Welcome back to the next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. I have with me a special guest that we have had on here before, but this time I’m coming back to talk to us about Ableism and disableism. So I have with me the wonderful Marshall Lyles.
For those of you that did not catch the last episode that he did, it was on Santre attachment and trauma, if I recall correctly. And so, listeners, I know you’re going to really love this episode. Make sure you go back and check him out in the last episode as well.
So if you’re not familiar with Marshall Lyles, let me tell you a little bit about him before I ask him to say hello and we get into our topic of conversation for today. So he lives in the Austin, Texas area, has well over 20 years of practice in family and play therapy, drawing on lessons learned from working with attachment trauma in a variety of mental health settings. He regularly teaches on trauma expressive.
Therapies attachment informed family work around the globe and has become, in my opinion, one of the leading voices for helping us understand Ableism and disableism, which is why I’ve asked him to join us. He’s published in professional journals and magazines in addition to contributing to several books, including the co authored book Advanced Santre Therapy. Hi, Marshall.
Thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me back, Lisa. Yeah.
I reached out to you because I said, Marshall, we need to talk about this, and you have such an important voice on this subject matter, so you coming on here, having this discussion, sharing with us, just feels like a real honor. So thank you for taking the time to talk about this with me. I appreciate you making space for such a subject.
I know it’s still not comfortable for everyone, and yet it’s the most commonly occurring, secretly held subject matter in our field right now, I think. So I’m really grateful for your willingness. Yeah.
Well, let’s just start with the basics as we make our way into the conversation. Our listeners may not even know what Ableism and disableism means is. Sure.
Can we start there? Yeah. It probably helps to think a little bit about what disability is in order to understand the other two. Disability is really socially constructed construct.
People that have differences in the way that their minds work or the way their bodies move or they process sensory information. It doesn’t automatically mean that those differences or even impairments have to become a disability. Where they become disabilities is when they come into contact with a non inclusive world, a world whose design hasn’t considered them and is holding up this myth of there being a standard way for a mind to work or a body to move that starts to create the necessity of disability.
So for me, as someone who walks with leg braces or a cane or those sorts of things, most of the time I don’t always feel disabled. But I become more aware of having a disability based on the room I’m in or the person I’m talking to. Have I been thought of? Is there room for me to be here? Do I feel welcomed, do I feel included or is it just outside of awareness or acceptability for me to be who I am and to need what I need? That’s where I start to become more aware of having a disability.
So I do use the word disabled for myself in a way that I feel proud of, but I also feel like I use it in a way that almost everyone I talk to doesn’t have the same definition of it as I do. It’s not inherent to my struggle. It’s the part of my struggle that’s more societally based.
That disability, you know, thinking of it in that way helps you then understand ableism and disableism. And ableism is the active favoring of an abled body or neurotypical mind. Neurotypical? It’s not even a word I really love.
But just whenever we’re comparing a mind or body to some mythical norm and then we are perpetuating design issues or processes in therapy world that are making it easier for people who fall under that abled ideal than we do for others. That’s ableism disableism then is kind of the converse of that is the active discrimination of people with disabilities. So one favors the abled and one actively discriminates against the disabled.
So when we’re looking at this within the realm of therapy or play therapy, what are some of the ways I want to explore that active discrimination? First, you said something in the introduction that caught my attention, which is that it’s one of the things that’s happening that we’re not talking about. Right. It’s a very active part of what’s going on.
And so let’s put some of the things that happen on our radar that maybe aren’t on the radar. Absolutely. I think some of it backs all the way up to graduate school and might not just for play therapy, but mental health training in general.
We do perpetuate a lot of discrimination against therapists who have different kinds of needs, who might need to take breaks in a session or have to hold their body in a certain way. Then when we start getting down, into specific training to become a play therapist. Just how frequent certain things are just said without thought about.
Well, clearly, you’ve got to be able to get down on the floor. You got to be comfortable being on their eye level or these little microaggressions slip in that make it make people’s norming of how bodies should move as therapists or minds should work. And it sends this generic covering that says if your mind and body doesn’t work, in this way, you’re probably going to be an inferior version of this professional identity.
So it’s all of these different assertions that come up in a less than obvious way. But then there are even some things that are more egregious. Hiring someone to work for you, but then not being willing to accommodate them, to have your office in a non Ada compliant space, to not be thinking as a Sanchez therapist to put out in the world.
Oh. The right way to display miniatures is this way without thinking, that might be incredibly overwhelming to certain Neurodiverse presentations or physically unavailable to people who have to remain seated or fill in the blank. Fill in the blank.
And so anytime we start making things sound like expectations or rules or agendas without considering how many people we’re excluding from full participation on therapeutic level as as well well as the client level is where we start to perpetuate ableist norms. And it’s one thing to be a therapist going through that, which is incredibly painful. But if you’re an eight year old and you can’t even articulate the feeling that you’re having but you just know that this place is letting you get the sense that your body isn’t fully thought of.
Your mind isn’t fully welcomed into the work. Kids know that, but they just don’t have the insight and the awareness to label it as an issue with the other. So we’re not being more careful in cleaning these things up.
While we are trying to heal one part of a little one, we might be at the same times scarring their identity in another. Invisible way. I’m also thinking, even for a child, that does have a certain level of awareness, but just the piece around wanting to fit in or wanting to be liked by the play therapist and therefore not speaking up.
And falling into the okay, I’ll accommodate you and try to be like you. I can’t, but I’ll try. I’ll lose myself in the process.
I’ll build up resentment in the process. I’ll have grief in the process, but I really want to be accepted by you. So I’ll try to be in your world rather than because that’s too painful to recognize that you’re not seeing me or you’re not joining me in my world.
Am I getting the essence of that? You are when we think about attachment theory and we talk about insecurity. We know one of the hallmark symptoms that comes from receiving the intergenerational and relationally created struggle and protective mechanism that is insecurity. We know one of the markers of it is a child doesn’t really learn to know their own mind because they’re having to constantly read the mind of the other to stay safe enough to try and take any morsel of relational availability.
And so they’ll kind of change their own connection to their neediness in order to keep an adult close. In some ways, if we’re not careful in our field, we can perpetuate this overall attachment insecurity for kids with these physical and emotional needs, different ways of processing information because we’re forcing them to have to experience our room from our point of view instead of us pre contemplating them. And we then shift the presentation of the child because they’re realizing oh, I have to make you feel comfortable with me, which is an attachment insecure trait.
And so we even as attachment figures in kids lives, when we’ve not done our own work around noticing how ableism has entered into our profession, into our own minds, into our own bodies, we force kids to have to go to that place of survival in the place where they’re meant to be going to be protected. Who’s also coming to mind are parents and caregivers. So maybe it’s the parent or caregiver and then same thing.
It’s like oh, I really need help for my child and I’m going to force myself into this world. And when we think about that attachment relationship is so important with the parent and caregivers too, just even between the therapist and the parent and caregiver and what that can do also. Yes, absolutely.
When we’re talking about disability, we’ve got to be able to hold the therapist, the caregiver, the child all in mind in our field. And to be honest, we’ve just not been historically good at that. So for play therapists that want to become more curious, let’s just first talk about their play space.
Do you have starting points or suggestions for play therapists of how they might begin to when I’m saying this, I’m making the assumption the able bodied or the able minded play therapist, how would they think about their space? Yeah, to be honest, even someone with a disability like mine, that’s mobility based, it doesn’t mean that I inherently know how to think about all other people with mobility issues, not to mention sensory processing or fill in the blank other issues. But I have maybe a little bit more of a burden when I encounter someone with a mobility loss that I’m not substituting my experience for theirs. And so we’ve got to be thinking really complexly about all of that.
But start with if you’ve never backed up and got legally educated on reading the Ada for yourself. It actually kind of hurts my soul that that’s not something that every play therapist has already read. I wouldn’t even want to guess a percentage, but I’m guessing very few people have ever gone and read the act itself and gotten be familiar with how late in American history that it was even came.
So go get legally educated, but also read books by disabled authors about their lived experience. Get to know advocates in that world outside of just thinking about your playroom, because it’s almost like you have to start borrowing, stepping into the mind of another in order to really have the sufficient mentalization to think critically about your own spaces and your own practices and then to, as often as possible, evaluate your space through different lenses. If you live in a place where the majority of your clients use public transportation, take the route that they would take into your office and imagine one particular day what it would be like to be losing your vision, to be losing your hearing, to be walking with a cane, to be using a chair to have autism, to fill in the blank.
And don’t lump it all in one experience. Just keep walking back through your spaces over the coming weeks from the point of view as as many other communities as you possibly can, thinking about, are there steps to get into my building? Have I ever thought about it? Are hallways dark? Have I thought about it? How quickly does it change temperature throughout my building? Just letting your body and your mind really try it on before you ever even get to your room to think your room exists inside of a much bigger space and you have control over this part, but you need to have awareness over all of it. So that would be one place that would be a very pragmatic entry.
It’s so beautiful. What you’re saying is, if we really understand that the therapy begins before the child ever even enters the playroom, the moment they’re leaving, wherever they are and they are in route, the therapy has begun in some way. And so I love this invitation to actually go all the way back, go back as far as you can and be with your client in a particular way and just what would their experience be like before they ever get into the room.
It’s also really highlighting what you were saying, too, about what we learn in graduate school and even in the play therapy field, there’s a lot of emphasis sometimes on what your playroom does need to look like and the types of toys and what a good playroom setup looks like. And there is there’s almost sometimes this feeling of a good play therapy room and a bad play therapy room. And I just love what you’re saying because I’m just hearing you say, no, everyone, you got to back up.
Like, back up way further, way further than that. It’s such a beautiful message, Marshall, and you’re never going to perfectly predict it all. So you try to be as conscientious as you can, but then have the humility to let new information come in from the point of view of every single session you’re with and it’s going to feel overwhelming.
You’re not going to solve every problem related to Ableism, but at the very least you can initiate repairs even when something is not solvable. So we make the accommodations and we own the impact of our spaces, of our decisions, of our processes, even of our paperwork, not realizing how overwhelming it can be to a parent who has certain differences or limitations or struggles, but own it. Like when it’s brought up to have the comfort to say, even if you don’t have full control over that change, can you be a part of acknowledging it’s a problem? And this is where sometimes I know I lose people in my trainings.
I feel them wander outside the room when I talk about this. But there’s also the work you’re meant to in my opinion. There’s the work you’re meant to be doing inside the room as a healer, but then you’re learning things about the general mistreatment of categories of humans that, as a mental health professional, I think you need to be advocating outside of the room when you start to realize that there’s a problem that the field or our greater therapeutic systems have not considered.
Speak into it. Speak up for the people who don’t have insider access and are depending on us, who know how to navigate those spaces to challenge status quo. So get better empowered to be an advocate, get comfortable speaking to people who are in positions of power and to just make sure that everyone has come to know what you’ve come to know.
Because a lot of times it might not be an organization or an employer’s unwillingness to do something. It could just be that they, quite frankly, didn’t yet know it was a problem. Because ableism keeps things just outside of awareness.
We’re only thinking about the middle grouping of people with certain sad abilities and so they may not yet have had it brought to their attention. So speak up. There’s a piece that you’re saying here that feels really important also, in that if we haven’t gone through the process of attempting to speak up about something that seems challenging or seems hard or feels scary well, if we’re supporting the parents and caregivers.
And one of the things that we’re helping them do is speak up on behalf of their child or to help create awareness about what their child’s needs are. How are we going to support the parent and caregiver through the process, the fears, whatever it is, if we can’t actually name like it is scary, it is vulnerable. We’re not going to be very believable, are we? Absolutely.
Courage is contagious. We got to not waste the amount of courage that’s coming into our rooms. People aren’t only vessels of struggle.
In fact, for most people, the more struggle that they hold every day, it means they have more resilience and more courage, and we can borrow from that. Where you want to be careful is when we’re only borrowing inspiration from people, but we’re not acknowledging that we might have been a part of co creating the need for them to have to overcome something. So it’s part of where it gets really gross.
And this is true for sexism and racism and homophobia and all the isms when we elevate some part of someone’s story in our mind to get inspiration from it without owning that we might have been a part of the problem that caused the story to have to be inspirational, then we’re in dangerous spaces. So it’s wonderful to borrow courage from someone as long as you’re also equally asking yourself, have I contributed to some overall dynamic that caused this to have to be seen as courageous? And if so, own that, too. And then we get to speak up and speak for and speak with people in ways that are socially responsible.
Yeah. I want to share a story where I had a miss because I think it’s important to normalize that the misses happen, and that the ruptures and the repairs. I just think that’s an important dance to keep talking about because I find that so many play therapists are so afraid of the miss which is going to happen inevitably sometimes.
Right. May I share a story? I would love that that happened. So when I one of my private practices was in, like, a group, it was a group practice, and we had a long hallway, and in the hallway we did what you’re supposed to do, which is have the sound machines out in the hallway, because that’s the standard, is to have the sound machines for confidentiality.
And so I didn’t think about it. I just got my space together, got my sound machine, put it out into the hallway. Well, my room was one of the last rooms down the hallway, which meant that my clients had to walk through a sound tunnel to get to my room.
And I had a little boy that you could tell, and at first I didn’t understand what was happening, but I could see his body contract as he was walking down the hallway. And I thought of it as, oh, he’s afraid to come into therapy. Right.
Yeah. I did stay curious about what that was about. And I was able to quickly learn and identify no, this is a little boy where sound is really impactful to his system.
And my hallway was unsafe. Yeah. And as much as he might have wanted to be in that playroom with me, it was not safe for him to come into that.
And he would have viewed as, Lisa didn’t consider me as I’m walking down this hallway. Yeah. That’s such a beautiful example for a lot of reasons.
That one, it shows how powerful simple attunement is to helping to address pockets of unawareness of how we might be assuming all minds and bodies work in one way. But more than that, too, is because what’s equally possible is the kid the next hour. If the sound machines weren’t on and they were hearing other people’s voices, that could be the lack of safety.
And so it’s why this gets to be a hard subject is any move we might make to try and make a space safer for one person might make it more threatening to the next person. We just have to stay open. You’re never going to make a practice safe for all people.
May I share what we did together to process that? So once I got a clue about what was really going on, we actually went to the sound machine because it had different settings and we explored just the different sounds. And he actually found a sound in there that actually registered as soothing. So the one that I had was not soothing, but there was another one.
I think it was like a rainstorm versus, like, the there was one that was more like a rainstorm that was actually really soothing. And me knowing that was super helpful because then I could talk to the other clinicians to say, during this hour, you don’t have to do anything. But just so that you know, if it’s okay, I’m just going to walk down the hallway before my client shows up, and I’m going to just change to the rainstorm in the hallway.
And then there’s that larger discussion of and can you make sure that that feels okay to your clients as well? And then I can shift it back. So it was like finding out what worked, what didn’t work, what felt safe, what didn’t feel safe. Because I think that’s what you’re talking about is that we have to discover what the nuances are for that individual and what the needs are.
That’s empowering. Yeah. Because he got to walk away with the experience of someone’s capable of understanding me.
It’s to me, one of the biggest tragedies of ableism on the disabled mind disabled body is you have no choice but to fill in the blanks of the world’s not capable of understanding me. And if you can’t feel understood, you can’t feel loved. If you don’t feel comprehensible, you can’t be organized.
We require co organization, and I think there have been so many kids like him and so many parents that have been dropped because there weren’t therapists willing to notice how their practices and their environment was becoming a disorganizing force in the experience of trying to access. Good. That’s a good gosh.
This is such a powerful conversation. Marshall just really appreciating you and this conversation as we just keep going here. Are there other pieces that just feel really important to name? Yeah, I do have one thing that’s been on my mind lately, but I will tell you in advance is I still don’t feel completely coherent when I try to talk about it.
We’re battling some difficult dynamics because right now the majority of people, I’m sure who listen to you all have licenses. And so they have promised to uphold certain codes of ethics and things which are critically important. But almost all of the things in our field were created through a lens of ableism.
And so we are trying to remain ethical, but some of our commonly occurring ethics aren’t safe and there’s a tension. And so, as one example, just thinking through how we do documentation, which is an ethical mandate, and we should all be documenting, we should be documenting as soon to a session as possible. We should be as thorough as is needed to allow someone else to continue with care should we not be able to, or to help us remember where we left off.
And not so detailed that it would be a shock to the client to read this themselves one day. So we’re already dealing with those dynamics. But if you back up to where there could be some ableism alive in that is we’re having to do every bit of our documentation around the DSM.
And we’re forced for the most part for people who participate in most mental health settings, is you have to provide a diagnosis for anyone to be able to access care with you, which means they have to be labeled or they don’t get treated. We are forcing a lot of people into diagnostic categories, even though we might even some people might say, well, I don’t really know that they meet full criteria. However, it’s the closest thing and there’s this weird lack of ethic in the way that we’re all having to participate in ethics.
But even beyond that, the bigger issue is for people who are already struggling, we’re having to assign words that the words themselves, if they read them, would be harsh and unsettling. And then we’re writing documentation every week based on this category of information that might not be the most sensitive ways to think about a human. Because so many of our client struggles actually are their response to an environment and not something inherent to their own processing.
It’s this bigger kind of gross pervasive thing that’s filtering down even into all of the issues that we’re required to ethically participate in. So we have a lot of work to do. Even on top of that, once you put the diagnosis on there, then it stays with them.
It’s something that then is carried forth for years and years and years. And so it is I’m providing an identity. I’m like, I’m giving you an identity of some kind that’s not even and so that we can do something.
And let’s be honest, I’m just going to name this one Marshall or because otherwise the therapist doesn’t get paid. Yep, they don’t get paid, or God forbid, they may have to pay back six months of payments. I mean, we’ve all seen heard that happening or felt it happen to us about this is audited by this insurance company or that system of care.
And there are all these financial risks for not fully participating in the system. Definitely, we have to be ethical. We have to do the things we said we would do in order to be a part of the systems we’re a part of.
But at some point, we’ve got to start having hard conversations with the people who manage these systems and trying to figure out is there not a better way to provide care. But there are a lot of us that still haven’t fully seen some of the insidious nature. And if we pick one clinical issue, that’s kind of a pet issue of mine, I know you have some stake in it too, of dissociation.
Love dissociation. There would be serious consequences to any relationship in my life that made it to take all dissociation away from me, not be able to get through a day. But we end up only thinking of dissociation as a clinical problem to be solved instead of something to be celebrated, instead of something to be loved.
Because the reality is, if you call it a symptom or an adaptation, whatever you want to call it, if you love it, it will eventually find its way to the balance that makes sense for that human. It’s not yours to change. It’s not yours to take away.
It’s not yours to solve. But that’s how a lot of us do therapy is without the person’s full permission. We’re deciding based on their report what parts of them we think need to be changed, and dissociation is a very strong one.
Can I bring this full circle with our conversation here? Because I think what you’re pointing out here is a really important fine line that play therapist. I don’t even say it’s a fine line. It is a line that therapists need to make sure that they are on a particular side of, which is that we’re also not viewing someone’s disability as something that needs to be fixed or changed or that somehow it means that there’s something wrong or there’s bad or there’s a problem here.
And that really what’s needed is how do we celebrate the uniqueness of this individual and help this individual love and appreciate themselves exactly as they are? Can you imagine the world if that was true for everybody? I would even start by relaxing so much in my own body. If we just became aware of how our field was contributing to the need for people to dissociate, even if we just started there, that how our field organizes itself in the greater world, is increasing the felt need for dissociation in many ways because, oh, there’s this part of me that I’m now afraid of. If a certain person.
At my school or at my work comes to know it’s going to get labeled, it’s going to limit my opportunities, therefore, I must float away from that. And how do I float away from that? I dissociate. So we’re a part of this overall need to increase dissociation, but then someone comes to us, and then we have the gall to label that as a problem to be solved when we haven’t even looked at how our field is helping to maintain the need for it.
You know, it gets to be very nuanced, and I know that’s part of why people often don’t want to look at it. But can I increase the discomfort a little bit? Absolutely. I would love to go down in a blaze of glory.
Yes. Well, you’re just making us back up and back up and back up and back up and just see the larger system and then the larger system and then the larger system and the larger system, which is what we need to be doing. Absolutely.
What we need to be doing. Probably something that is the most uncomfortable for this subject is as a society, we don’t really want to look at any of these issues because it means that all of us are having to grapple with mortality in general. If you start looking at ableism and institutionalized ableism, then you’re having to acknowledge that your own body, your own mind is not going to stay in the state it’s in forever.
It’s already hard to deal with our internal implicit biases in general, but for a lot of the people who are working on implicit biases, they’re choosing to work on issues that they’re wanting to gain some social awareness of. That will never be true for them. I’m working over here on this particular issue, but I’m not having to imagine that I will one day become the people or a version of the people that I’m working on my bias against.
However, you can’t look at ableism without looking at your own future. And it’s not just our field. Humans want to do that.
That’s harder. So I know what we’re asking of people is existentially fraught, but it’s still needed. So good.
And what an important inquiry for therapists? Yeah. An important inquiry for therapists. Yeah.
You just backed us out real far, and I am so appreciative with a cackle in my voice. I’m talking about mortality, and I just come to life is the irony of, well, it’s truth, right? And there’s just something beautiful about truth, even if truth is yeah. Marshall, I really can’t thank you enough for this conversation, for being a voice for this topic, for everything that you are doing.
You also have a handful of things coming up related to this topic as well. Would you share with our listeners what you have in the works? Sure, yeah. If you go to my website, I do have a few conferences I’m speaking at coming up in the fall.
For the most part. This year, I’ve not been doing traditional work. I’ve taken a year off from practice and providing consultation at my training center in Austin.
That’s an Expressive Arts Place. I’m mostly just doing retreats for healers, using poetry, using sand, using clay, primarily to look at our own connections to our bodies, to our way of thinking. So all of the retreats this year that I’m doing for healers, every one of them is at least indirectly looking at the legacy of ableism on the way we think and move.
But there are some coming up later in the year. They’re going to be specifically about counteracting internalized ableism and what are some practices that you could implement. And that’s for people who identify as able or disabled.
I keep those retreats really small, and so I know it can be hard to get a spot, but if I have one that fills up and there’s a waitlist, I’ll just offer another section of it. But then also there’s kind of a secret project that hopefully by the time this podcast comes out, I will have been able to send out an email to people on my list about. But there is kind of a bigger scope project I’ve been working on for several months, and we’re just about ready to make the formal announcement.
And it’ll be something that therapists or healers in general, but as well as clients who are trying to either feel understood because of their own disability or address the way that they love people with disabilities, it’s going to be an ongoing resource that will be shining a light on these things and inviting people into dialogue. So stay tuned. The best way to come to know about those things is just to hop on my website and get on the email list because I don’t currently have social media or any traditional easy way to find me.
And it’s at Marshalls.com. That’s right. Oh, goodness, my friend, I’m hugging you through the computer right now.
It’s been good to chat with you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, lovely to spend this time with you listeners.
I hope that you enjoy that conversation as much as I did. At minimum, I hope you’re thinking and it’s got you considering. And I really invite you to take Marshall’s suggestion to heart, which is to back way up and imagine.
Put yourself in the mind and the bodies of your clients as they are making their way to you for services and what might their experience be like and what might you need to do or shift so that they feel seen and like, that’s a place that they are very welcomed. So wherever you are in the world, take care of yourself. There’s a lot happening in the world these days.
I keep hearing more and more how tired therapists are. The exhaustion level is no joke. It seems like right now for clinicians.
So clinicians, you stay true to you. Do what you need to do for you. Care for your hearts.
Care for your minds. Care for your bodies. You are the most important toy in the playroom. Until next time.
