Hi, listeners. I am so excited that you are joining me today for this really awesome episode of Lessons From the Playroom. I have with me a really special guest. For those of you that are able to see the visual right now, you likely recognize her.
For those of you that have no idea whose name I’m about to say, I am saying the one and only Paris Goodyear Brown. I am so grateful, Paris, that you are joining me for this conversation that we’re going to have about how to hold really hard stories, because I think it’s a conversation that needs to happen a lot. So first I just want to say welcome.
And then I want to share a little bit about you to our listeners. So welcome. Thank you so much.
Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for inviting me. And I’ve been just really delighted to get to spend time listening to some of your previous podcasts.
And really I love the sense, really the felt sense of those times. I think people can learn so much from just listening with that third ear to our conversations with one another. Yeah.
Wonderful. Well, for those of you that don’t know Paris, I want to introduce you. So Paris is the creator of Trauma Play, which she’s going to mention in our conversation today.
She’s the founder and clinical director of Nurture House, which is in is it actually in Nashville proper? No, it’s in Franklin, Tennessee. In Franklin, Tennessee. Okay.
In Franklin, Tennessee. She is also the executive director of the Trauma Play Institute, where I know you are taking Trauma Play globally and doing trainings around the world on that right now. She is an internationally renowned speaker, a prolific author.
I was trying to guess how many books you’ve written and I was like, I’m just going to ask. Well, I am just about the twelveTH book is coming out in March. Wow.
Can’t believe it. You’ve contributed so much and you have spent the past 25 years specializing in treating trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, maltreatment, neglect, attachment disturbances, anxiety disorders, and you’re also an MDS certified EMDR therapist. So much wisdom, so much knowledge.
Paris. Can I share? I was trying to think back to when did I first cross paths with you. And I don’t know if you even know when that was, but it was my very first apt conference, and you were doing a presentation on supervision, and I remember sitting in on your course, and I remember thinking, who is this woman? Like, wow, I even remember where I was sitting in the room.
But I was really captivated by you and your presence and your teaching from the very first time that I heard you teach. So thanks for doing what you’re doing out in the world, Paris. Yeah, well, thank apt.
I remember my very first apt conference was in Orlando, Florida, and, it know, years and years ago now, but I just fell madly in love with the field. I listened to a workshop with Eliana Gill, and I just went, this is the language of children, and it’s been the passion ever since. Well, let’s let’s talk a little bit about you.
Let’s follow that thread right there that you just put out there. What drew you into play therapy in the first place? Why are you doing this work? Yeah, I think, like for many of us, ultimately, I’m doing it as part of healing myself as we’re healing others in the world and helping walk alongside them as they heal. When I was little, my parents were sort of in and out of relationship over and over again for years.
That was confusing to me as a little one and finally got divorced. And in the wake of some of that pain, for me, I was really parentified and supported in my exploration and my independence. If we think about that through a secure base, safe haven lens, I was supported in my independence, but not so much celebrated in being welcomed back into stress and so got into some things that were in my preteen years that just weren’t the best and ended up in a psychologist’s office.
Not so much for a therapeutic process, but because I had kind of gotten in trouble. And I remember going in and being just so scared and having this older man in a tie and a suit with a big mahogany desk that he had a chair that he sat in behind the desk. And I sat in a little chair in front of the desk.
And he asked me lots and lots of questions. And that was and I cried a lot. I was feeling really sad and scared.
And that was my experience personally of psychology or a therapy process or a helper. And I think that really that’s the beginning of when I thought as I grew, that there’s got to be ways to help that are just so much more fun and safe and nurturing. And then I went to Duke and got a double major in drama and psychology, which I like to joke equip me to do absolutely nothing postgraduate without know, to either get some advanced training somehow or go to be a broadway star.
And so I had gotten this invitation to join the cast of The Tempest in our local Shakespeare group and also got into clinical social work school at the same time and kind of came to this crossroads and thought, yeah, I think I need to do the social work route. And I’m so grateful that I did. But I’m not sure what your training program was in your graduate studies, but for us here in middle Tennessee, there wasn’t a lot of play therapy and there wasn’t a lot of child development.
Even in my mean, we learned how to talk about the ecological perspective and differential diagnosis, but not really what to do with the child who’s throwing things at you from across the room at all. So when I got out and one of my first jobs was with kids with really big behaviors, I really didn’t know how to help them. And so I began chasing all over the country, went to that conference in florida and did fall madly in love with the field.
And really do believe that play is I mean, I would say behavior is a primary language of children, but play is the way that we enter their minds and hearts. And their language in that way is quite cross hemispherically powerful. And the more we understand that, the more we get to walk with them instead of talk at them, which is, I think, what I felt early on in my own life.
Harris as you’re sharing your story, we have an interesting part of your story that’s a similarity, which is that when my parents separated after that, I was then introduced to my first experience of therapy. And I was sitting in this big chair across from this older man who had his shirt all buttoned up, did not have the mahogany desk, but just sat there asking a bunch of questions. And I remember thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me.
I remember that thought in my head, right, you’ve got to be kidding me. There has got to be a better way to connect with kids. And I remember in that session thinking, what can I tell this individual to get out of here as fast as I can? Because I don’t want to be here, because I don’t feel connected to and that was the beginning for me of there’s got to be a more heart centered way, a more playful way, as you said, to be able to connect with a child.
Because I felt so missed sitting across from this gentleman who’s just asking me a bunch of questions. So I totally get that feeling that you just described. Yeah.
So here we are, right? We found the magic of play therapy. Yay. So, Paris, let’s talk about how to hold hard stories.
I think that it’s such a beautiful topic and one that’s complicated and challenging for us as clinicians, as you shared, our own stuff comes up, too, right? We come into this work because of our own healing, and it’s a confusing space. So let’s just have a conversation about that. How do we hold hard stories? Paris what do we do? How do we hold them? How do we do it? I really feel like the more I learn, the more I ask that question, the more I wonder, what are all the ways? And I think it’s part of what has helped trauma play’s evolution is really trying to figure out there’s not just one way.
I think early on in my training, I started to feel like and this was 25 years ago, so the field’s come a long way in terms of and as opposed to either ors. But the idea that if I say, I am a purple play therapist, that I may then have and I really identify with this one thing, that I might have children who come into my playroom, who I’m likely to say, gosh, this child isn’t helpable. Instead of, I have not found the best way to help this child yet.
Right. So that need to look at all the different ways of working and then integrate from there, I think is part of the foundational answer for how we hold hard stories in lots of ways. Santre and child centered in Adlerian in your model, in all of the ways there’s.
Yes, yes, and yes. And it’s our continual job to pursue new learning and know more about things. So we’re stretching ourselves, and one of the first things we do in trauma play training is help clinicians reflect on how I perceive myself.
How you perceive yourself as a container right now in terms of symbols work. So what might we choose in our current environment to show where we are in our stretched state? Our ability to hold hard things. And the symbol that I go back to again and again is Elastigirl from the incredible do you know her? Because her arms can stretch as far as she needs them to stretch.
And then we reflect further on how might we stretch even more. What would this symbol need in order to become an even more stretched container? And then we work with that. The other side of that, though, I think, in holding hard stories is if we’re people are like, Paris, are you for real? Like, you want us to keep stretching and stretching? Are we going to pop like a the? That’s the danger.
So if we’re going to hold a lot of hard things for people, then we also have to be able to siphon off right. There have to be ways to let go of that. And so the self care piece of that, I think, is really important too.
Yeah. I don’t know about your training, but I don’t recall in my graduate program a discussion about self care. I remember conversations about ethics, obviously, and about the importance of continuing to do your work and looking at your own process and transference and countertransference.
But I don’t know if self care was ever really talked about or if it was talked about. I don’t recall conversations where it was really explored, like, what does that really mean for individuals? And I feel sad sometimes when I look at the amazing work that people in our field do and that there isn’t this other holding right there with it saying, what is self care? What does that look like? How do we invite you into doing that more? I don’t know if you sense that also, but I just see so many amazing people burning out, and I see so many amazing people struggling to hold. Let’s just be honest.
When you’re in a session and you are having whether it’s conversation or you’re watching play or you’re in play and there’s abuse, that is hard. It’s heartbreaking. It’s hard.
And when you have caseloads that are filled with that, it’s hard. And I just see so many amazing, beautiful therapists that are like, I can’t I can’t do it anymore. Yes.
Yeah. I think at Nurture House, we have a lot of clinicians now who work in lots of different ways and in different rhythms. So really, I think some of that self care work is about what’s the window of tolerance for you? I tend to run at a pretty high pace across the board, so I may see more clients in a day than some of my other clinicians.
They do amazing and very present, beautiful, grounded work, but they might need, in between sessions, time to use the restroom, time to have a snack, time to refuel, time to clean up properly, reorganize their environment in themselves. We have so many kind of outdoor play stations that work with our almost like an outdoor occupational therapy floor. At Nurture House, so when I see a clinician come out of a session and they’re clearly carrying the weight of the trauma that they’ve just held for someone, I will invite them to go out and literally jump on the jumperoo and discharge that energy from their bodies, because we can’t just hold and hold.
And then there are times when they know about me that when I lay down, I will lay down on the marble hard floor of the staff room, full out, just flat on my back. And sometimes they come over and squeeze me, but they know that that’s my way of trying to feel the cool of the floor and ground in every fiber. I picture my mind almost a leeching out of my body of the toxicity of what I’ve been holding, because otherwise it can make us sick, right? I mean, we weren’t meant to contain some of the atrocities we have to contain as humans.
And to think that we should just be superhuman and just continually hold is, I think, really unfair to us, to the human part of us. I remember when I first started work and I had a lot of trauma on my caseload and I didn’t know this piece right, this wasn’t talked about. And I remember I would drive home from the office and instinctually, my body needed to move.
And I remember I’d be driving in the car and I’d start singing this song and I’d be like, get out of my body. Just trying some way to shake it out of my system instinctually, because I knew that I was bringing something home and my body felt really activated. I would start singing and shaking and trying to dance in my car because my body didn’t know what else to do.
Well, and I think some of it too, for our systems has to do with the supervision we receive and the holding that we do or don’t get from the organization we’re a part of. And I was in private practice for years and would not return to that now for as much as anyone might pay me to do that. I love having a team and I love getting to come alongside and really shepherd in some way.
All the staff at Nurture House and Trauma play really deeply values the embodiment of a set of roles, therapeutic roles that we call it the cascade of care. And this idea that whoever is the head of the organization or the safest bosses of the family, our job is to pour into the next generation, to let them pour into the children. So even from the way I think about myself at Nurture House is my job is just to hold the clinicians in those roles which we call Safe Boss, Nurturer and Storykeeper as best I can.
So that as I embody Safe Boss, Nurturer and Storykeeper, they can begin to embody it also and then they can give it to their parents, and parents particularly, I think when they come into treatment, they’re so exhausted. And I think also sometimes I hope this isn’t overstating, but disgusted maybe with themselves and with the child that they’re deeply trying to care for. And so having them then breathe in these ways of being.
I’m a safe boss, I’m a nurturer and I’m a storykeeper. That’s really the goal, right, is for us to be able to transfer those ways of being to others. I do think the hardest part of that work is the person of the therapist work each and every time.
Because until we can embody it ourselves, which means we have to work through our own processes of self reflection and repair and saying, hey, I made a mistake here. I’m so sorry, and working through the rupture and repair processes in our own lives in order to authentically do that at all for other people, which means it’s a constant, I think in lots of other fields, we don’t have to think this way, but for us, the personal is professional and the professional is personal. And it’s a messy business to try and separate out those pieces.
Yeah. I think about the days when our own life is hard. We have things going on and we have our own window of tolerance that just feels smaller on certain days, and yet we’re being asked to then hold this big story and it’s like, gosh, it’s hard, it’s tricky. We’re having a hard time holding our own stories in those moment.
And now I was like, I’ve got to hold someone else’s story too. And it is it’s a tricky place. I really think it’s a really noble profession and it’s a profession that I feel like, in a sense, we’ve all said, all right, I’m dedicating to a lifelong inner process and journey for myself so I can be of service to other people.
Yeah. And I don’t know if we all consciously realized that when we decided to jump into this. I feel like I was sort of protected from understanding the depth that we were going to need to go to, that I personally was going to need to go to in looking at myself, my own heart, my own motivations, my own adaptive and maladaptive ways of being in the world, and my own attachment history.
Another big piece of becoming safe, boss, nurturer, and storykeeper is looking at the stories we tell ourselves and why and where they came from. And so there’s some very vulnerable, kind of soft, underbelly work that has to happen for us to in the trauma play model and in your work as well, for us to be able to show up in a way that is connected and compassionate. And I don’t know, I think unless we are having compassion for ourselves, it is very difficult to have compassion for anyone else.
Yeah, absolutely. Paris, you mentioned the one for you where you lie down on the cold tile and that’s super grounding for you. Are there other things that you do or that you’ve done over the years? Because you do work with a lot of trauma and that is one of your expertise, and I imagine you’ve had to come up with all kinds of creative ways or different things to support yourself in holding all of that.
Are there other things that you can share with us, different ideas? Yeah, well, I’m holding my babies. My babies would come with me to all of my trainings and stuff for years and years. My youngest is twelve now, almost 13, and my oldest is off at college, so I can’t really pick them up in the same way and let their weight regulate me.
But I do have now at Nurture house a heavy bear. I think it came from the Soothies people. And when I am feeling particularly dysregulated, I will pick up Heavy Bear and just hold and rock Heavy Bear because he weighs about ten pounds and each of my babies came out as almost ten pounds and a big baby.
They regulate me now, but they also take me back to a whole set of felt nurture and oxytocin and dopamine get released in my brain like immediately as I hold that weight. So that’s one for me. And then nature even here I have my bird feeder just in front of me out the window because I delight in having my involuntary attention captured by something in the natural environment.
It stills the rest of me and it’s a fully present moment. And then I also kickbox. I didn’t know that.
Oh yeah, my knee is injured and so as my body gets older, it’s becoming more challenging to do that as regularly as I like. But yeah, for years and years I’ve hit and kicked the bag and sweated a lot. And that really helps me regulate as well the hard, sweaty workout.
I know that you’re a great singer and I know that just because I’ve just heard you sing in random places over the years. Do you sing and use that part of yourself also? I’m curious about that part of you. Well, sure, we sing.
So my daughter is she’s probably going to go to school for theater and film and we watch a lot of Broadway musicals around here. We watch all the Disney movies. We can sing any of the scores from the a lot.
We make up songs together a lot. Even about just doing the dishes. Do you have the dishes? I have the coffee cup.
We do a lot of that in our kitchen. Playfully and then I will just blast. One of my other self care strategies is taking the doors off our yellow Jeep in the summertime and blasting the Broadway show tunes.
Going down the highway at the top of my lungs. I love to sing and I love to dance. Part of stretching ourselves to hold hard stories requires holding both the griefs and the gratitudes in our own lives and then in our clients lives.
Helping parents to hold the grief and gratitude, I find that to be especially difficult with some adoptive parents. But one of the griefs for me has been that I haven’t been able to travel. And I’m sure that’s true for you too.
The travel we had done, I was supposed to get to go in person to South Korea and to China and to and to do it through this screen. We can still connect and I’m grateful for so that’s a gratitude. But there’s real grief at being grounded in those ways because that’s another self care thing for me.
Have you felt that as well. That grief from the groundedness. Yeah, absolutely.
I find that I have to almost identify what is it that I’m missing and then consciously create ways of getting that particular need met. So even if it’s like a sense of adventure, it’s like, okay, I’m going to consciously go on a hike for the purpose of creating a sense of adventure for myself or being around a group of individuals. How do I consciously do that through the computer? So I do I find that I have to get really mindful about what are those pieces that I’m grieving and how do I create those experiences for myself.
For sure, I’m going to take a deep breath on that. So one thing that as you were describing that really caught my attention in a really beautiful way is as you were talking about making up songs in the kitchen with your daughter or I was picturing you in your jeep and all of that. What I also think I heard you say was that one of the ways we can hold hard stories is to have fun.
Yes, is to have fun, find ways of accessing joy. I don’t know if that’s what you were saying but that’s what it sounded like through those examples. Yeah, well and that’s really the whole when you come into nurture health I feel like really good powerful work is being done.
Anytime I hear a clinician and a child and parent laughing together, there’s good work being done there because our bodies release these massive amounts of cortisol when we’re stressed. And I almost see it as I know it’s oversimplifying things, but it feels like an antidote almost, that play and the oxytocin and dopamine that get released as we enjoy each other and as we laugh spontaneously and as we share safe, good touches and as we just roll around on the floor together. I mean literally being able to ground our bodies when I see a parent able to sit down on the child’s level even there’s a beginning of a level of connection there that allows them to be a different kind of storykeeper for the child than they had been before.
So I think that joy we have in trauma play kind of a tool. The play therapist palette is what we call it in training. Everyone makes their own because they might not all look the same.
But what are the mitigators of the approach to hard things as we are titrating doses of story with kiddos and their parents that help them feel competency surges and joy and connection. That’s what mitigates the approach to the hard thing. And kids can do so much more in bravely facing and risking sharing and telling us in whatever mediums they choose in play and expressive arts their story when they’re feeling connected with us and grounded and powerful in the world.
So we do a lot of like kids standing up on we call it the magic carpet swing. It’s this big sky gliding swing and as they struggle up and now they are captaining the swing back and forth and we might be doing some EMDR to further enhance that sense of I’ve got this, I’m strong, I’m able, I’m flying. Even then we begin to approach potentially pieces of the harder story.
But it’s a powerful play. I think parents come in really scared often and kids too, of what’s going to happen here? Is this going to be a place where I have to spill my guts and that people tell me what’s wrong with me? And we start it’s part of why in Trauma play we do some diatic assessments first before we see the child individually to depathologize their entrance into treatment and to help become safe, boss, nurturer and storykeeper for the parent child Dyad. So if the parent is telling the child a story about when they were a baby and it’s a really cute story, I get to laugh with them, delight with them and then that becomes part of my story keeping for them as the Dyad also.
And that can be woven back in again and again in treatment as we delight in the system. Yeah, beautiful. I would love you’ve referenced parents in here a couple of times and you made that statement about how sometimes particularly parents that have children who are adopted, it can be really challenging to support them in holding their child’s heart stories.
Let’s touch on that a little bit as we’re rounding out this conversation. What wisdom can you share with us of how do we help parents hold their well, it’s their own too, right? And their child’s hard stories, especially when the grief and gratitude don’t seem to go very don’t seem to go hand in hand, right. It’s hard to see both of those.
I think first off, there’s an evolution to her practice. I think the person of the therapist work around that. So many of us in our training programs were trained to work sort of one on one with a child in the playroom first.
And the idea of adding in parents is kind of scary and having to deal with several autonomic nervous systems at the same time. It’s a lot the evolution of trauma play began with here are some things you can think about and do with kids in the umbrella framework of the key components of trauma play. But the Parents as Partners piece, the last book that just came out in January of 2021, parents as Partners in Child Therapy, was really the culmination of my really, truly getting to the point of we can’t do a whole lot that’s of lasting change if we can’t in some ways begin to impact the system as a whole.
And I kind of cringe when I think about my early work with parents because I think I talked at them a lot, gave them a lot of psychoeducation and wanted. To feel secure that I was giving something, doing something, instead of being something with them. And now I really think the best way to start off with parents is be safe, boss, be nurturer to them, be storykeeper with them so that they can begin to experience it.
And the more I’ve given into and over to that process with parents, it’s become a very sweet, tender place, even in the intake, more than I would have ever thought that a parent is in this kind of constricted, maybe judgy, angry place with their child. And as I get under with them that anger, there’s such a sadness, such a helplessness and sense of I’m not good because I can’t make them be good. And so when I can come in and say, you’re already good, I see you in your goodness, I see you in your intention, I see you in there, there’s often tears even in that intake because parents desperately need to be seen in order to look at their own.
We need to feel safe and seen to look at our stuff. Right? So that’s for me, the starting place. And then we have in Trauma Play some very specific sorts of offerings of intervention for parents, for clinicians to do with parents, like taking various prompts from the AAI, the Adult Attachment Interview, but doing them cross hemispherically, using Santre or visual art and reflecting on their own stories.
And once you’ve earned the right to speak into a parent’s life, then that can be really powerful stretching of their reflective capacity. And they don’t even see it happening, they can’t even articulate exactly what it is that’s happening, but they begin to stretch their containers as well. It’s a really powerful process.
Yeah. Really beautiful. Paris.
Yeah. My guess is there’s lots of listeners going, OOH, Trauma Play. I want to know more about Trauma Play.
Will you share a little bit? Where can people find you? Where can they learn more about you? Yeah, so Traumaplayinstitute.com would be where you would go to look for there are some sort of 1 hour introductory webinars and things if you’re interested that way. We have a whole Trauma Play certification program that begins with reading Play therapy with Traumatized children, that initial text and then doing some pre work reflective.
We’re going bottom up and top down in this training process and then coming for some live foundational training, about 20 hours of that, then doing supervisions both individual and group with Trauma Play approved supervisors from our team. And then an advanced workshop where we take a deeper dive, particularly into bringing the parents in more deeply to the work and then read Trauma and Play therapy. And then we move on to another 10 hours of supervision.
And at that point it takes about a year’s process to get the certification. But we have seen just really amazing. And of course, as you know in your teaching too, we learn so much from what our students bring to the work.
It’s a really rich way of me learning, too, from everyone who comes. So you will go there. The next foundational training will be mid April, I think April eigth through the 10th, and we’re about to send something out about that.
And then there’s Parisgoodyourbrown.com and Nurturehouse.org, especially if you want to see kind of what the space is like and some ideas of we have a lot of therapists who reach out these days to ask about constructing their own spaces.
And I love, love, love. I can geek out for days on bigness and smallness in space and how we offer in our reception of safety in all these ways. So I love to do that kind of consultation and help with people.
Great. Yeah. And listeners, Paris teaches all over.
She’s a frequent speaker at conferences and whatnot. So if you are at a conference, if you see her name on the docket, go and be in her workshops and enjoy the rich learning experience. Paris, I am so grateful for this conversation and so grateful that you joined me today and grateful that the listeners get to experience you and get to experience this conversation that we’re having together.
Thank you so much. Yeah. All right, listeners, so let’s just go with the theme that we’re talking about today, which is take care of yourselves.
You’re really important, and you’re doing really amazing work out there, and we want to acknowledge that you are holding hard stories. And so be tender with yourselves, take care of yourselves. You are the most important toy in that playroom.
