Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. I am so honored that I have a very special guest with me today. I’m going to go ahead and introduce Dr. David Crenshaw, who is joining us today to talk about the hidden gifts in children, the children that have been through so much and yet there’s still this thing inside that seems to not get touched. So I’m so curious about this conversation we’re going to have. For those of you that are not familiar with Dr. David Crenshaw, he is the clinical director of the Children’s Home of david, you’re going to have to pronounce this poughkeepsie. Okay. He’s the past president of the New York Association of Play Therapy, a board certified clinical psychologist, a fellow of the American Psychological Association Division of Child and Adolescent Psychology, and registered play therapy supervisor.
My goodness, David, you’ve done so much for our field. He was honored with the Excellence in Psychology Award in 2009, a lifetime achievement award in 2012 by the Hudson Valley Psychological Association. And we are celebrating him even more because he just received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the association from Play for Play Therapy.
Yay. You so deserve it. And also from the New York Association for Play Therapy in 2018.
He’s the author, editor, co editor of numerous books, book chapters, journal articles on child aggression, play therapy, child trauma. And his latest books, co edited with Kathy Malchiati, are what to Do When Children Climb Up in Psychotherapy, and a book co written with Ileana Gill titled Termination Challenges and Child Psychotherapy. Wow, David.
Such an honor. Before we jumped on here, I was talking about this concept of standing on the shoulders of giants. And you are one of the giants in our field, and it’s just an honor to have you on here to share your wisdom.
You’ve been at this a while. It’s hard for me to view myself as one of the giants. That’s something that I’m a foreign boy from Missouri, and I came from modest surroundings and not a very impressive pedigree.
So when somebody refers to me as a giant in the field, I have to do a double take and look behind me to see if there’s somebody else that they’re referring to. But thank you and what an honor Apt has bestowed on me. I’m very humbled by that.
So grateful. Absolutely. Well, you have done a lot in your career, and I want to start there.
Before we get into our topic around the gems and the buried treasures and the hidden gifts inside children, tell us a little bit about how did you start working with children? What even led you on this path? Well, I’ve always loved kids, nieces and nephews, and eventually my own children, my grandchildren. But I think I started out working with adults in the two veteran hospitals in St. Louis during the Vietnam War, and I saw a lot of young veterans coming back with PTSD and even more serious emotional breakdowns from that traumatic experience, being so young and being exposed to so much during their tour of duty.
But I enjoyed working with those young veterans, but I also did not find the work with the more chronic patients in the BA hospitals to be very hopeful. It was hard to keep my spirits up working with such chronic conditions. So when the opportunity came up to go to New York, I was living in St.
Louis at the time. I jumped at it because I was working with children. And the experience in working with kids is just such a nourishing hopeful experience.
I mean, hardly a day goes by that something doesn’t happen that makes me so grateful for having this opportunity to I don’t think we can count on making a difference in the life of a child every day, but we can position ourselves where it’s possible that we could make a difference in the life of a child. So when I get up in the morning, that’s what I think about when I go to work today. There’s a chance, a possibility that I could make a difference in the life of a child, and that’s all I need to get going in the morning.
Been doing this a long time. This is the start of my 53rd year in the field, and I’m just grateful that my health allows me to continue doing this. Like the psychoanalyst that I studied with in New York City, dr.
Walter Boney said when he was 85, he said, David, I’m looking forward to not retiring. And that’s my philosophy. I’m looking forward to not retiring.
I heard a funny quote one time that said, retirement is great as long as it doesn’t get in the way of your work. And you’re speaking I mean, even as you speak, it’s just so clear how much you love what you do and how much you love children. It just comes right.
What a blessing. When I was in private practice on a part time basis, I saw a lot of adult clients who made three or four times the kind of money that I made, but they weren’t happy. People in the jobs that they do.
They’ll never have a chance to make a positive difference in the life of a child. So I never want to take that for granted. It’s a privilege.
Well, having worked with children for so long, I’m so intrigued when you brought up this topic of you’ve never met a child. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances have been that they have gone through, whatever the hardships have been, the level of trauma they’ve experienced that you continue to find inside these children this buried treasure, this gift. Will you share with us what you’re talking about and what you mean by that? Well, back in 2007, James Garbarino and I wrote a paper on the buried treasure potential in Youth Who Are Violent that when you peel away the layers you often come to something that is some kind of talent, some kind of strength, some kind of ability to build on it’s buried in there.
But if you are patient enough and you’re able to create the kind of therapeutic context that they’re able to let you see more and more of their basic makeup, the core self, you often come to these treasures. Now, a lot of times that might be art, music, poetry, some kind of creative ability. But the thing that I’ve been just absolutely fascinated by recently is something that Jerome Kagan, the child developmentalist, used to talk about.
But I don’t find too many people that talk about it in the child development field, and that is a sense of virtue, a sense of goodness. Kagan maintained that that’s very important in the healthy development of a child that they attain a basic sense that they’re a good person. There’s virtue that we all need in order to feel good about ourselves.
Well, I’ve come to realize that even in the kids that I work with, some of them are in what we call our safe harbor program. And these adolescent girls had been commercially sexually exploited. Trafficked and God knows what they’ve experienced is the utmost degradation, humiliation, exploitation.
And yet the writing that you’re referring to was inspired by an experience I had of going to McDonald’s for lunch, which I know is not a great recommendation health wise, but it often meets my need for a very quick bite to just get me through the afternoon. And so I walked into McDonald’s a couple weeks ago and as soon as I got in the door, I heard this lovely voice say, Hi, Dr. Crenshaw, and this beautiful, beautiful smile.
And I realized it was one of our girls from the safe harbor program. And the interesting thing to me was that I’ve gone there a number of times I’ve never been greeted in such a sweet, kind, pleasant voice, let alone I mean, most of them wouldn’t know who I was. But just even to say hi, this was extraordinary.
Not just for the program that she’s in the background of her experience, but it stood out in that environment. When we go about the world today, there’s so much hate, there’s so much in the way of hyper competitiveness. Just the basic elements of kindness and caring and patience and pleasantness are not easy to come by.
So it may seem like such a simple encounter a brief encounter. But it really touched my heart. And it got me thinking.
How is it that kids who have gone through such horrible life experiences still retain that sense of virtue, that sense of goodness, the ability to smile in a beautiful wholehearted way that just touches your heart? And I’ve come to realize that even though you can crush the spirit of a child, it is done sometimes. It’s not easy. It’s not easy.
These kids have a resilience that is just incredible to witness. And particularly astonishing to me is that that sweetness could survive all that they’ve been through. I wrote her a letter about my experience and I I took it over to her last week and of course, she had no idea what this was all about.
And she took a couple of minutes to read it and then she just burst out in tears because she felt that nobody had appreciated that part of her. That in fact, you have to think that it takes a lot of courage to show that more vulnerable side of oneself, that kind of tenderness, when you’ve been mistreated for most of your developmental years. It takes a lot of courage because most of those girls don’t let you see that vulnerability.
It’s not often that people have a chance to see this, which is another sense in which I felt honored because she allowed me to see that sweet part of her, that beautiful smile that you just would not expect from someone who has been exploited and mistreated and abused in all kinds of ways. And I’ve written with a colleague, some papers, on intimate wounding. I think the injury to the spirit of the person is all the more devastating when the wounding involves intimate parts of self.
And these girls that have experienced extensive sexual exploitation suffer from those intimate wounds. And so I’m particularly moved when I get that kind of response from those girls. And it’s not the first time.
It’s not the first time. I’ve seen it a number of times during the six years that we’ve had that program. But it never fails to touch me deeply as you’re sharing it’s reminding me of two things that I think are important for our play therapy listeners to keep in mind, which is you’re reminding me of the children that have been wounded.
So often what we see are the protection patterns around the wound and we forget this thing that you’re talking about and we get confused and we get swayed by the protection pattern rather than remembering that underneath all of that is still the child’s essence. Yes. And underneath the anger, underneath the back talk, underneath the sassiness underneath the shutdown, that there’s still this essence.
That’s what you’re reminding me of, and I think parents forget that too. And one important thing for us to remind parents of, to find the goodness and to really look for the goodness inside the children we work with. And how do we help other people see the goodness inside of them? That’s one of the things that’s coming to mind really strongly as you’re sharing.
And, Lisa, I learned that from you, actually, when you were talking about adolescence in a presentation to the New York Association for Play Therapy, and you talked about how the adolescent phase of development is so intensely focused on finding one’s essence. Hi, listeners. I’m going to ask you to step out of the playroom for just a second so we can talk business.
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I hope to see you there. Get all the details at learn synergeticplaytherapy.com. It’s easy to overlook these deeper qualities of gentleness, tenderness, caring, sweetness, because adolescents don’t easily show us those things.
They can be very challenging in their behaviors, and so it would be easy to overlook this part of their essence, but that’s part of who they are. And I think our ability to appreciate that and to honor that enables them to view themselves in a more expanded, richer kind of way. So my second piece that came up was the question for you, which is, as play therapists, we have the opportunity to catch glimpses of this when we’re working with the children, whatever the age is.
Are there things that come to mind for you that would be helpful for us to think about, to support this side of the child emerging in the room? Like, what can we do as the clinician to make it the word safety keeps coming to mind, to make it safe enough for the child to be vulnerable in this way? What comes to mind for you? I think you hit the nail on the head that safety is the key to allowing kids to be who they are, in essence, whether they’re adolescent or younger. We have to create the kind of safety in the therapeutic context that allows them to reveal as much of their true self as they can. As you were asking that question.
A particular example came to mind in which this boy was 14 and might be on the upper edges of the age range that we usually do play therapy with. But he was an action oriented kid and sitting down to talk about things was not in his repertoire, but he would play things out and create all kinds of stories and dramas. He played out the sense of being in placement and not just the time he was with us, but I believe he had been in twelve foster homes before he came to us.
So he had been in foster care for most of his life, and he played that out by putting me in jail. And so the utility closet off of our playroom was my cell. And while I was in there, I would complain that I didn’t like being locked up and was dark and stuffy.
And what kind of a place is this? I’d like to have a chance to talk to the judge. And he would just be so cross and so hostile in response to my complaints. But then there came a day when he knocked on the door and he said, you can go home now.
I said what? He said, yeah, you’re free now. And he said he himself had paid the money for me to be free. And I said to him, you didn’t fool me a bit.
I know about your kind heart. I’ve seen it from the beginning. I saw it today that you wanted to give all of your money that you had made in our summer work program to the homeless man down on the corner.
You wanted to give all of it 400 and some dollars, and we talked you out of that because we thought that was over the top generous. And we suggested you give $20 and the rest of it could go in the bank. But you so reluctantly agreed to that.
You kept saying, Well, I can work, I can make more money. He has a family, he needs to feed his family. He can’t work.
He’s disabled. You had such an astonishing sense of generosity. What a heart.
So I knew from the beginning that you were going to do something like this. You can’t fool me. You have such a kind heart.
So that would be an example of something in the playroom where we can really accentuate highlight the goodness, the kindness of his heart. And he’s living with his mother now and he’s not been with us for a while, but I called him the other day to let him know that I can’t pass the homeless man down on the corner without giving him some money. And every time I do, I give it in honor of him, because he taught me what real generosity is all about.
And he was pleased to hear that in the article that I read, you gave such beautiful examples of the child that knows what it has felt like to be hungry and yet shares is willing to share a meal when they finally get food. Or the child you have so many different examples, but the child that doesn’t have clothes but is willing to give the shirt off their back, or the child that doesn’t whatever it is that has been their hardship is willing to turn around even in the context of that hardship. Which I think for me is the most extraordinary thing.
Because you think that because that’s where the pain is. Yes, but exactly where the pain is is where their heart seems to be as well, which is so beautiful. Isn’t that striking? I mean, it’s just so remarkable that these kids who have been deprived of even the basic necessities can be so generous in giving what little they have to others who need it even more in their eyes in the playroom.
Because virtually all of our kids do come from deprived backgrounds. In fact, we do an Asus survey every few years and over 80% of our kids have experienced both physical and emotional neglect. And so that’s a powerful theme in the playroom.
And the way they play this out is they will pretend that they are running a grocery store and they have me as a customer showing up to buy groceries. But each time I show up, they send me away, the door gets shut in my face. And after this happens over and over again, you really begin to experience what these kids must feel like.
It’s so disheartening, it’s so frustrating, it’s so degrading. Over and over. I mean, you’re not coming to Nordstrom’s, you’re coming to a grocery store for goodness know, just to get bread and milk and you’re being turned back.
Come back tomorrow, we’re closed. Come back tomorrow, same story. This is something that’s just so uncanny, how these kids can share their story in such a precise, beautiful way through symbols and metaphors so that you really can’t help but understand better what their life has been like.
So it’s just so wonderful that they can express so much through their play, through their symbols, and if we don’t get it the first time around, they’ll repeat it until eventually we get it. Exactly. They’re generous that way too.
They are taking you a while. We’ll keep going until you get it’s true. Yeah.
I can make it a little more obvious. Yes. I actually had one child when I was in private practice draw me a picture to help me understand that underneath his sadness was anger.
And so he just laid it out there, the different feelings, and on the bottom was the sadness that was underneath his anger. Yeah. As you’re talking about the play, I’m caught with even in the play of the grocery store and being turned away and not being able to get basic needs.
And I imagine in the play being hungry and not being able to have food available. And whatnot I’m so taken by as I’m reflecting on my own cases, the transformation of that in the play often comes with now we have the food and we share it, or something was missing and we finally find it and then we celebrate it. And there’s often a sharing of that.
It’s not just me that gets the jewels meaning the child, but hey, you get a crown on your head too, or you get some beads around your neck as well. And so you’re helping me think about how often empowerment really has a generosity attached to it. Absolutely.
And this goes back to the early days of my career in play therapy. But I love this as a teaching example. The story of the Jolly Green Giant.
And this little boy had gone home for Thanksgiving. I was working in a different residential treatment center at the time. And so in the session before Thanksgiving, he told me all he hoped to be able to have for his Thanksgiving dinner.
His mother was a good cook and he was really pumped up to have the mashed potatoes and the gravy and the turkey and the cranberry sauce and all of that. And it was mouth watering to listen to everything that was on the menu. But when he got home, his mom met him at the bus stop and she was all bandaged up.
She had been injured in a battered wife incident, stabbed, actually. And she was at a shelter for battered women. And so he stayed with her at the shelter and for Thanksgiving they had some stew or something that just was not at all what he was hoping for.
So the first session we had after he came back, he was going to cook the kind of Thanksgiving feast that he had hoped for. And there was so much food available that everybody in the room was invited, including the Jolly Green Giant and all the puppets. I was helping him get everybody seated at the table and he was working away in the kitchen and cooking the turkey.
So we were finally ready to sit down to eat and he froze. And he looked over in the corner and there was a baby in the high chair and he said, oh my God, we forgot to feed the baby. The story of his life, right.
There were just too many problems in his family that they forgot to feed the baby. The nurturance that he needed was was not available. So I’ll never forget it.
It was just such a stunning moment, powerful moment. But once again, the kids are so amazing. And being able to share their story, even in that example, his essence came through the part him that recognized that the baby deserved to be fed.
Yes. I jumped in and said, oh, it’s not too late, I’ll get the baby. Lord knows there’s plenty of food.
So we included the baby. And the baby did get so there was a chance to do some corrective intervention there. David, this conversation, it’s touching my heart greatly.
I’m finding myself even, I’m just really tender, just listening and reflecting and really grateful for what you’re sharing and the reminder for us to look deeper and to not forget this part of the children that want so desperately to be seen and recognized, and you see it, and it’s so beautiful. As a final question for you, seeing what you’ve seen and gone down the road, you’ve gone in your career, we have therapists that are listening from all over the world and all different stages of their own growth and their career. If you could say one thing, what’s the advice you’d give for therapists? Well, in keeping with the theme of what we’re talking about today, I think the deeper we go, the more we are surprised, the more that we find this buried treasure.
I believe that we are all trained to focus on pathology and the damage the child has suffered. But at the deepest level, you come to these beautiful qualities of what it means to be human that not even the worst of life experiences have been able to extinguish. James Garborino has a beautiful way of phrasing this.
He talks about the divine spark that exists in every you know, I suppose in the most extreme cases, it could be extinguished, but in most cases, it may be faint. It may be in danger of being extinguished. But so often, if we look for it, if we’re patient enough, if we make the therapeutic context safe enough, we’ll be able to encounter that part of self that is sweet, tender, loving, kind, caring, empathic.
Because I believe it exists in most of these kids. And so that that’s that’s what drives me in my work to locate that treasure. Absolutely beautiful.
And not that I had any doubt why you would have received the lifetime achievement award, but it is absolutely abundantly clear why you received the lifetime achievement. Thank you, lisa, coming from you, that’s quite a compliment know, I have so much respect for your work and the groundbreaking things you’ve been doing with your synergistic. I have a hard time saying the word synergistic.
Is that right way to play therapy? It’s a wonderful approach. You’re great, wonderful. Well, thank you once again, David, for your time, your wisdom, your presence, it’s really pleasure.
Yeah. So much gratitude to you and play therapists. Thank you for tuning in.
Wherever you’ve tuned in from around the world, deep breaths to all of you. Be well and remember, you’re the most important toy in that playroom. You? For more information on our courses and our classes, please go to our website@synergetictherapy.com and check out what we have available to you, and as always, remember that you’re the most important toy in that playroom.
