On Play Therapy & Being A Little Wild
By Anna Kim, ASW
In my second year of clinical training, I worked with kids and families. In that setting, a lot of my work was play therapy, which means that I sat on the stained, wall-to-wall carpeted floor of my windowless internal office, and my clients and I made up stories about the hodgepodge collection of dinosaurs, figurines, and miniature furniture that filled several bins on a bookshelf in the corner. The work happened through metaphor, through stories.
When overwhelming, scary things happen to kids, especially when they’re young, they don’t have the language or the cognitive processing capacity to sit down and talk it out. They can’t tell you how something has impacted them, or how it plays out in their current relationships.
A six-year-old client and I were once talking about the building where we met for weekly sessions. I told her how many floors there were, and made another offhand comment, using the name of the mental health agency that operated the clinic. She scrunched up her nose and said after a pause, “I thought this was Therapy?”
She thought the building we were in was called Therapy.
“In play therapy, monsters can be vanquished, adults can show up at just the right moment, magic can happen. There is no limit to the healing possibilities of the imagined world.”
And for her, it was. For kids, some words are not yet informed with all the layers of collective meaning. For the rest of the day I imagined our agency removing the sign out front, and replacing it with one that read only: Therapy.
Kids play. Kids imagine. Their ideas for stories are deeply influenced by their experiences and what they have witnessed. But it is play—that plastic, malleable medium—that allows them to introduce new ideas and new stories, and to change what happened in the old ones.
In play therapy, monsters can be vanquished, adults can show up at just the right moment, magic can happen. There is no limit to the healing possibilities of the imagined world.
In my work with adults, I’ve found that it’s less acceptable to play or to imagine. Adults come to their sessions and know that it’s therapy. They’ve read the sign outside. Not only that—they have an idea about what therapy is, and what they’re supposed to say. Adults struggle to put their internal experience into words, but rarely imagine a trap door, or hide under a chair, pretending they are lost in the jungle.
But if you’re under the chair, lost in the jungle, you don’t have to find the words to say: “I’m out here alone, and it feels really far away.”
Your therapist doesn’t have to say something that connects aloneness to your past experience.
When you get lost in the jungle, the people who care for you come looking. They get worried and call you on the satellite phone and say that they miss you when you’re not around. Even if the connection is bad, it somehow clears up for the part when they say: “I wish you’d come back.”
And, just like magic, you can.
Anna Kim is an Associate Clinical Social Worker, a writer, and an adventurer. Anna works with individuals, intimate relationships, families, and groups to support growth and change. She is especially interested in grief & loss, identity & authenticity, and attachment, but appreciates all the infinite, complicated parts of being alive.
Anna can also be contacted directly at anna@kindman.co