Welcome back to the next episode from the Lessons From the Playroom podcast. I have a big announcement today, and in order to make that announcement, I have a very special guest with me. Not only is she a dear friend of mine, but she is also a certified Synergetic Play Therapist supervisor.
She’s also one of my co trainers in Synergetic Play Therapy. And we have launched something that I’m going to share with you quite shortly here after Judy Norman introduces herself a little bit more. Hi, Judy.
Hi, Lisa. Thanks for having me today. Yeah.
So should we just quickly do the drum roll, make the announcement, and then more about what we’re up to and have a really cool conversation about it? Yep. All right. I feel like I’m going to do, like, a drum roll.
Those of you that can’t see what I just I’m tapping on my desk, making a drum roll sound. So for years, Judy and I have been really noticing and holding a larger vision for teachers, for educators, for school counselors, and have really wanted to bring some of the Synergetic Play Therapy principles, along with other really wise, important information into the school setting to support educators and schools at a whole other level. And so we have officially launched the Synergetic Education Institute.
So exciting. So, Judy, from that, will you share a little bit more about you and what we’re up? So, as Lisa said, this has just been years in the making. As soon as I met Lisa, as soon as I landed in what Spt really was all about, because I’m not only just an LPC, but I’m also a licensed school counselor, I would go back into my building and I would just go, okay, there’s something here.
There’s something here that I know will just magically change the environment that I’m working in. And so Lisa and I started talking years and years ago about what that could look like, and little by little, I started bringing in different SPD, Tenets, and Teachings, working with first just one or two teachers to all of a sudden, the culture of the particular school that I was working in changed. And it took a couple of years, but a lot of that was because I had to figure out how do I translate this, how do I translate this and take it from a therapeutic lens and bring in the educational pieces.
And so, little by little, we kept expanding it. And now through the Synergetic Education Institute, lisa and myself and some other trainers are actually traveling all over. And we’re working individually with teachers.
We’re doing coaching, we’re doing education, and we’re working with whole school districts and working with therapists, therapists that are mental health professionals in schools, or therapists that just have contact with schools and want a little bit different paradigm to understand. How do I bring this intersection of education and mental health. It’s been it’s been fabulous to get to be a part of.
So it’s so exciting. One of the things that was really exciting for me so Heather Forbes, I’m just going to mention Heather Forbes here for those of you that are not familiar with Heather Forbes, she does a lot of work in trauma informed school education. She’s written a handful of really well known books.
One of her ones that’s really well known is, oh, gosh, Help for Billy. I was like a classroom for Billy. That’s not help.
Help for Billy. She wrote Beyond Consequences back in the day with Brian Post. Anyway, she’s just out there doing amazing work, and she came to visit one of the schools, Judy, that you were working in, and would you share what she observed? Because I think that it just speaks volumes to what we’re up to.
And then in the conversation today, we’re going to share with all of you a little bit about what you can do as play therapists if you are collaborating with schools or help you begin to think about working with schools in a little bit of a different way. So we’re going to get into content here for sure. But would you share what Heather’s observation was? Sure.
And we do have this quote on our website, too, because we’re just so proud of it. But one of the things that she said was that the particular school that I had started in was the most advanced trauma informed school that she’d ever visited, which blew me away and humbled me. But the part that really spoke to my heart was when she said that she could see and she could feel that every single student was arriving each and every day knowing that they mattered and that they were important.
And for me, that’s the spt part, because what we did is we were able to help all of the adults in the building really understand what it meant to feel students and see students on a daily basis. So let’s even use that as a little bit of a platform here. So, Judy, when you think about play therapists and play therapists understanding of how they can be supportive for a school environment or if they’re collaborating with the school or let’s say they’re a school counselor.
Or we just know that if we’re a play therapist, likely we’re talking with teachers at some point and supporting the teacher and supporting the child that we’re working with. But what is a piece that you feel like we don’t understand enough? Or what’s a piece that you can help guide us towards maybe looking at a little bit differently as we begin to think about our work with school districts. And I have to tell you that I figured this out by making lots and lots and lots of mistakes.
I want to just put that out there. One of the things that I didn’t realize till I had been doing this work for many, many years was that I was part of the problem. And what I mean by that is I was talking to educators.
Whether I was doing it from within the school or because I’m also an LPC, I would go into other schools just on behalf of my client. And in both those settings, what I realized I was doing was I was asking the educators to really meet the kids where they are. But I wasn’t doing that for the educators.
I was wanting them to be where I was, meet the kids where they are, but do it my way. And I woke up one day and went, oh, that’s not fair. That’s so not developmentally appropriate.
And so how could I keep talking about being authentic and meeting the kids where they are and not allowing the same thing for the adults? And so that was a major light bulb for me. And once I realized that, and I really just started showing up first as a therapist, I learned a lot of things. And from that has come a developmental perspective approach that I teach in all of the classes with mental health professionals.
And you can look at it lots of different ways, but basically I give you a framework to look at what are my interactions with the teachers? What am I hearing them say? What am I seeing them do that help me understand where are they in this process? And so we have these five different stages, and it’s okay if there’s a part of me that really hopes they get to a place ultimately where they can really meet the child where they are. And I can do that in such a way by respecting where they are in that moment and taking what I say to them and how I say to them and how I approach the information in a way that matches that person’s individual level. And what I have found is when I started doing that, everything shifted because people could hear me, because I was doing it in a way that fit for, oh, they’re ready for this piece of the puzzle.
They’re not quite ready for this one, so I’m going to wait on this one, but they’re ready for this one. And so as I’ve started teaching that to people, the feedback that I’ve gotten back. In fact, I just launched a class a couple of months ago and just heard from a student two weeks ago.
She’s like, I just had a conversation with a teacher that I’ve been working with for years, and it was like this. And all of a sudden something opened up, and I was able to see where she was. And we had this conversation that I never thought I’d be able to have with.
So that’s a piece that I think is really valuable to know. Judy, we talk so much clinically about meet your client where they’re at, what I’m hearing you say, uh huh. And we need to meet the teacher or the school administrator or whoever it is that we’re having, whoever we’re communicating with, we need to do the same for them.
And I’m hearing you say, and we need to meet them where they’re at, from, where they are developmentally, and then from because just like we say, behaviors make sense, behaviors completely make sense. And once we learn about the brain and we learn about brain states and body states, and we learn about stress response and that continuum, we can look at a child and go, okay, it might be that I want that behavior to ultimately look different in the classroom, but the behavior actually makes sense. That’s true for the educators, too.
If they’re pushing back with what I’m sharing, if they’re not ready to do something that makes sense, and if I just keep pushing, I’m not going to get very far, and I’m not being terribly respectful. Wow.
So you mentioned that there’s these five developmental stages. I’m curious if that’s something that could you share what those stages are or give us a clue into what those different stages are just by the names? It’ll be interesting to see what comes up for people. But the first one I call unaware and then wondering, then exploring and preparing, then rethinking and changing and then embedding.
It’s very developmental, and they’re going to get as far as they’re going to get. And even if we just stay in those very early stages, there’s still a lot of good work that they can do. Because we also learn that very often, I think, as therapists, the more we’ve learned about the brain and we talk about the difference between top down and bottom up interventions, I think sometimes we make this assumption that one is better than the other, and they’re both really important, and we need to know how to do both.
And one of the paradigm shifts that I really talk a lot about in the classes that I teach is it’s okay if there’s some people in the building that their job is to do the top down interventions? That’s okay. I don’t have to decide that. They need to be able to do the bottom up also, because if there’s other people in the building that can do those, I can look at it and go, that’s not going to be your job.
That’s not going to be your role, and that’s okay. So I think that’s another way to look at this. It’s like whether that person in that moment is capable of doing top down or bottom up, it’s still going to be a valuable piece.
And one of the things I found, too, is that once educators understand that, that they all of a sudden have more of a capacity to do things. I’ve been to so many trauma trainings over the years where you walk out of the room and what you heard was, the teachers are not doing enough to develop relationships with the kids. And I look around and I see teachers who are trying really hard to develop relationships with kids, and a lot of them are doing a very good job of it, but if all they keep hearing is you just have to develop relationships with kids, that’s not helpful and it’s very blaming and shaming.
And so when we look at it from this model, I think it helps us understand not only are there different ways to build relationships with adults and with children, and I can value and respect where you are and your ability to do that this way. But there are some kids that are really tough to build relationships with, and you’re not doing anything wrong. And when I can language it that way, I also find that even the teachers that maybe were staying in those early developmental stages when they start hearing me go, you’re doing so much right.
And it’s tough to build relationships with some of these kids, not because of what you’re doing, but because of what’s going on for them in their brains and their bodies. All of a sudden, this capacity to try to do things more from the bottom up opens up because they’re not feeling blamed for it. So I think that’s another important piece.
As you were talking, I just kept having this image of teachers and how much pressure they’re under and the number of messages that they get about you’re not doing enough, you’re not doing enough. Whether it is academically, you’re not doing enough, emotionally, you’re not doing enough. Behaviorally, you’re not doing enough.
But teachers are under so much stress and pressure to perform, which that’s hard to be our authentic self in that, and it’s hard to feel empowered in that, and it’s hard to feel inspired to go to work when that is the pressure. And Judy, one of the things that I think that you do so beautifully. And my guess is, part of the magic that is being brought to school districts and to classrooms is that you’re helping teachers feel okay again, and you’re helping restore an internal sense of humanness and helping return them back.
To why they wanted to become a teacher in the first place and helping them get back in touch with the part parts of them that are wise and knowledgeable. And how can that not be helpful in the classroom? Because that’s what we’re doing for kids, right? And think about what you just said. You just made every single one of the threats to the brain.
And that’s what teachers are dealing with every single day. And so, again, I think as therapists, if we can frame it that way and help teachers understand, of course you’re overwhelmed. Let’s learn about the threats to the brain, and let’s look at the fact that you’re dealing with all four of them all day, every day.
It helps set up a foundation for what you’re talking about. I can now go, oh, this is over here, and I can look at it that way instead of say, oh, this is about me, because I can understand why I’m having such a hard time and why sometimes I leave at the end of the day and don’t feel like my best self. And if I can start to understand that from a brain state and a nervous system perspective, all of a sudden I feel like there’s something I can do about it.
So it’s very empowering. Another thing that you teach that’s empowering is you reframe trauma. There’s so much trauma informed, right? That’s the buzzword.
Our school district is doing well. If we’re trauma informed, we know that that means so many different things and it plays out in so many different ways, and sometimes it really isn’t trauma informed, and sometimes it is and everything in between. But will you share your reframe on trauma? Because I think that’s also one of the things that is helpful for us as clinicians is to hold a different paradigm about what’s actually happening.
So one of the things just to put it in the context of the developmental model, one of the things that I teach, which starts at the very first stage of the developmental model, so if you just want to get a taste of it is I have these enduring understandings of these goals. And, like, okay, even if I’m not going to look at this whole developmental model and look at all the pieces of what I’m going to teach, there’s one thing I’m going to take away from each stage in the model that I’m going to try to teach. And I call those my essential understandings.
And in stage one, the first one is we all experience stress. And for some people, that’s as far as I’m going to go. We experience stress every single one of us every single day.
And so that’s how I reframed trauma. So I don’t talk, especially with a group that I don’t know very well or that I perceive might be in the early stages. I talk about stress response and I talk about a stress response continuum and how we all have reactions and responses to stress.
And you will never go through a day in your life where you don’t experience some stress. It’s never going to happen, ever. And people get that.
So we’re not talking about trauma. We’re talking about what happens when my brain perceives stress. And all of a sudden when we start talking about it that way, we’re not talking about that one kid.
We’re not talking about that kid with a trauma background. And what do you expect me to do? Because I’m not a therapist, I’m a teacher. We’re talking about me and every single little person in my room and every adult in my building.
We all experience stress. So the more I can understand what is actually happening in the brain as I move down brain to different brain states and what is it that causes me to move to different brain states? It’s my perception of the stress and whether I perceive the stress as escalating or whether I’m finding a way to alleviate the stress and move back up to a place where I can feel safe. And so when we talk about it that way, I think it does two things.
It normalizes, it so I can talk about it. And as a therapist, it helps the teacher recognize that I’m not here to tell you the ten things you need to do for my client. I’m here to say things are stressful right now and what we can talk about is different responses to stress and how they make sense.
And I can share with you some regulation strategies that you can use for yourself in the classroom that is going to help every single nervous system in that room, not just my client, every single nervous system. And I think that’s a really different way to approach it than to say I’m here to tell you what to do for my client. Well, and you just touched on one of the also nuances or differences with how we weave in the synergetic play therapy piece into this, which is that a lot of the attention is for the teacher, not so much for the individual students in the classroom.
Will you speak to that also? Because that’s also a paradigm shift. Yeah. And one of the things that comes up all the time right now is that self care is another one of those.
Let’s do a presentation on self care. And teachers are just done, they’re done hearing about self care. In fact, I’m on lots of different Facebook groups and there was a huge rant just a few days ago about how many more times are they going to make me sit in a self care workshop where I’d rather be out doing something that actually takes care of myself.
And I just had to laugh because that is, I think, one way that we have really misappropriated that term. Because self care does not mean getting a massage. It does not mean taking a nap.
It doesn’t mean going to the gym. It can be a part of those things, can all be a part of it. And if you can do those things, great, do them.
I’m not going to ever say don’t do them. But what we teach is social emotional wellness for adults, is the term I use instead of self care means moments of finding myself, attaching to myself, regulating all day, every day. That’s self care.
And so we focus on that because we go into the neuroscience, so you know, the mirror neurons and what happens to us when we perceive that a threat is outside of our window of tolerance and why we get Dysregulated. And so we teach the educators that if I can put 1ft into the Dysregulation, which is a very spt concept, so I’m feeling it because then I can recognize in my own system, oh, it’s time for me to regulate. I keep 1ft out of the Dysregulation and regulate myself.
Not only am I taking care of myself then, because you’ll notice my rocks in the background. Those are rock pillows. And I use those to teach.
This is what happens when we don’t do that. We have these boulders, and they stack up, and they stack up, and they stack up, and we carry them from situation to situation. And our window of tolerance gets smaller and smaller and smaller as the day goes on because the stress is building.
And all of a sudden, I’m yelling at kids because I’m carrying these around with me. Instead of if I go, oh, here’s a boulder, I can feel it. And I take a deep breath and I let it go.
I move into my next situation with my window still pretty big, and I can handle that. And so we help them see that the focus has to be on regulating myself, which for teachers I know this from therapists, that one of the things that therapists love so much about synergetic play therapy is that they come back into a deeper relationship with themselves. And there’s something about that that’s so meaningful when we come into relationship with ourselves.
And so for teachers to have permission to focus on themselves when all those pressures are focused outside of yourself and meet the numbers and make sure that so and so isn’t screaming in the back of the room and all of these external things that sometimes are not in their control, but how can they find a sense of okayness in that? And as you’re saying, from an spt perspective, we believe that that’s one of the greatest gifts they can give the classroom is because everyone’s watching and we have these eyes on these little faces that are now watching someone connect to themselves. And that’s pretty enormous. That’s a pretty significant learning moment right there.
And there are times when I can’t start there. Yeah. And that’s where the developmental piece comes in.
The mistake I made is I wanted everybody to feel that. And so I would start there and people would look at me like, oh, I’m not doing that. Like, I’m so not ready to attach to myself in the classroom or name how I feel.
And I didn’t get that. Of course you’re not ready for that. It doesn’t feel safe to do that yet because of all the things you’re talking about, because of all these messages you’re getting from your school district or there’s incredible incongruence, like, we want SEL to be important, and yet your test scores are going to determine whether or not you have a job next year.
And so there’s this huge disconnect, and so it took time to really develop. Is it safe enough for me to be myself in the classroom? Last year, I was doing coaching with a teacher, and after a couple of sessions, she looked at me and she said it was tricky in the beginning. In the beginning, she wasn’t prepared, wasn’t ready to do any of the kind of self reflection that I was hoping we would eventually get to.
Everything was the kid’s fault. And she was doing everything she could. And after about three sessions, she said to me, I’m realizing that one of the things I really like about working with you is I always walk away feeling extremely validated but challenged.
And I just start crying because I’m like, that’s it. We want to support teachers. We want them to feel like we’re here, we get it.
We know how hard this is, and we want to push a little bit. We want to challenge a little bit because just like as therapists, we know you don’t grow unless you start to ask yourself some hard questions. We have to do it in a way that isn’t shaming.
They’re getting that everywhere else. Wow. Yeah.
Judy I want to share with everyone who listening that want to learn more about the developmental model. If you are a listener and you have connections with schools, if you want education brought to your school, let’s share with everyone where they can find us and maybe even a little bit about what some of the offerings are in case that’s of curiosity to anybody. So we have a website, synergetucation.com, and if you click on there, you will see our different trainings and we do have some free resources. And you’ll see a clip of teaching in one of the classes and there’s different things that you right now can start using and offer to teachers. On the resources page, there’s a regulation room that I had actually developed during the pandemic that teachers can use in their classroom and individual students can use.
And it’s different than a lot of the calming rooms that I saw. And it’s actually the reason I did it, because people were saying, oh, we need calming rooms. And for those of you who are familiar with SBT, you know that we talk a lot about how regulation and calm are not the same thing.
And so I wanted to be very intentional about creating a regulation room where the goal wasn’t necessarily calm, but the goal was to help students connect with, where am I right now? What’s going on for me? And so one of the rooms specifically focus on teaching kids interoception techniques. And so that’s something that you, as a therapist can just say, hey, explore this and hand this to a teacher. And they can use it right away for themselves or for students in their classroom.
There are some other concepts that we teach learning tools and Braindrops, which are concepts you can learn about through our classes, that help teachers teach their class about how do I intentionally and explicitly grow windows of tolerance? Because that’s really what we’re talking about, is if I want students to start to believe that they can handle whatever perceived threats are coming up for them in the classroom, which might have nothing to do with me as a teacher. And that’s part of our teaching them that it’s not that you’re doing something wrong, but there’s all kinds of reasons why perceived threats come up. What we want to do is we want to teach them, hey, it’s okay.
You can have that feeling, that emotion, that challenge in the classroom, and I can handle it, and we can move through it. And so what we’re really doing is we’re trying to expand windows of tolerance in the classroom. And learning tools is one of the ways that we can do that.
We can help kids go through this exploration of self awareness and start to become aware of when I hold this in my hand and I squeeze it, what does that feel like in my body? When I sit on a yoga ball and I do this, what does that feel like in my body? Which is very different than when we see kids use fidgets. Yeah, let’s take that word and throw it in the trash. Don’t use that word.
We don’t use that word. No fidgets. They’re learning tools, the teachers, through a process that they then can take the kids through, of teaching the kids.
When I do it like this, is it a tool or is it a toy? And we do it very intentionally with lots of different things so that the kids start to identify, no, this doesn’t work for me. Yes, for me, this is a toy. I don’t want this at my desk because it doesn’t work for me.
Whereas this one actually feels like a tool. And here’s how I know. And so we.
Take teachers through a process of learning how to do that. And Braindrops is another concept where we teach them how to help the kids identify where’s the energy in my body? And so those are all things that you’ll find on the site. Our trainings, we have programs, we have standalone workshops.
We have a Touchstone program that we’re developing right now, which is really an all day program just for educators to come back to themselves. And so that’s our next big one that we’re developing that’s still just in the development stages. But for therapists, we have, let’s see where right now it’s called Evolution of a Trauma Informed Educator.
But I think we’re going to change the name for lots of different reasons. But that’s a six month program specifically for teachers and for school based mental health professionals. And then we have our 1ft in Education program, which is for therapists that have an Spt background.
So it’s taking the Spt concepts that you’ve already learned and translating them into education. And we’re doing a lot of we get calls from specific schools or specific districts and we tailor programs to them. So that’s probably what we’re doing the most of right now, is really customizing programs to people that call us.
But there’s lots of things on the horizon. Yeah, so many things. Judy, I’m so grateful for you and I’m so grateful for your vision and your heart for the students and for the educators and for administrators.
You’re a breath of fresh air in the education field and just super grateful to be collaborating with you on this and having launched this new, exciting endeavor. So I’m just super grateful for you. Thanks, please and thanks for pushing me, as you always do.
So beautiful listeners. If you work with teachers, which we know that you do on some capacity, if you’re a play therapist or if you’re in the schools, I hope you found some nuggets in this conversation that were really meaningful for you, at least get you thinking. If you want more, you know where to find us@synergeticeducation.com.
And as always, you are the most important tool in the playroom. And I look forward to the next time that we get to spend time together. Until then.
