one of the driving interests for me is how do we just invite people to think this stuff through, to just anticipate where it could show itself. I mean, we have rooms that we have for the last 15 years been talking about making more culturally sensitive and so we have many more objects that represent different cultures and ethnicities.
What happens if somebody takes sushi, those little erasers that I just saw in a store a minute ago. But what happens if we look at that or a child looks at that and says, this food is gross. That’s for people who don’t live here and blah, blah, blah.
Do we just let that go? Or do we try to do psycho education or do we try to talk to the patient anyway? So that was my hope. And my hope was that it would cause people to really think through. So I wrote a bunch of vignettes that I’ve had experience with that have come up in the play therapy office as examples.
And my experience has been as I’ve talked to people, that they go, oh, I had a similar thing happen. We can see that with LGBTQ kids, that kids make disparaging comments. What do we do about that? You just sit and let it go.
Do you, again, talk to the parents? Do you reflect? But something has to happen. And so that’s kind of my bottom line, I think, when I’m talking to people right now, is just prepare yourself to take some action, to take some concrete steps in a positive direction. Because we do have this opportunity, like it or not, we are an influence on families.
We can role model things for them. We can challenge them at times and that’s come up over and over and over and over again and. That so beautifully ties back to where you first started, which was and we have to look at ourselves first.
Absolutely. Because how are we going to take action authentically if we haven’t done an investigation into our own biases and our own beliefs and our own assumptions and our own feelings and our own history? That’s not going to translate so well. So beautiful reminder.
We’ve got to go all the way back to us. And I love this question of Anne, given whatever modality you’re trained in, what I’m hearing you say, is there’s a place for this conversation? And it’s important as play therapists that we start to get curious about and when does that conversation need to happen and how do we do it authentically, how do we do it based on our own training, et cetera, et cetera? Absolutely. Such an important question.
Yeah, because I did give a number of different examples of how you might respond, but without assuming that there’s a best way. It really depends on your training and your orientation. And do we become proactive instead of waiting for something to come up in the play therapy office? Do we introduce it at some point? Certainly with the kids that we’ve worked with who are immigrants and who are incredibly anxious due to the raids that are going on and who have their shades drawn and don’t know when they get home, if their mom or dad is suddenly going to be missing in action with those kids, that comes up all the time.
We really have to be responsive to the anxiety they’re feeling. But what about their next door neighbor who’s maybe a white kid who saw the police come in and take them away in handcuffs? That child has an impact of that experience as well. So these conversations are just so critical, and yet it’s almost like, I don’t know, I think sex and money have always been really hard issues in therapy to talk about, but it’s another one like that.
How do you bring all this stuff up without getting incredibly antsy yourself and uncomfortable? That’s why I think this role playing opportunity, talking with colleagues. Here’s an idea I had about this. And what do you think and how would you respond and what do you think we can do? I think all those things are important.
I’m also aware in the book, too, that you expand it beyond race and color, and you mentioned LGBTQ, but someone that has a disability or a handicap of some kind, there’s so many ways that the sense of difference comes forth. And to me, this feels like the conversation applies to all socioeconomic status. Yes.
Race, color, there’s so many ways that this plays in, and I think that we just make too many assumptions. Yeah, and thank you for saying that, because, honestly, as we started talking about culture, we’ve become aware, I think, over the years, that there are subcultures and, for example, all these kids in technology, all the kids whose social relationships are now different than when I grew up, kids who meet online. There’s all dangers online as well, for sure.
But that’s kind of a culture into itself and the LGBTQ community and their experience with family and community and the larger social media presentation. There’s so much discussion of trans kids and there’s killings of people on the basis of different genders, gender fluidity, neurodiversity. There’s so many different areas like that.
Sometimes when you say to people something about culture, they say, oh, I don’t have any real cultural stuff. I’m just an American. And I just think that’s so interesting because I go, well, what part of the country are you from? Oh, so you’re a farm for you’re in the farm country, that’s kind of a different culture than the big city culture.
So it’s just kind of acknowledging that there are things that draw us together, for sure, and there are different experiences that we’ve had that make us view the world in a slightly different way. Absolutely. So listeners.
Ileana’s book is called cultural issues in play therapy. You can get it on Amazon or I imagine, the main areas, bookstores sources of where you get your books from wherever you’re listening in. Eliana, I have a final question for you.
We have listeners from over 150 countries that are listening to this conversation right now, play therapists from all walks of life, all different stages of their journeys of development. Given your lens and your experience as a play therapist and having seen the evolution of the field and your own growth, what’s a message to all of us. Yeah, that’s kind of interesting.
It’s so funny because, again, we evolve over time. But I think that the opportunity to connect with people, to be emotionally available, first and foremost, for a lot of the kids that I’ve worked with, that reparative experience has been so important because without it, the expectation is that all relationships are going to include a level of danger. All relationships are going to eventually end in some kind of pain.
To have a reparative or a corrective experience means that you have an opportunity to see that there’s an alternative. The thing I like the most about this concept is that if kids can see that there’s a rewarding interaction, there’s a possibility of a rewarding exchange, then it’s possible they’re going to motivate towards that. And I’ve had so many experiences with adult survivors who have said to me that the thing that made the difference for them was that one teacher who just didn’t look at them hard, very simple.
They didn’t look at me hard, they looked at me soft, like they weren’t going to hurt me. Or someone who never raised their voice, someone who just always seemed to be there when they needed them. So when you think about that, that’s the corrective experience.
And that’s, I think, what all of us can contribute and bring to the table. When I work with young play therapists, the thing I notice the most is the anxiety of what to do next, the anxiety of what technique I want to use. And it’s anxiety, you can see it.
The head is constantly going. And these days we talk about left and right hemisphere of the brain. And if you’re inviting kids from the left hemisphere of the brain, you’re really inviting them to do more cerebral work.
And definitely sometimes that’s really effective. But from the right hemisphere of the brain, you’re welcoming them into a world of emotion and metaphor and symbol. And there’s very few demands on the kids, but that ability to just be emotionally available.
So when I’m talking with young people, I say, just try to quiet that voice, that’s thinking, oh my gosh, what am I going to say when they finish talking? Or what does that mean? That they did this or that or the other thing? And just try to be connected, just without any judgment, without any expectation, just be fully present. But if you’re taking notes and if you’re just kind of trying to figure out, jeez, what am I going to respond about this? Or I think I should get that technique, I should pull that board game out, then you’re not there anymore. And so trusting the process and being emotionally available to me are probably the most important things because that process of just knowing that, just wait, just be patient, there’s something the child is doing that’s important to them.
I’ll never forget this one little guy who had been sexually abused. He just would come in and he would roll the sand around. He’d just push it from one side to another and then he would wet it a little bit and he would pat it down.
And he did that, I’m going to say seven or eight times. It’s just patting. And I was just there.
And I honestly, by then had learned that this must be important to the child. And then, I don’t know the 9th time or so, he started kind of gathering the sand together and he made these like little mountains and then he started making little holes in them. And eventually the long story is that planes would crash in the hole and there were six holes, six little hills with holes.
And it turned out this child had been sodomized six times. And each one of those little hills was one memory, and each memory needed to be recreated. And this was all metaphor work.
And when I think back on that, I say to myself, when he was touching the sand, he was connecting grounding himself. When he was patting it down, he was probably comforting himself. But also I had this image of it’s like the earth when the farmer goes to plant and then they dig up the earth and they get the good earth and then they get the thing ready, and now it’s ready for planting and seeding, I should say.
And then eventually things start to grow. And that’s how I thought about it. And I think sometimes we’re just rushing all the time.
We’re not trusting that whatever is happening in there right now is important and necessary to whatever might come next. And we get ahead of ourselves. Now, we also have demands from the world.
So we’ve got financial demands in terms of the parents saying, I can’t afford this, or if we’re working with the county, they’ll say, well, you’ve got three months, or if you’re working in different environments, the insurance companies take over and they go, You’ve got six sessions with this child. So there are those demands that cause that hurring. But even in those circumstances, I try not to put myself in that position where I’m going to be told how much time I have.
So that’s why private practice has always been so appealing or nonprofits, and that’s both my settings where I’ve worked. But when you do have that kind of demand to be able to say, okay, I can contribute this and that’s my person, meeting that person. And now it’s funny to me, the neuroscience kind of explains things that we’ve all been doing intuitively for years.
And now we have this great language where we can communicate it to people often who need that language in order to connect with what we’re doing. Yeah, so beautifully said. It’s so funny, isn’t it? Because everything is.
I used to have a supervisor who would say, you have this really nice presence about you, and the kids seem to quiet down in your presence. Well, now we know with the polyvagal theory that we’re talking about our nervous systems kind of resonating and affecting each other, and that I have the power to center myself, and then that is going to contribute to the child centering himself. And that’s the big changes, I think, that have happened is we have all this new language and all these different ways of communicating about the things we’ve all intuitively done, which is fabulous.
It’s really nice to see that in the last, what, 15 years or so has just been incredible. And I think there’s much more acceptance of the expressive arts. So little things like I say to kids, you can talk to me or you can show me in a variety of different ways what you think and feel.
Puppet stories or art, or do a dance, do a rap, I don’t care, whatever. Kids have that wonderful ability to just use their behavior as a way to show you. And so let’s just kind of listen for that, not look at it as that’s a bad thing, but that they’re communicating in much more ample ways than we do.
Thank you so very much, not just for this conversation, but for all you’ve done for us as play therapists and really setting a path forward so we can have some pathway to follow as we find ourselves and find our way. So thanks for being one of the individuals that went, oh, thank you, Lisa. And also, I just want to say that it’s wonderful to see yourself with your synergetic play therapy and others kind of really just moving along and showing a different kind of approach and a different way.
And I don’t know, it’s beautiful. It’s a really good time for us all. It’s not like the old days where we had to try to find scour to find some good training, excellent training, and now it’s available to us.
So I also thank you very much. It’s wonderful to see. Well, listeners, wherever you are in the world.
I invite you to take a deep breath here as we transition and a reminder to take care of yourselves. Be well, and as always, you’re the most important toy in the playroom. You’re important, so take care of yourself.
