Thank you so much for joining me for another episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. I feel very blessed and very honored to have with me someone that I have been really looking forward to having a conversation with for many years. Our first interaction, even though it wasn’t directly there, was sort of a kindred spirit connection, an immediate I want to know you and this moment and this conversation feels like a long time in the making.
I am welcoming today Marie Diaz, who is in Canada. Although not originally from Canada, she’s from France. She is a registered clinical counselor, a registered art therapist, a registered Play Therapy supervisor, certified play therapist supervisor.
And she has created a beautiful playroom, although it’s more like a play home, really. A play home on a beautiful piece of property that is called the center for Expressive Therapy, which is where she works with children and also does her teachings and her trainings. She is a legend, in my opinion, in the field.
She has been working with children and families for over 45 years. She’s the creator of Holistic expressive play therapy. We’re going to be talking about that today.
She’s a frequent speaker. Marie Jose, you’re a blessing to our field. I am so grateful that you have joined us.
Thank you. I’ve tried to be a, um, I shared with you before we got n that. I really wanted the listeners to know you a little bit more.
You have such a beautiful story. And what I have read and what I have understood about your story has influenced so much of why you do what you do, why you believe what you believe, how you created Holistic Expressive Play Therapy. And I would like our listeners to know you a little bit more.
So would you take us on a journey from France? Well, I’ll take you to a little village in France, a small village just a couple of years after the Second World War in Normandy. So you can imagine the situation there. And so I was raised by farmers who had gone through two world wars because my parents would have been the generation where they were children in the First World War.
So I would say I was baked in trauma from one generation to the next. And I was a bit different, a dreamer. And my obsession was that I wanted to touch the sky.
So in our yard, we had a big yard on the farm, and I could see where the sky and the hedge would touch the horizon, and I thought that was how I would touch it. And so my mother found me a few times running back and forth, trying to touch, and I was always so disappointed that when I got there, there it was, far away. Yes.
So that was kind of I don’t think I’ve ever stopped longing for that. Yeah. So I would say that’s pretty well at the source of my life.
There’s a beautiful story that you have shared about being with your mother one day out in nature, and asking her about God and discovering or hearing something about that there’s this thing inside all of us, or it tapped you into some fundamental knowing. Yes. Well, being a Catholic country in those days, you had to go to Catechism as soon as you were about six years old, five or six years old.
And so I heard about God having no beginning, no middle, and no end. And I was trying to figure that out as I walked back and forth to school. And so finally, when the summer came, my mother, I would go with her while she was gleaning in the wheat fields.
After the men had cut the wheat, then the women picked up the little pieces there. Finally, we had a bit of time. It was very hot, and I sat by her side and I asked her where God was and what she did.
And I’ll never forget she picked up the sheath of wheat. One of the ones took out a seed, took out the COVID and showed me the seed with that little white dot. And she said, that’s where God is.
Yeah. For me, my whole approach is based on seeing each and every one of us being a different kind of seed and that we have that life force and that drive to grow towards the light, and it’s very powerful force. All my life, I’ve always looked for plants that grow, like, through rocks and asphalt.
So to me, that’s what I focus on is helping people wake up that force inside them. So that’s what I try to engage, and that’s what I’ve seen until you can engage it unless you see it in the other. It has been so buried for a lot of the children that I see that it makes a huge difference because they see it in your eyes.
Yeah. What do you think it was that has drawn you to really focusing on children who’ve really gone through a lot? Well, you can imagine that it’s very rare that anybody with my background in my generation would leave the village and manage to go and get an education and went to boarding school. So as soon as I was able to, well, I’ve went to university as first, which was quite rare for anybody in my background.
And as soon as I could, I started wanting to get away and travel. So you can imagine that being a young woman. In 19 6667-6868, I landed in Champaign Urbana, Illinois to teach French.
I had a few adventures starting from my childhood and obviously the kind of people that I would be drawn to as well. And so I had a big crash eventually where I had to be hospitalized. I traveled through about England, the US.
And then so and that’s where I started. It caught up with me, basically. And I knew I wanted to heal myself.
And in that search to heal myself, I realized this is what I want to do. And I discovered somehow there was a part of me that would know what to do, in some cases to be there. So I’ve always worked on myself as well as developed my work at the same time.
Yeah. One of the things that has struck me profoundly by the way that you approach working with children and with families is the sense of really providing them the experiences that they did not have or providing them a real sense of repair or a sense of new experience. I love it so much when I hear stories or when I hear and I’ve read, you talk about even basic things like if a child doesn’t have food, you start with food.
If a child whatever they’re missing. Right. You start and you build up the nurturing, build up the positive experiences.
I don’t necessarily think that that’s the way many play therapists start. I think that it almost feels like you start one step even further back, even your center that you have, it being more like a home and what that offers for a child to experience. I would love for you to share a little bit about how you have created what you’ve created and a little bit about holistic expressive play therapy.
But there’s something really unique and special about the way that you approach it in a really profound healing kind of a way. Well, what I try, I see it as essential to always start where the person is at in their primary need. So whatever that might be, that’s where we’re going to take care of that.
But also they need to feel valued and seen. You cannot feel connected without being seen. And it’s the being seen that I focus on and the sensing of what that primary need is and then providing it.
My first years in this field, I worked in a treatment center for adolescents. And that was think or swim, let me tell you. Yeah, I learned that therapy could be done anywhere at 03:00 in the morning when there’s an earthquake.
Do you have to comfort them? Or it could be in the kitchen, or it could be while you’re driving somewhere. By the time I moved on to working with children, which is what I really wanted to do, I didn’t have anybody to tell me what I could do and not do because there wasn’t anything where I was. So I continued to see what the child needed, and then if I didn’t have it next time, I would have it.
And it worked. And that’s how I built everything I have. Yeah, there’s just something in that that feels so different to me about the way a lot of play therapists approach play therapy.
Because what I’m hearing you say, it’s not about a protocol, it’s not about an intervention. You’re not even saying play therapy is this and it’s not this. What I’m hearing you say is just taking a walk outside is therapy.
Getting a glass of water together is therapy. Having someone lie down and put a blanket on them because they’re tired is therapy. Having someone spend time playing with your dog is therapy.
And I think that’s what I find so beautiful is you’re not putting therapy in a container. Well, therapy healing is what is important to me, and I think they’re different. Yeah.
Because what I focus on is how am I going to help this person connect to who they truly are in their true nature, which is where all the answers are to help them heal themselves. So I need to make them feel safe physically, emotionally, cognitively, depending on the age and spiritually, which I mean by seeing them and their value and their true nature, it’s kind of layers and layers of safety that you create to hold them so that they can relax enough to connect with who they are. And it comes to them, it’s just amazing.
And I have never stopped doing the work, by the way. I still have a full practice, and I don’t see able to see as many people as I used to or as many days, but I can’t imagine not doing it. But one of the best sessions I had last week was it was pouring rain and this girl who has selective mutism and has gone through horrors, we went and played in the puddles and with gumboots, and it was one of the best sessions she’d ever had.
And the connection the next session, she came and she wanted to draw and stay inside and was able to get to the other parts because she’d experienced something before. And of course, now they’re saying that nature is essential and then animals and expressive therapies I was a bit of a strange bird back in the early 80s, let me tell you. Yeah, you keep using this word, safety.
I’m curious, if you had to define that, how would you actually define what safety is or what it feels like? More than anything, I think it’s to feel received and connected with someone. So safety in the presence of another. Because safety alone with your companion in a cabin and you feel safe is very different when a person has had gone through complex trauma and so on, because people is where the trauma is, right? So you have to feel safe in the presence of another human being and it’s safe with somebody who’s going to guide you to connect with yourself and recognize that the things I’ve seen come out of the children, what they’ve created and so on.
It’s not just a word for me, innate wisdom and I’ve never met anybody that didn’t have it. Some people are more disconnected from it than others. But that safety has to do with feeling held without touch, in a way, all surrounded by this gentle warmth.
And you know that you can be accepted emotionally. Any feelings you have will be accepted and followed and guided through being able to have them without getting in trouble. And if there’s something that you don’t understand that you want to know, it’s safe to ask any question.
So physically, of course, here no one gets hurt. Emotionally you can have all the range of feelings and cognitive leak and then in the whole time you’re being seen and helped to get closer to who you are, which is very unique. So I always see it as a mixture of nature, nurture and trauma and how they’ve come together is as unique as your fingerprints.
Very much so. So if I go in there thinking I know how it’s going to be, what to do. Yeah.
And even as you’re talking about our own individual blueprint, I’m appreciating well, there’s an assumption I’m making right now so you can let me know if this assumption is correct or not. But what I’m aware of is you have so many different opportunities and ways that a child can express themselves. So whether it is through the puppets or through the sand or through outdoor areas you’ve created or different spaces in your playroom, but there’s so many, right? There’s so many different or something like the kitchen or something like that.
And I’m making the assumption that part of also how you work is that the child chooses and that the child’s own innate wisdom, if we’re going to use your beautiful words, guides them, is guiding them towards the experience that they need. Not the experience I think that they need, but the experience that they know inside that they need. Is that a correct assumption? Yes.
But that takes quite a bit because some children who are so very disconnected from themselves will need a different kind of holding than a child who is right there. So it’s always finding that kind of combination of freedom and containment that is going to guide them to that connection to themselves and where it comes then. Right? So it takes a bit because it’s very anxiety provoking for some children to just be purely child centered and say, you may use these any way you wish, right? Yes.
Especially if they have a trauma attached to attempting to express something or do something and then being scolded or shamed or something. There might even be I don’t want to put myself out there because that hasn’t gone well in the past. No.
Some of them, they spend so much of their time and energy reading you to see how you’re going to react and seeing if they should push you a little bit to see how you’ll react and to establish safety. I always tell people, you think that you’re interviewing children, you’ve got something coming, we know how to interview you and figure out what kind of a grown up you’re going to be and test you. If you have a button somewhere, they will sense it.
They will. Yes, they will. And you can feel it.
I’m coming close. Yes. So, time for a therapy session.
Ray Jose, will you talk to us a little bit about how you came up with or even just the premise of holistic expressive play therapy? Well, it’s been a long journey and it started for me with thinking about healing and how healing came about. And I thought of it so often using the metaphor of a wound of some kind. So some people have more pus and infection than others.
So I was always looking for safe ways and that would take into account physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, together, safe ways of kind of expressing and transforming this pus. Right. So that whatever was there that needed healing could go.
So that’s what I call the healing from in the inside out. And then in order to you kind of let the pass out, you clean it up through the expressive therapies and the whole range of expressive therapies. Sorry.
And they each need to do something different. Here we go. There we go.
I always ask my students to not have their phone. I think this will teach. So there’s the inside out through the expressive therapy and then outside in.
Then I was thinking then I used more natural materials and the multisensory of nature and natural materials to put like ointment on it. And so throughout the expression and transformation, there would always be expressing soothing, expressing soothings for one little bit of inside out. Three times the outside in, the milieu, the ointment.
I would say from the beginning, the first component was the healing from the inside out through the expressive therapy and the outside in through the milieu. But then you can have all the expressive therapies in the world. The most important one, of course, is the relationship, especially with attachment issues.
How are you going to do that without doing that? And then I would say that once you have a session with a beginning, a middle and an end where there’s ointment on it and we end with a little ritual, a closing ritual, so that they look forward to closing their session and then you give them back. But if the person who takes them back rips it off and pokes it, then it’s very hard to go anywhere. So that’s why then I work with the family and caregiver as much as I can because in some cases that’s not going to be possible.
So that was kind of what I came to. And I guess I should say how I came to it was after working in a treatment center, I was asked to run a day program for adolescents where on the street at night and they would be with me. During the day, half asleep and trying to engage them and do stuff with them and then realizing I don’t want to wait till they’re adolescents.
You guys are going to let me see the children? So they sent me the children who were in therapeutic foster home. Nobody was seeing and they responded really well. It was a matter of us, we developed it together.
With each one I would discover what helped them feel more relaxed and open and their own way of expression. And I started by being an art therapist, but I soon found that most kids were not at the stage where they were able to draw, wanted to draw. So then I looked for other ways of making imagery and I used to take them to the ocean a lot like Vancouver, 1980, oh my God.
Gave me a car so I could drive to Jericho Beach. You have like, sand to walk barefoot. And I saw how the sand and the water made such a difference to them.
And eventually I had too many children coming, so I didn’t have time to drive to the beach. And so I had them make me a box, an outdoor sandbox, and then used some of the things we gathered because just had seashells and feathers and driftwood, that kind of thing. And I got into kayaking in those days too, not with her children, though.
And then we made images outside in the sandbox and I was surprised with some of the things that were starting to happen. I could see some images emerging and I always used photography in those days to make them an album of memories with the things they’d made and so on. And I could see there was like a pattern in this.
And we also have a lot of rain, so sometimes we couldn’t go outside in the sandbox outside. So the children asked for it when they came. And then I said, Well, I’m sorry, I don’t have a sandbox outside.
They said, well, why not? I said, yeah, why not? I went to the photography store, Lens and Shutters, and got a photography tray and got some sand from Jericho Beach and cooked it at my house. And I’m telling you, it smells and everything because it smells way worse if you don’t cook. And that’s how it all started and continued on.
And eventually the program I was running was shut down. And so I had the choice to become a social worker or quit. And I said I would quit and try and do it in my basement in my little house in East Vancouver.
Then I went back to university, to UBC, where I had come at first to teach French. I went in the master’s program and I met John Allen, who was there, and he said, wow, what are you wanted? He liked to see what I was doing. And then he said, you know, there is a woman in Switzerland, her name’s Dora Kauf, and she does stuff like this.
You should look her. So I found that Dora Kalf existed, but she was not happy when I told her I’d been told I was doing sand play, said, how dare you? You went trained with me. So I never went to Dorakalf because she was so unpleasant.
And I continued with developing my own way, which I teach now. Now you have a story. Yeah.
Well, it’s beautiful. And it so highlights the phrase that I loved when you said, well, we built it together. You built it with the kids, you built it alongside.
And here’s an experience of them saying, well, why don’t you have it? And you say, I don’t know. Yes, of course, and let’s create it. There’s such a felt sense in that for me when I hear you say it.
And for me, it’s such a visceral felt sense of what you mean when you say meet the child, where they’re at, and how do I attend to something that needs something or would like a particular experience and how that can create safety and help them feel seen? So it’s beautiful. I feel it in my heart as you’re describing it. I’m so grateful to the children, and I definitely wouldn’t be sitting here with you if it wasn’t for them.
And it’s continued to be like that. And from then on, everything that I’ve developed has continued to be between the people who came to me and everything I knew didn’t help them. So I had to stretch right.
And together we discovered something that worked, and then I would add it, and that’s kind of how it went. When you think of play therapy today, or play therapists and training today, we’ve got listeners right now from all over the world, some that are just beginning, some that have been doing it for a while. Is there a wish you hold or a message that you would like to offer the play therapy community? Well, number one, I’m very grateful for them wanting to help children.
And I hope that they never lose that love and why they’re doing it. I think as long as they can maintain that and their humility is very important, I think, because the more I’ve spent time in the inner world it seems simple, but it’s very complex. And there’s a lot and it’s rich and there’s always more to discover and we know very little.
So I would say that would be important and your own light, because without that, they walk in that room if you’re not connected and shining it and you learn some need it stronger than others, right? But then nothing else is going to happen. And I would say I would encourage every play therapist to discover their own innate wisdom and make sure that whatever they take into that playroom, they’ve digested and made their own. Because I’ve seen the harm in imitations.
I’ve seen sometimes people who’ve gone to so many workshops and they have so much information, but you see the poor child trying to kind of being mixed up from one way of being to the other. So I always encourage people to find their own true theoretical background, like how do they see themselves and human beings and healing and what it is that they do. That meaning is essential.
It’s been challenging lately, for sure. Yeah. I’m grateful I came at a time I did because it has become so cognitive in some ways.
That’s where I still have some learning kinds of things why I don’t write, because some of the little scars left on my brain, I think that I haven’t been able to clear totally. So it was a good to trust. I came at the right time.
I think each person brings something. I love the little bit that I hear because it’s like, wow, she’s saying the same thing with neuro, with a different language. This is wonderful.
And the world now needs more scientific words because without that, people wouldn’t feel cognitively safe. And that’s what you’re doing. You help them feel cognitively safe with what they’re doing.
But I think we’re talking about the same thing. One of my beliefs that I have held is that when a child looks into your eyes, they’re searching for the twinkle. And that’s my way of saying, do you know yourself? Because that’s my belief.
When we are connected with our own sense of self and our own innate wisdom, there’s a natural twinkle. There’s a natural I don’t know, there’s something that a little bit more of a connection or a lot more of a connection. And I believe kids know that and they see it and they pick up on it.
So I love what you’re saying and I love the mirror that’s happening in our conversation. And I just love I know I’ve said this so many times in this conversation, I love, profoundly love and appreciate this piece at the beginning. It’s like where you’re working is so many play therapists want to jump right in.
And what I hear you saying is, no, hold on. There’s a step before that. There’s a step before that.
And the step is about real deep attunement and real deep connection and real deep seeing. And I just thank you for that reminder. Because I think our field sometimes is going too quickly and jumping in too fast to solve the problem or change the symptom or meet the goal.
And there’s just this whole step right before all of that. Yeah. Because there’s a focus on pathology and what we need to fix the pressure is on to do that.
And fast, cheap and fast and quick. Right. That’s increased.
I’ve seen the change happen, very much so. And I’ve seen it do harm. And I’ve seen really good people being burnt out, like so many people that I taught, because I’ve been sharing this stuff for what, over 35 years now, maybe more.
And a lot of them have retired and burnt out because of well, without that connection to ourselves, this world is impossible to manage. And there’s depression and disconnection and of course, personally, I’m never always sparkly or connected. I’m still looking for that connection.
I don’t know anyone who has it all the time, but that’s a primary one. It is, yeah. Well, this has just been beautiful.
So appreciate the connection and appreciate knowing you a bit more. And I just love Vancouver. I am going to come to Vancouver and I’m going to come say hi to you and I’m going to come spend some time with you directly.
That is going to happen. I would love for listeners, Alexander saying, is that your dog in the background? Yeah, she’s been sleeping. Because this is where I sit when I do online sessions, right here, because of COVID and all that.
And she is really missing seeing people in person, which I do again. Now, can you give us your website so that the listeners can go and learn more about you and see what you’re doing? Okay, so it’s www.centerforexpressotherapy.com. So that’s pretty simple.
Even if you spell it center with an R or Er, it will show up. And there’s a tour of my garden in my playroom and it doesn’t look as beautiful right this moment because it’s late fall here. And, listeners, I’m going to really encourage you to go to her website and to get a feeling of her website and to watch the little video that takes you around what she has created.
Because I think it’ll take this conversation and bring it even to another depth and possibly give you some ideas or some inspiration or if nothing else, to leave you reflecting on what’s possible. Because you really have created something that is quite magical. It’s quite magical.
It’s quite extraordinary. I know if I was a child, I would want to go and spend time with I would want to come and spend time in what you have co created with your children. And I want to say I work with adults and adolescents also.
They love it, too. But one thing I would like to say is I am older. I will soon be 75 years old and I am always looking for young ones.
That I can pass on to what I have learned so that they can take it the next step. So I just want to say that I’m putting it out there because yeah, I would I would love to be able to share what I know, like, what I’ve learned, because it will be helpful. I’m at the end of my career, so I’m not looking for a career, but I just really would like to be able to pass down.
So I’m really grateful for this interview and you asking me. It feels wonderful to be able to give what you’ve been given. Yeah.
Thank you so much. And on behalf of all the kids and families that you have helped over the many years, thank you. Thank you, listeners.
