This particular topic has been a request from multiple listeners over the last few months. So really excited to be able to offer this information to those who have requested it and those of you who have not requested it. It’s an important topic and always there’s a reminder and an invitation.
If you have topics that you would love for me to present on or for me to find experts on, please send them my way. I would love to create this for you. So today we are going to jump into how to work with parents and children when they have just experienced a significant tragedy in their life.
And specifically a tragedy that has impacted their sense of safety or their sense of safety in the community. So it could be anything from maybe there’s been a school shooting or something dangerous happened in the community or maybe there was a flood or hurricane or tornadoes. Something like that has come through the community.
Maybe there’s been a suicide that has really shaken up the school system or the community or the fmily could be really anything that really lands as a significant tragedy. But oftentimes there’s a shock experience. Oftentimes parents are left wondering, how do I help my child through this? And then parents own fears.
Do I send my child back to school? How do I help my child feel safe or stay safe if it was something that happened openly in the community? These are all really important things that we need to think about as play therapists because inevitably when these children and their families come to see us, we’re also potentially going to get afraid and our own protective patterns and desire to protect can come in. And that may be resulting in us offering information that may not necessarily be what the child is actually needing in order to move through the tragedy and move through the challenging thoughts an feelings about whatever has gone on. So let’s just jump into this and start to unpack this a little bit.
So the first thing that we need to really wrap our minds around is that it’s really important, however scary it is, that we don’t jump in and rescue. There is this natural urge when our clients are really suffering, when they’re really having a hard time. We love them, we want to make them better, we want to scoop them up and we want to help them feel safe again.
And when I talk about jumping in and rescuing, what I’m specifically talking about is giving them messages that in the moment are an attempt to help soothe them and help them feel better. But they’re actually promises or messages that are very empty and empty because we can’t actually follow through on them. So I’m going to give you some examples here.
It’s saying things to children like I’ll keep you safe or your family will keep you safe or it is safe for you to go to school or things like that where we’re just trying to help them feel safe. And I’m going to go one step further because parents often do this with their children. So I’m going to take school shooting as an example.
When a child is afraid to go back to school, a natural impulse for a parent might be to say, but your school is safe, your school is safe. Your school does a really great job at making sure that the kids are okay and it is safe to go back to school. And this is going to sound maybe really hard to hear, maybe not.
Those are things that we can’t actually promise because we don’t actually know that. You don’t actually know if the child is going into a safe environment. Things happen, random things happen.
And so as we’re trying to create a sense of safety in a child, it’s important that we help them develop the sense of safety internally from within. And we’re going to talk about how to do that rather than giving them external messages that then puts them in a position of relying on your words for a sense of safety or relying on words that we can’t even really follow through with. Because again, you can’t always keep a child safe.
Even with the best of intentions for a parent to say something like, I’ll always keep you safe. No, a parent will not always keep a child safe. Even other things like I will never leave you.
Parents cannot promise that as clinicians for us to be able to say to a child, I will always be here, we can’t say that to a child. You might not always be there. You might move.
You may make a decision to change the way that you’re doing your work or your practice and you may no longer be at that particular job or placement of where you’re working. So again, I’m just reminding us that as adults, we love the kiddos so much and we just want to wrap them up, scoop them up, and just give them these words that help them feel safe. But sometimes we’re doing a disservice when we’re using language like this, when we’re offering things that ultimately we can’t follow through with.
I’m going to touch on another piece that I’m alluding to here, which is that when we as the adult are stepping in with language around, we’re going to keep you safe, the adults are going to keep you safe. You’re really having the child, again, rely on outside authority for their internal sense of safety. And when a child’s younger, of course they need some of this.
But as a child gets older, it’s really important that they’re internalizing the sense of safety. Otherwise you’ve got a child that feels highly anxious and highly nervous going through life because the world doesn’t feel safe without mom or dad there or without being able to see you as the clinician, as their therapist every single week. So we really want to work at empowering and internalizing this sense of safety in the kiddos.
So that brings me to I just said the word empowering. That brings me to that piece here. The goal in any tragedy is to help the child regain a neuroception of safety from within and to help them feel empowered in the situation.
So I’m going to give an example. A so this conversation that I had with my daughter Avery after some of the recent school shootings that happened here in the US. And so my conversation with her just started with checking in with her around how she’s feeling about it.
And as I’m checking in with her about her full experience, I’m really staying in a state of curiosity. So I’m giving this example about my daughter. But this is what I would also do in the playroom if I was having a direct conversation with the child.
This is also how I would coach a parent to be able to talk with their children after a big tragic event or something like that too. So I would start with just inquiring how are they feeling and not making an assumption on my end that they are feeling a particular way. So I’m going to share a quick story and then come back here.
So at the Play Therapy Institute, the institute is on the second floor. Below us on the first floor are two preschools. And a couple of years ago, there was a teacher that passed away at the preschool, and I got a phone call from the director asking if I could meet with the teachers and offer some support.
And before we did that, the executive director and I had a meeting to just discuss just some ideas on even just how to support the teachers before talking to the teachers about how to support the kiddos. And as we were having a conversation, the first question I asked her was, what are you nervous about as you’re thinking about talking to your teachers? Where are you at with that? What are you feeling about the situation? And what she said is wells that she was inclined to talk to the teachers about sharing with the children that it was normal and it was okay if they felt sad and that they’re probably going to see the teachers also sad. And that was what was going on.
That was really okay to be sad. And I looked at her and I said, that’s a lovely place to start. And my next question was, well, what if they’re not sad? And she really looked at me and she said, what do you mean, what if they’re not sad? And I said, well, is sad the only emotion that is allowed in a tragic scenario? Because kids can have a full range of emotions? Where’s the discussion on the full range of emotion I shared? What if a particular student didn’t like the teacher and actually feels relieved that the teacher is no longer at the school? What about that? What if the child is mad because there were some circumstances around the death of this teacher that were really challenging and the children knew about it? So what if the student was actually mad about how everything happened and how it all came to be? What about rage? What about confusion? Because there’s not a real understanding of the details.
And she really paused and was like, wow, yeah, I’ve just been thinking about it from the lens of sad. And I said, It’s really important that when we’re working with kids around tragic events, that we normalize the full range and the full range to include relief, joy, all of that as well. And so we worked together to create different ways of working with the kiddos so that they could work through what had just happened, but with this peace in mind.
So when you’re working with parents or you’re working with the kiddos, again, really important that you allow for the full range of possibilities and that you help parents also talk to their kids about the full range of possible emotions that could be coming up based on whatever it is that’s gone on. So back to Avery. So as Avery and I are talking, avery is sharing with me her feelings.
And again, I’m just beginning to normalize her experience for her and then also sharing that. Avery, you may find, as time goes on, you may find that your emotions change. You may find when you think about it, one day you feel really sad.
You may find that another day, you find yourself really, really mad. You may find yourself confused. You may even have moments when you think about it and you notice that you’re not affected at all.
And, sweetie, that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean that you no longer care. It just simply means that in that moment, your sense of safety was okay and that you’re having a normal part of the response that emotions come and go.
So this is the first part of it. Now, in order for me to even have that conversation with her. I had to be able to honor within myself my full range of emotions.
Because if you can imagine as a therapist or as a parent, if we’re working with the kiddos through this, if we’re really sad, if we’re really angry, if we’re really honed in on one particular emotion, we have a high probability of then projecting that onto the child or overemphasizing that particular emotion, over another emotion. So I really had to look at how I felt about the situation so that I could really normalize and share for her, sweetie, I feel the full range of emotions as well, and all of them are normal within me too. So that’s a really important message.
Now, the next piece that I asked her was, as you think about what happened, what part of it is the part that really bothers you? Now, that is a really important question, so I’m going to repeat it again. As you think about whatever happened, what part of it really bothers you? It’s really important, then, when we’re helping a child integrate something that feels tragic, that we really hone in on the part of the experience that is registering as traumatic for the child, because the entire event itself is not registering as traumatic. Maybe in the situation, maybe it’s the experience of the child isn’t able to reach their parent.
And that was the part that was really hard. Maybe in another situation it was they happened to witness something, and it was like literally seeing the look of terror on somebody’s face. Maybe in another situation it was maybe like in a flood.
It was maybe watching an animal or a cat or one of their pets, dog, cat, hamster, whatever, be swept away in the water. Maybe that was actually the most painful part of the entire event. So it’s really important that we hone in on it, because if we don’t hone in on it, we don’t know what to speak to.
So we can, again, out of our own fear, we can jump in to try to rescue and try to make it all feel better and completely miss the part of the situation that’s registering as hard. So when I was talking to Avery, the part for her that was really hard was actually just the confusion, right? And for her, it was the confusion on in this one particular school shooting, it was a confusion on how the young man that did the shooting was even able to purchase a gun in the first place. That’s for her, what was registering for her.
And with that, there was confusion, there was anger, there was frustration. And when I’m listening to her, I’m hearing her go into a lot of blame. So this is the next piece that I want to talk about.
It’s really important that when we’re listening and helping a child integrate, that we don’t jump into blaming and that we don’t polarize their experience even further. So I have opinions and feelings also about this particular situation and how the child was either able to get a gun or not. And so it could have been easy for me to jump in and go, I know, and this and that.
But instead, I stayed open to help her process. So it’s like, sweetie, keep talking to me about that. So how do you think that happened, and what is your opinion and what are the parts of the gun legal part of it? What parts of it do you understand? And just keeping the conversation going.
And when she would get into blame, I would reflect back to her things. Like, I hear there’s a part of you that wants to blame somebody for this. I hear there’s a part of you that wants to figure out who was at fault.
I hear that there’s a part of you because this feels so painful, that just wants there to be one answer, and it’s so hard when there’s not one answer. And then she and I get to take a deep breath and just connect in that, because that’s, at the end of the day, what’s really underneath all of it. That’s where she can allow herself to access a deeper level of emotion, sadness, or even deeper levels of confusion or whatever’s coming up for her.
But as long as the adult, when they’re helping the child process is staying in blame or polarizing, the child just literally stays looping in their story. So I’m going to review what we’ve covered here so far. Really important that when we’re offering language that we’re not offering language that’s a bit of a Band Aid that prevents them from figuring out the empowerment from within.
It’s really important that we also look at our own ability to feel and to give ourselves permission to recognize the full range of emotions in a tragedy and to be able to extend that openness to the children and to the parents of the children. The next piece is to hone in and figure out specifically what is it about the tragic event that’s bothering the child, then moving into allowing them to talk and making sure that as they are talking, we’re not adding in polarizing language because of our opinions and because of where we’re still trying to process through things. And then the next part of it, which is the most important part, is then looking at the empowerment.
So as Avery and I are talking through this, and I’m beginning to share with her and reflect back to her that she’s talking about feelings of not feeling safe, then I extended the next piece, which was, all right, sweetie, so let’s come up with a plan. If this were to ever happen at your school, and this is key, what’s the plan? What would you do in a situation like this? Let’s play it through. Let’s play through worst case scenarios.
This is no different than when you take your kiddo to the amusement park, and there’s a big crowd, and as a family, you say, okay, if anybody gets lost today, we’re meeting back here at this stand here at the front. Or I want you to go find somebody who’s wearing the green badge. Those are the helpers, and they will help you find me.
We come up with plans, and at school, they create plans. And I know I’m just talking about a school shooting, but I want you to generalize this to whatever the situation is. They come up with plans, but families don’t often come up with plans around these things.
So what’s the family plan and being able to work with the child around? Okay, so if that were to happen again, or if that were to happen to you, what’s the first thing that you would do? Okay, and then if that wouldn’t doesn’t work, what’s the next thing that you’re going to do? And then what’s the next thing that you’re going to do? And help them come up with the process. Help make the unknown known. It’s the unknown in their minds that is scaring them.
The more that they have a plan, and the more that they’re able to figure out, okay, I can do something even in a tragic situation. And then the flip side of it is then for the parent to be able to offer the plan back what they’re going to be doing.
So, example. So Avery and I talk through what the plan would be if something ever happened at her school. And on my end, I’m sharing with her.
So, sweetie, the first moment that I would hear the news, I want you to know that I would be doing everything that I could to get in touch with you. I would be calling Daddy. I would be getting in my car, moving closer to the school if it was safe to get to the school.
But I want you to know that the moment I’d hear it, I would be working my end to get to you while you’re working your end to get to me. And that’s important, because, again, it helps put a sense of empowerment in the child’s hands, knowing that, sweetie, I can’t always keep you safe. Every day.
I can’t always send you out into the world and protect you. Sometimes I’m not there, and sometimes, sweetie, even when I am there, I can’t always keep you safe. So let’s work together to maximize this sense of safety.
What can you do? What can I do? How do we work together on this? So hopefully somewhere in here, I have offered a couple of tips or some things to think about that you can use for yourself. Maybe you’re a parent. So you can use this with your own kids that you can use in the playroom to be able to help guide the kiddo through this, and I’m talking about this through conversation in the playroom.
You could have them create sand trays about how they feel, and you could also have them create sand trays demonstrating the plan. You could act it out in the tray. You can role play it, you can act it out that way.
You can use art to put the feelings, help the feelings come out and put the plan together. You can support the parent through their own experience and then coaching and guiding the parent on how to also talk with the child. With both of them, coming up with a plan can be just incredibly helpful.
