Welcome to your next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to be a part of this next conversation. I have with me a very special woman that I’m excited to introduce to you here in a minute, we are going to be talking about gestalt theory today, which, as many of you know, is so near and dear to my heart because I’m a certified gestalt therapist, and it’s one of the roots of synergetic play therapy.
And this next woman is one of the gestalt experts on the planet. I am talking about Felicia Carroll. For those of you that are not familiar with Felicia, you will be here in a minute, and I want to share a little bit about her before she says hello.
She is a licensed marriage family therapist. She’s a registered play therapist supervisor. She is in private practice in Sylvain, California.
She’s the founder director of the West Coast Institute for Gestalt Therapy with children adolescents. She is an international educator. Her list of places where she does training in this world is so long that it would take up this entire podcast if I read through the entire list.
She’s published several chapters and articles. One of her latest was in 2019, Gasolt Play Therapy, and it was included in a special edition of the association for Play Therapy magazine. You are a person that the first time I met you, Felicia.
You made an impact. So I would love for you to say hi, and then I want to share the story of how we first met. Well, I mean, hello to everybody.
I’m assuming that people can both see and hear that’s, right? So it was good to be here. As I told you, Lisa, I’m doing this with a great deal of affection, and we just had such an instant connection and friendship, and it endures. So I was delighted when I heard you were doing the podcast and you invited.
Yes. So for you and for gestalt play therapy, I’m here. Beautiful.
So we met do you remember how many years ago, Felicia? Yikes. It would have been about at least five or six. Five or six.
I was thinking maybe even longer. Maybe everyone we both found ourselves, we went and did a training with the wonderful Teresa Kessley down at her home in New Mexico in the United States. And there were probably 20 of us, I guess, that were there.
And Felicia, my experience of you and I was you and I just sort of, like, made eye contact and just were sort of drawn to each other from across the room. And when it came time to partner, like, there was like a magnet that just kind of we were like, we’re together, and then we were just off on this amazing journey in our training together, and I have felt connected to ever since. Yes, I agree with that.
It sounds like love at first sight, and I think it was. But you’re right. We did.
And as I say, it endures. It endures. And then when you came to California to do a presentation, Lisa, I was delighted to go to that too, and learn even more from you about your work.
Well, and now I get to turn the tables here. We’re going to get into gestalt play therapy. I know that both of us, before we can get in here, it feels important for us to acknowledge Violet Oaklander.
What would you like to say about Violet Oaklander? And maybe some individuals on this podcast don’t even know who she is as they even say her name. So let’s begin the conversation with Violet Oaklander. Oh, a lot to say and a lot to appreciate.
Well, Violet, first of all, was one of the pioneers in child therapy, coming out of so many different theoretical orientations. She was one of those people like Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and Dorakoff and all the other various peoples who were at Winnicott. Others who are asking themselves, of course, and then Virginia Axeline, of course, who asked themselves well, how does this theoretical approach that I’m learning here primarily that’s focused on adults.
All of those. How can I apply that to work with children? And Violet was an educator. She was a teacher of special education children, and she also had begun training, making a connection with a gestalt therapist at Eslin Institute, Jim Simkin.
Shortly after, her son one of her sons died of lupus. And as she was working through that grief process, she started realizing that what she was learning. And then she went into training as gestalt therapist and then asked the question, and so began to kind of use this perspective in her classrooms and her work with children, and then began to really see how these kids just really seemed to respond and made such a difference in their sense of self and how they were functioning not only in her classroom, but in other places as well.
So she wrote her dissertation, which became the book, the classic book that I bet everyone in your audience knows, and that is Windows to Our Children. And it really put the field of play therapy on its side, and maybe we could talk a little bit more about how that then she then became in very great demand both in the United States and around internationally as people became more familiar with the work from Windows to Our children. I met Violet right after Windows was published.
We were both educators, and we had experiences at Esalen. I was at Eslin working with preschool children, ages, infancy through age five. And I went to my one mentor at that time, which was Janet Letterman, who was one of the contemporary of Violets, who also wrote a book called Anger in the Rocking.
So I was working there with Janet Letterman and know someone should write a book about gestalt therapy with kids. And she said, I think somebody has, and it’s in the bookstore, so you might go check it out. Well, I did, and it was Windows, and then I had the good fortune of I was collaborating with Janet at a conference presentation, and Violet was also there.
And it was on education and therapy with children. Gestalt approaches. And so Violet and I met.
And then I was working on my PhD in gestalt education with George Brown at UCSB. And I began to see that I was more interested in the therapeutic orientation. And so I changed.
I gave up the PhD just short of the dissertation process and got my degree to become a licensed marriage family therapist. But in that time, I apprenticed with Violet, attended many of her trainings, and during that time we formed a friendship. And at some point she became quite ill and decided she needed to make a major change in her life.
So she moved to Santa Barbara, where I lived, and we then began collaborating together in our clinical practice. We had offices in a similar structure, in the same suite, essentially. And then we just began working on trainings and teaching and writing.
And she died in September of 2021 at the age of 94. And she and I had been friends for 41 years, and I met girlfriends, we were both divorced at the time we met, had just been newly divorced. So we became just kind of girlfriends and did all the things that girlfriends do.
As what? Shopping and talking about relationships and all sorts of things. And so I cherish that friendship. And I also cherish the fact that I had the opportunity to be with her just shortly before she died in September.
And I was on my way to Prague to do some teaching, and I got the email that she had passed, taken her last breath, and I sat for a moment just so grateful for our conversations in those last weeks and days. So she was an international teacher, mentor, consultant. She was friend, supporter.
She was everyone you could expect a wonderful woman to be. An intellect, heart, soul. She had it all.
My guess is there’s a lot of listeners that don’t know this, and she is she’s one of the greats, and she’s one of the individuals that has shaped what we do and why we do what we do. And to hear personal stories about her is really touching. And so thank you for helping us know her a little bit more as we’re getting to know you a little bit more.
Thank you. Let me tell you one more thing, just in general, for the listeners to see how she received several awards of recognition, but one was the association of Play Therapy in 2008 gave her the Lifetime Achievement Award, and she was 3rd, 4th, right after Gary Landreth and Charles Schaefer. So she was very well respected and appreciated in our field of not only Gestalt Therapy with children, but the whole field of Play Therapy recognized her contribution.
I know for me, the first time I read Windows to Our Children, which is one of the books that is on my list for all of my students, it was an impactful book. You can feel her in the book. I think that’s you can feel her.
You can feel her approach, you can feel her connection with kids. It’s an incredible book, and it’s a book that I really believe that anyone working with a child needs to have on their bookshelf. It’s just one of those books I’m currently teaching in China, and it’s translated into so they’re reading it there.
That’s great. Felicia, let’s talk about Gestalt play. Let’s go into that a little bit, because many may be familiar and many may not be familiar.
And this is a chance to share some of the wisdom from Gestalt Play Therapy. I know you talk about the four pillars of play Therapy. Let’s start there.
Talk about that. Well, I think one of the things I want to give an overarching, because the three, four pillars, it’s kind of like they’re holding something up. Gestalt Therapy is fundamentally an organismic process.
The organismic process kind of separated itself a little bit from what we might call the intrapsychic psychotherapies, where in Gestat, we’re interested in how the child, how the process of this organism, and we understand the various processes of how children, how we develop, how we grow, and how we organize our experiences. So we need our senses, we need our body to move. What the organism is doing, why we got the title Gestalt Therapy in the first place has to do with this kind of innate organizing principle that essentially all organisms use to organize their experience in a way that allows them to get their needs, to explore their interest, to engage with others.
All of those things have to come together in a meaningful way for us to feel truly alive and have a sense of well being. So that organismic paradigm, which was kind of contrasted with a more mechanistic paradigm so we are organisms, human beings. We are not machines to be repaired, fixed, et cetera.
So with that paradigm that overarching view the four pillars that Violet created or kind of formed the structure of Gestalt play therapy. The first and foremost, of course, is the relationship. Now, some people say sure, well, at the time that Windows to Our Children was written, that wasn’t such a sure.
The therapeutic relationship was the child and the therapist were disengaged in some sense. The child was the in Gestalt therapy. What we talk about is this engaged mutual relationship where I’m not off from my client.
Even in that reflective mode of child centered play therapy. I am working with, I’m at one with you would say that dialogic, what we call the dialogic relationship is one in which we both work together, we create together, we communicate together. I talk about what I like, what I don’t like.
They can talk about what they like, what they don’t like, what we want to do, what we don’t want to do. I can make suggestions. As a therapist, I listen to what the child is saying and I try to follow the sense of direction with what they are doing and what they’re needing.
So the relationship is very important. And I gave you an example, a child. We were doing clay and it was kind of a new relationship in some ways, but she had had a previous relationship therapy therapist.
And as we were working with this clay and we’re kind of working through the process, projective process, which we’ll talk a little bit about here, she just stopped and she looked at me and she said, you know, you’re different from my other therapist. And I am. I said how? And she said, I’m not real sure.
You’re just different somehow. You’re more real. And I really cherish that.
I said, oh. I said, Well, I’m glad to hear that. I said, do you know your previous therapist? What was the person’s name? She said, I don’t know.
Wow. There wasn’t a relationship there. Wow.
So what I’m saying is that one of the pillars is this relationship and it has its foundation in a very clear orientation around the dialogic process. The I thou I sometimes call it the me you us relationship. So that’s number one.
That’s one pillar. I would say the second pillar or another pillar is that she kind of, first of all, kind of delineated or kind of organized, but it’s not a linear process. I don’t want to leave people with that idea that this is a protocol, because it’s not gestalt therapy is not a protocol.
It’s a creative process with certain elements in mind based upon an assessment, maybe a diagnosis coming up with something of what is this child needing to support that organismic growth and development that we come with this viewpoint. So, as you know, they ran two primary functions. How does the child make contact? How do I support that contact? And the other is the child’s sense of self.
So, first of all, the process has a lot to do with the relationship. Then, second, based upon certain assessments giving the children experiences with their body, with smelling, tasting children and even adults sometimes walk into a room. They don’t even see the room.
Some kids, that’s all they see. I mean, it’s not organized. There’s not an organization to their experience that way.
The senses, what do you smell? What are you hearing? And then also using the body, the emotions, emotional development is a part of that whole therapy process. Emotional regulation. And sometimes that’s about expressing, and sometimes it’s making choices and decisions about when maybe we need to hold our emotions back or tone them down in certain settings or situations.
And also how to make choices. Cognitive development is all a part of that. How do I make choices? What do I think? What do I want? How do I assess this? And then the final part of that therapy process has to do with that sense of self, which is giving children experiences in the therapeutic process that allows them to know more of who they are, what’s that subjective experience inside? Who am I? Who am I not? What do I like? What don’t I like? To have a sense of identity.
And many children, again, who are coming in have no sense of that. It’s like what other people tell them to do, or it’s what other people or maybe they’ve constricted and shut down so many of their own experience that they’re not in touch with that anymore. So the relationship, the therapy process, the third kind of element that she demonstrated was how to work with these creative modalities that are such a or all of the various functions of what we might call play therapy.
How do we work with these modalities in a way that allow the child to deepen that process? So working with expressive modalities, creative modalities, and then allowing the child be able to do that, it’s not analyzed by the therapist or just a nice thing to do. And we have 20 questions that we ask, and that’s it. But the child is given an opportunity to do, let’s say, a Santre, to then share a little bit about what that Santre is and then to be able to enter into kind of like in the virtual world to enter into maybe the perspective of one or more of the characters in the santre or the figures, or even the mood of the santre.
And then to be able to say, because what we know is that’s a projective process, it’s coming from them. So we can ask the question, is there some way in which you’re talking as that tiger in your santre? Do you ever have that feeling or would you ever like to say that to someone in your life? Then the child’s more able to that supports that child, of being able to say, yeah, it’s my older brother. I’d really like to talk to him.
And then we could talk about the relationship with the older brother and what that’s like. And then that might move us into maybe a drawing or something else that might then help us or even role play and problem solve, maybe doing dietic work. But it can deepen the work and lead us as therapists in the direction we need to go.
So that’s kind of three. The fourth one. The fourth pillar had to do with what we in Gestalt Therapy working.
All of behavior occurs within a context, in a situation, in a field where you may hear people say and we have to be able to work with those field conditions to be able to get a child’s needs met to build support and so forth. And the way we do that, we might do family work, we might do educational work. I go into schools.
I go to IEP meetings. I work in the community on behalf of certain children. So Clark Mustakas is one of these play therapists that’s been overlooked.
And I just think Clark Mustakis is wonderful. He’s another person I wish was alive. You could have him on anyway.
He wrote a great book called Being In, being for and Being With. And there are times when we need to advocate the being for children. So we work with all these different modalities in the field, in the context.
And as that child’s advocate, oftentimes I’m working with a child’s legal counsel. If there’s a custody issue and the child has a court appointed attorney, I’m working with that attorney, advocating or even bringing parents together, solving conflicts, doing family work, restructuring things so that the discipline is more consistent and expectations are clear. All of that.
So those were the four pillars, the relationship, the therapy process what did I say? Working with projective processes and creative modalities, having fun, the sense of humor, being goofy, being human. And the fourth one is then working with the field in the context. So Violet in 1978 brought that all to play therapy.
It had not been there before. And as I wrote in the article that you mentioned, it was a difference that made a difference. It was a difference that made a difference.
Those are the four pillars. So, Felicia, even in you just going through the four pillars, I’m over here and I genuinely feel emotional. And I feel emotional.
I feel like you’re bringing me back to my roots. Well, I told you that, right? And you’re bringing me into my heart as you’re talking about this. You’re bringing me so close to, you know, my my beliefs.
And anyway, I just want to say I’m over here feeling so alive inside and feeling emotional, and just keep wanting to say, like, thank you, thank you. Thank you for having this conversation with yeah. Yeah.
Alicia one of the biggest misconceptions about Gestalt play therapy is that it is just mean. It’s often put in the category of if you’re going to do directive play therapy, then you’re going to do Gestalt play therapy. Will you flesh that out a little bit? Because it’s not help people wrap their mind around that.
Well, here again, maybe a little bit of history and context could know the Apt Association for Play Therapists really developed by Charles Schaefer and Kevin O’Connor to support the work and Gary Landrith as a way of supporting child centered play. What? That was play therapy. If you were going to be trained in play therapy, you were trained in child centered play therapy, which is called a nondirective approach.
The therapist is somewhat removed in a reflective process, but reflective in the sense of supporting the child’s play, which the therapist does not engage in in any way other than maybe to support something that needs to happen. And some of us have seen videos of even things falling apart, and the therapist waits for the child to offer request. That was that.
And then various therapeutic approaches began to emerge in the field. And the popularity, for instance, of Gestalt and Violet’s book Windows in 2008, you know, so that they were struggling with this idea of how do we differentiate these different approaches? And so, unfortunately, what happened was things CBT was coming into the field, and some neuroscience EMDR, other things were coming in. So how do we differentiate and not get lost in the mix? And so I felt it was unfortunate they created this duality.
You were either nondirective, which tended to be child centered play therapy, or you were directive. And it’s almost like you were either child centered or everybody else was over here. And there were a lot of people who began to kind of question this kind of dichotomy here.
And it seemed so artificial and was not really representing what other orientations were doing. So I can speak to Gestalt because I even raised objections about because Gestalt therapy, I’ve often said, is both. And what I love so much about being a Gestalt play therapist is that I oftentimes am back here very observing, reflective, letting the child direct me, even though my relationship is much more engaging than more than child centered play therapy has been.
They seem to be modifying and changing a lot. But in their approach, coming mortgage dalp, that was a parentheses. But anyway, so I do that.
That’s what I do. That’s part of the dance, the sensitivity in a dance. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow.
And I can also be in that relationship that’s more engaging and mutual. I can also make suggestions. I can say, how about let’s do this, or let’s try this experiment, or, Together we can do this.
So it’s much more engaging that way. And it is. Sometimes I lead, sometimes I follow.
And that nondirective directive referred to the clinician’s behavior. If you look at it from the child’s behavior in Gestalt Therapy, you see directive nondirective. So that’s the context.
As I lift it, others may have a different story, but as I lived it and I hear less and less about this and less about the dichotomy, and there’s more inclusivity. You know, we’re all directive, indirective, non directive. I love Joyce Mills.
She broke the dichotomy. I don’t know if people joyce Mills is an Ericksonian kind of hypnotherapist. So she said, I’m neither directive nor directive or non directive.
I am indirective. And she kind of goes around. So I appreciated her breaking the dichotomy with the indirective.
So, yes, I want your audience to know that Gestalt Therapy is I would strongly say it is not in that. Bailey Wicker I’m directing the therapy now more so than any therapist is using judgment and assessment and criteria for making decisions about what to do and which direction to go in or what kind of materials might be helpful and useful. But it’s always within the context of the relationship and how the child is responding.
Yeah. Beautiful. As you think about the conversation we’ve had so far and the pieces that you’ve shared with the time that we have, is there a piece that you want to make sure that you are able to talk about? If we are able to pick another, whether it is talking more about the nature of the relationship or a type of intervention or the goal, or is there something that you’d like to expand on a little bit more? How much time do we have? Let’s go for it.
We’ll go another ten minutes. Okay, Bill. Okay.
One of the things that I really want to talk about is what we call in Gestalt Therapy self nurturing. That was a late come on to Violet’s work. After working with children and given kind of this supportive process, as well as working on various symptoms and difficulties that children were having problems, she began to notice that there was something missing that was not really being addressed.
And here again, she was influenced by some therapy that she was having, some group work she was participating in as a client. And it was part of that process was called the good Mother work. And this is where she saw that what the therapist was doing jack Rosenfield Rosenberg what he was doing was encouraging people to begin to talk to a younger part of themselves as a child, as a good mother, the loving, caring, accepting mother would, and this allowed some changes to take place.
So she began asking, how do I do this with kids? And so she began to establish, recognizing that all children, all children, all each, you and me, everybody, we develop these self messages that are very critical and judgmental. I’m good, I’m bad, I’m ugly, I’m stupid, even I’m pretty, and I’m smart, and blah, blah. These are kind of messages about the self towards the self, and these become very limiting and they become hard.
And so she began a process called self nurturing, where you can find or develop or think of someone in your life who can accept you totally. That might be mom, it might be a grandmother, it might be a teacher, it might be a friend. But for the child to be able to say to these parts of themselves that they are so hard on, so judgmental on to be able to we call them interjects.
So using a term here, these beliefs that the child can say, even though that’s the key phrase, even though you’re not good at math, you’re trying, you can learn, or it’s a way of saying, even though it’s not saying when or if or any of that, it’s even though it’s allowing my inadequacy to stand. And I can embrace that inadequacy and give it support. And lo and behold, it began to be a major transformation.
So now today we have Kristen Neff, who does self compassion work, and the research is there supporting this process that we called self nurturing. And now we hear in the literature and in our training the importance of self compassion. Now, I sometimes refer to this work that we’ve been doing since what, 1980s play therapy with children, what we call self nurturing, self compassion work.
And it is about that embracing the parts of ourselves that we don’t like. You know, what’s so beautiful about what you’re saying? So in synergetic play therapy, we talk about it as a moment when you’re attached and connected to yourself. But what I just heard you say was that Violet Oaklander was talking about self regulation before self regulation became a term, became a therapy, was talking about regulation.
Totally, exactly right. The ability to be with the self, not avoid, not run away, not dismiss, not shut, not even try to change it. Exactly.
Not try right. Just to the real acceptance about how do I develop a relationship with that part of myself. Exactly.
Which is what now neuroscience is proving. Well, that’s another, you know, that’s it’s just interesting, the terms that are coming out you, I’m hearing you say them through Violet’s language. Well, through the Gestalt language, really, and how she applied, how we could do this work with children, because so much of it originally was for adults.
And so I think it’s just so important to be able to appreciate these individuals like Violet and Dorakhoff and Virginia Axlein and Melanie Klein and all these. Wonderful clinicians who were interested in kids and trying to support them and give them a chance for something that we all had to wait till we were grown ups to get. Felicia, if there’s a listener right now that wants to learn about your trainings or train with you, how can they find you? Okay.
All right. Through the West Coast Institute for Gestalt Therapy with children and adolescents. So we have a website, and it’s WW dot westcoastinstitute us, and the website is there.
And as we were talking earlier in June, we go in person. All the trainings will be in person. There are a few right now that are still online, but we’re optimistic and thinking we’re all going to be healthy and vaccinated and boosted.
And if we need to, some of us will wear masks, but we’re going to be in person. And we have a good time here. We have dinners together, do a lot of things in our trainings here.
And we have one training in Las Vegas on adoption that people may be interested in. One of our staff people will be training that who has that is her area of so I would be happy for them to say they heard the podcast and decided to check it out. Yeah.
And as I mentioned in the introduction, you train all over the you know, if you’re curious if Felicia’s ever going to be in your area, please reach out to her institute and inquire about what’s happening or what could happen wherever you are. Well, if you happen to be in Slovenia, I’m going to be there. The 1 april.
There you go. Well, that’s another thing. I’ve been doing trainings not only just in gestalt play therapy, but on shame and guilt, the trauma and self nurturing and healing from trauma.
And so there’s a variety of programs that people might be interested in. Wonderful. Alicia, thank you again so much for saying yes when I reached out and asked you to have this conversation with me.
This has just been so wonderful. Well, I’m the one who’s indebted very yes, thank you very much. You’re so welcome.
And by the way, your books are on my shelf. Oh, thank I look, I read them. I refer to so there you are.
Thank you. Yeah. So, listeners, wherever you are in the world, again, thank you for joining Felicia and I in this conversation.
I hope you felt inspired, curious, and I say this every time we end a podcast, and I’m going to say it to you again, everyone take care of yourselves. Lots of deep breaths, lots of self nurturing. Tend to your inner little ones.
You are the most important toy in the playroom. Oh, I love that. Like that, Lisa.
Yeah. Until next time, everyone.
