Play Therapist podcast is raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic. Discussing mental health from a play therapy specialization, including trends, treatment approaches and techniques, theory, and the business of psychotherapy practice. Get ready to learn and play with your host, licensed clinical social worker and registered play therapist supervisor, Althea T. Simpson. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chronicles of a Play Therapist.
I am your host, Althea T. Simpson, licensed clinical social worker and registered play therapist supervisor. I am the founder of Brighter Day Therapeutic Solutions, which is a trauma-informed psychotherapy practice in Woodbridge, Virginia, and the founder of Unicorn Life Play Therapy Training. Today's topic is all about attachment.
It's unrealistic to make children the change agents in their family. especially when they are the least powerful. So as therapists, we must address the important relationship of parent-child to help parents become the therapeutic agents of change. So today, I will be talking about attachment-focused play therapy with traumatized children and their families with Kathy Spooner, licensed clinical social worker, registered play therapist supervisor, and author of Attachment-Focused Family Play Therapy.
An Intervention for Traumatized Children and Adolescents. And the link to the book will be in the show notes. So you can just click that and order a copy. Kathy, how are you? And thank you.
Welcome to Chronicles of a Play Therapist. I appreciate you being here. So can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Kathy, the social worker, the registered play therapist, the author, whatever you would like to share with us. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
And I always like talking to Althea. So I am a registered therapist supervisor and LCSW. I've been, I'll be honest, the first time, this is going to age me a little bit. First time I found out about play therapy, I was working in Fairfax County.
I was a special education teacher working with elementary age. children who were in a self-contained special ed class for children with emotional disturbance. And at the time, like this was back in the early mid eighties, we had a school social worker and a school psychologist. They were part-time and I was the teacher and the school, both of them were doing this thing called play therapy in their offices.
And they would be so excited about it. They would come. So I'm like in my.
I think I'm in my mid-20s and kind of clueless. They would come and get kids from my class one at a time and do this play therapy thing in their office. I will never forget one time, this one little boy, they took him in their office, a school psychologist, and then they did something. And she came and showed me.
She was so excited about what he did with the blocks. And she was looking at it like it was the most amazing thing. And I'm looking at it thinking, I have no idea what that is. But it really was my first introduction.
It was also right around the time that Bruno Bettelheim came out with the book called Uses of Enchantment. And the school psychologist and I did groups together using fairy tales based on the uses of enchantment. And so we did a group with my class and she would narrate the fairy tale. She picked out the fairy tale based on the metaphor in the fairy tale, and then we would act it out. I was always the evil adult and like I got stuffed in burning ovens.
I like I was always the evil adult that they had to overcome. So mind you, I'm also their teacher. So I was the one with the power and authority in the classroom.
I was the one doing the disciplining, doling out their points so they could earn special privileges. And the thing that. got me so hooked about play therapy back in the 80s was seeing the change. that happened in my relationship with the kids and their interactions with me.
It strengthened our relationship. And that from there set me on a course to find out about this play therapy thing. I got my master's degree.
And for the longest time, I could now, mind you, this was also before the internet, I could not find anybody who knew about play therapy. And I have always wanted to work with kids. Since I was little, I was one of those kids who knew I wanted to work with kids and families and help in the healing process. It wasn't until about 2001, so it was a long time, before I finally found somebody that knew about plague therapy.
And then she kind of set me on my course at the time to get the training and then eventually become a... registered plate therapist supervisor. Wow. And it's so amazing because you set me on my course. And so I just thought about this when you were talking and I was like, well, maybe I should mention this, that you were my first plate therapy supervisor.
And so I didn't know about plate therapy until 2011. So I switched over from business to social work and I started out working at a... what do you call it? MST, multisystemic family therapy company.
And I was there for a minute and it was just like, yeah, this doesn't match up with what I want to do because the population, not saying that MST isn't effective because it is, but it's so rigid. They wanted you to do it exactly the way the model was developed, which wasn't working for inner city kids, right? Or inner city families. So I was like, and I just kept bumping up against the truth.
you know, bumping heads, bumping heads with the supervisors because, you know, it just wasn't working and I was doing things differently and they saw that I was getting the results. But when we did our team meetings and all of that stuff, and it was like, you're not following the model. So after bumping heads so much with that, I was like, okay, maybe this is not the environment for me to work in.
And so then I got connected to a community mental health organization and I always did creative based activities. with my clients. And it was not mainly because I was like, okay, I don't want to just be sitting here looking at them.
They looking at me, let me see if I can just engage them. So I was intentional about the games that I chose and why. I had no clue until I left that organization four and a half years later, go to social services. And so social services had this budget no one was using for training. And so...
Play therapy training came up and they was like, we were invited to this. We need someone to go. And no one wanted to go. And they was like, well, Althea, since you're the new person, you're going to go. And when I got to the training, it was you.
You were the trainer. That's so funny. Yes, you were the trainer. And it was like, wow. After the training, I was like, wow, this is real.
There's a name to what I've been doing all of these years. And I didn't know about it. And immediately after the training, I walked up to you.
I don't know if you remember that. I remember that. I walked up to you.
It was like, look, this just made a connection to what I've been doing all of these years. It made a connection. And I'm ready to become a registered play therapist.
Do you have any openness as a supervisor? And that's how you became my supervisor. That's so funny.
And so that was back in 2011. And the great thing about it is I think I came in. Like about a few weeks before you and your team was getting ready to do a 12-week case-based study. Oh, yeah.
With Dr. Bruce Perry on the neural sequential model, you know, which is really a structured assessment approach to organize a child's history and their current functioning by looking at their primary problems, identifying, you know, their key strengths and applying interventions that's helpful. for the family and other professionals to best meet the needs of the child. So that was the most intriguing training, even to this day. One, to be doing it with Dr. Bruce Perry. But two, as a new play therapist or on my journey to become a play therapist, just week in, I got to sit down and do this with you.
And it has always made me remember that in working effectively with traumatized children, it's... Working with the family is vital for the healing and recovery. It takes training and practice.
I was like, oh my goodness, to let that be my first experience of trauma training to become a registered play therapist. Yeah, that's awesome. That's a really, I love using that framework to think about the neuro-sequential model of therapeutics because he really does take the whole brain in mind and the developmental aspect of... when the trauma occurred and how it affects the brain and using that information to determine what kind of treatment approach and treatment interventions are going to be more effective.
Absolutely. And I believe assessment and psychoeducation is extremely important. And, you know, and I think that's a step that a lot of mental health professionals that they miss that assessment piece, right? Sometimes it's so quick to jump into treatment, especially when they learn a new technique.
And this is a podcast that's for mental health professionals. And that's why making this point is like, we have to take the time to do the assessment. Yes, assessment is throughout the treatment process and the stages of treatment, but we have to do that initial assessment. And when you're working with traumatized children, Or even adults, because, you know, I love doing play therapy with adults as well.
But you have to do that trauma assessment, adding those trauma questions into that assessment, because most clients don't realize what trauma is. You know, trauma is anything that upsets your ability to cope. And so people think of trauma as going to war or, you know. sexual abuse or physical abuse, something like that, but trauma is individualized.
And therefore, I think it's important for us to do that trauma assessment. I do a trauma assessment on every client that comes through my practice, every client, because making those connections to what's going on in their life, they may not know that they had been traumatized. So I believe assessment. But working with children, traumatized children, the psychoeducation, I think that's extremely important with families, children and families.
So I do psychoeducation with my children and families in their sessions because it is, you know, the brain is affected and trauma becomes imprinted in that child. So I talk to parents and the child about that. I talk to parents about how they can support.
support their children, because some parents can be dismissive of the effects that the trauma has on a child, whether it's their own stuff or they just don't know or they're too busy, but being dismissive of it. But I also tell parents that they don't have to let their kids give them a pass on their negative behaviors. And it's important to set boundaries and limits for their children, because a lot of parents that I work with let their children run amok. because, you know, of the guilt of what happened to the child.
And so you don't have to let them run amok. They don't get a pass for those behaviors. It's important to engage in some type of disciplinary practices.
What are your thoughts about that? And how would you work with parents of traumatized children in this type of space where they don't have any type of disciplinary structure because of what happened to the child? Yeah, that's a really good question. And as you were talking, I was thinking part of that question involves also making sure when you're doing the assessment to gather information about the parent's history.
It's been my experience that parents who have kids who have been traumatized through abuse, neglect, or things like that, it's not uncommon they have their own trauma histories. Right. So part of the parenting process is understanding when their trauma gets triggered and shuts them down from being more effective in their parenting.
I also think about it from an attachment standpoint, meaning attachment is about becoming attuned with your child and their emotional needs. It's also about structuring. having structure and flexibility. So structuring is those boundaries, doing the discipline. And the way that I think about discipline is it's about teaching your child.
Punishment is about inflicting something unpleasant so they'll stop doing the behavior. Discipline is about teaching them. to internalize control, make connections between their actions and the consequences or outcomes of those actions, to learn from it, to be able to be more effective in their relationships and in life in general. I think also with kids who've gone through trauma, we need to make sure to help parents understand. one, their own parenting and attachment and trauma histories so that they can identify where theirs might get triggered and shut them down.
And then from there, also being able to be tuned with their child to be able to figure out what's going on with them. And then they make the decisions around, do I need to structure or do I need to be a little more flexible? Like for instance, If a child's been sick and cranky, maybe it's more about not feeling well than about them being defiant.
So you would approach this situation differently with a child maybe who didn't get enough sleep or who's hungry. You're going to want to make sure they maybe take a nap or do some kind of quiet calming activity or get some food versus a child who's asserting their independence and not so. helpful ways, being a little more willful. Yes.
And I think that that's a, first off, thank you for talking about the difference between punishment and discipline, because a lot of parents don't understand that. And from doing supervision, because I am a registered play therapy supervisor, but I'm also licensed clinical social worker supervisor. And some of my supervisees don't understand the difference between discipline and punishment.
So it's difficult for them to, you know. teach that difference to the parents. But as you were talking, I was thinking about my primary population is children in foster care. And even doing this work with the parents, the foster parents, helping them to understand that punishment and discipline is different. And you taking everything from a kid, that stuff doesn't mean anything to them, you know, because they probably didn't have it when not saying that they got appreciative of it.
But if they didn't have it before they came into foster care, you taking away a video game or whatever you purchased for them or Department of Social Services purchased for them and you taking it away, that's not going to change that behavior. I find that a lot of foster parents miss the attuning part, tuning with these kids, and they think that, oh, they came out of these horrific situations. And so I'm providing them a roof over their head.
I'm giving them food that they didn't have before. And they should just do what I say and everything should be okay. But then when the kid, like you said, they may not even be feeling well, or they could be thinking about their family. They're just so in not being with their family.
There are just so many things that they could be thinking about. And it's not that they are trying to be defiant. And I find that a lot of foster parents.
they don't get it either, end up doing that work with them as well, trying to get them to develop an attachment to the child, be attuned to what the child needs. Yeah, I think that's one of the main points that parents have a hard time with understanding, and foster parents as well. And I would include in there if you are a parent who's gone from foster care to adoption, like adopting older. children.
I worked in a residential facility out here on the West Coast where the treatment was for adopted youth. And that, I think one of the kind of feed into that is if I just give them love, that should fix everything. And while that is important and critical, it doesn't fix everything because you got to help essentially rewire. Some of their attachment, I'll call them malfunctions, because their threat is always on alert.
And that's part of understanding and doing that attunement, especially when you're talking about kids who have been in foster care, is first and foremost. Figuring out what is underneath that behavior, that's the attunement piece, getting to know the child and kind of how they work, so to speak, reading their cues. And then from there, you can figure out what they need because they do need the structure.
They need to be able to inhibit behavior. They need to be able to think about the impact of their behavior on others because if they don't get that piece. the kids don't want to play with them.
And then you've got not only, you know, the trauma that occurred in their home before they were placed in foster care. Now you've got that additional wounding and rejection from peers who don't want to play with them. Yes, absolutely. And then even with biological, thinking about biological parents and their raising, they have to essentially learn how to reparent their traumatized child.
And they get frustrated, they get angry. And I think we have to normalize that for parents, but also helping them to get to a place where they can emotion regulation and co-regulation and attachment. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, that's it.
That is a key thing is helping children to regulate their emotions. And if you think about the role of co-regulation in the attachment process to help children regulate. So regulating their emotions has to do with one, figuring out what triggered it, how to help them calm down their threat system that just got activated, what it's going to take to calm that down.
And the parent co-regulation piece is being the... calm, steady force, so to speak, in that process for the child, the parent becomes like the anchor. And if you think about like mirror neurons and that being able to visually see, you're going to hear the parents, you're going to look at their facial expressions, you're going to look at their body language, you're going to... feel the touch, all of those things get communicated to the child. So if the parent, it's not about being a perfect parent because that's set up for failure.
Absolutely. It's about being good enough. Thank God, because my children would be a disaster. So I always had to remind myself, you just have to be good enough. You just have to be good enough.
You don't have to be perfect. You know, whenever I would blow it, that would have to go through the repair process. Oh my God.
You just said a key thing is the repairing. And I teach parents that we are not perfect. And I know that the school of thought, how we were taught was that you don't share with clients. It's not a personal relationship, but sometimes, and that's why I'm just my authentic self. And it's like, and I'm very transparent when it helps the client.
And- Sometimes our clients need to hear that we are human too. And it's like, especially around that. And I think that this is what makes me such an effective therapist, especially when in the area of trauma is because I raised my three nephews. I went from at 31 years old, I went from zero kids to three kids that was six, seven and 11. Wow.
And there were some times that I was like, and I wasn't even in the mental health field. I was in the business world then. Wow. It wasn't until two years later that I went to social work schooling, but I'm glad that I did because it started opening up an explanation of what I was dealing with my nephews and their behaviors.
But there were some days that I was like, look, just leave it away from me. Don't say anything to me. So normalizing that with the parents that just because you feel this way doesn't mean you don't love your child. And I think the parent shaming and the parent guilt to parents in there.
But I think it's important. And even as a therapist, you don't have to say, oh, I experienced this. But you can kind of normalize those experiences and those thoughts and those feelings for parents. Me, no, I went through this.
I want you to know that. I went through this because you regard me as an authority. And there is a power differential whether therapists want to think of that or not or believe it or not in that therapist-client relationship.
But the work that I was able to do with families when I gave them that piece, they're like, okay, so. She's not perfect. She just told me this story.
Some of them looked at me with a side eye. I think that's so important. So I'm glad that you said that.
Yeah, I think that is really important because we as a therapist, we're the therapeutic agents of change in the sessions. And we're part of that journey with our clients in order to help the parents become the therapeutic agents of change. Thank you so much. in their family system, they need to be able to have that trust relationship with us as a therapist that we're not going to judge them, that we get it, that we're human beings.
I'm comfortable self-disclosing about my own parenting, you know, within reason. I have some funny parenting stories because I was getting myself off the fly. And it was like something to pop in my head, kind of like how I do play therapy, like with activities, something to pop in my head.
And I'm like, OK, let me see if this will work, because what I'm doing is not working. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think when parents see that we're human beings, you know, because they come in, it's that power differential. I can't tell you how many times people have, you know, like on my side of the room, I look like the perfect person.
from them on their side of the room, which couldn't be further from the truth. So being able to create that therapeutic relationship with the parents, I think you have to figure out, one, as a therapist, where's your comfort level with self-disclosure? Yes.
What information you share? What is the reason that you shared? And I think that's something that comes with time and experience. Like early on, I wouldn't have done it because I was just trying to figure out how to be a therapist to begin with. But I think as you go along and you gain more training, experience, and knowledge, that you figure that out.
And it does help to build that bridge with the parents because they're going to rely on you to help them figure out how to navigate it. You know, like you were saying, taking on... you know, bringing in three kids and having an instant larger family expanding beyond you and not being in the mental health field. You are, you're figuring it out on the fly. And to be able to have a therapeutic support person helping you to navigate that is going to require trust with the parents.
They need you to be that anchor for them to help them figure it out because it's hard. Parenting traumatized kids is hard. Yes, it is. And you mentioned something that is really important.
When you said the training, you know, it'll come with the training and the knowledge. And what I find is that what we do, and I think for mental health professionals, or you're thinking about coming into the mental health profession, this profession is expensive because the training is expensive. The supervision is expensive. And then even after you finish your residency, your training hours to take that exam, it's still expensive.
We still need some sort of supervision or consultation because that's how you learn that. OK, yes, this is what the book said, but the book printed in 1969, 1972 that you're learning from. And what we do is relational.
And I always say that what we do is relational. But to learn these things that it's OK to disclose for the purpose of the client and knowing what to disclose, that just opened up for I know for some of my supervisees, they were like, what? It's OK.
That's not what the books say. That's not what we're taught in school. And it's important so that training and I know a lot of mental health professionals because it's expensive.
They find like inexpensive trainings just to get their CEs to renew their licensure. But is that effective for you as a professional? And is that going to translate in the work you need to do with your clients? Yeah, I think that's an excellent point.
Because I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to trainings, and I think of 17 different scenarios for the same thing. And to me, that's where... Not only the training, also the supervision consultation helps to figure out how to take the information learned and apply it in real time.
Because you have to do that clinical decision-making process in real time on the fly. So having a framework in mind, I'm a huge proponent of having a framework. to help you navigate through that clinical decision-making process, which, you know, like in my mind, you just demonstrated that by what you said a few minutes ago.
You're in the session with the child. You're noticing this isn't hitting the targets I was hoping it to hit. I got to change things up. What are the issues that I'm dealing with here?
I'm dealing with trauma. So I know this about trauma. I know this about play therapy.
I know this about this specific kind of. play therapy model, that one would probably be, let me try that in here. But you've got to have that basic structure, I think, to be able to navigate that more effectively.
Yes, definitely. And speaking of frameworks, can you talk a little bit about the skills framework for creating family space? Yeah. So I'm a foundationally trained DBT. This will actually will fit together.
DBT, dialectical behavior therapy. So I've been foundationally trained. One of the things I really, really like about DBT is the skills focus and they use acronyms to help remember the skills. So as I was thinking about creating this framework for using attachment focused family play therapy, in my mind, especially since we're teaching these skills to parents, Being able to give them like a structure and a framework using acronyms to help them remember what it is the skills are focused on.
So family space. So it's kind of two things, family space and also the three R's of relationship. To me, those go hand in hand.
So family space is focused on attachment. theory and now we have more understanding of neurobiology of attachment and Daniel Siegel did probably the most well-known about the interpersonal neurobiology, his mind site model. So family space is creating stronger attachment, positive, secure attachments within the family with parents, but also first with siblings.
I'm a huge proponent. Making sure that we're working on the sibling relationships. I feel like in a lot of attachment models, the siblings get left out of things. And I think they play a key role in our development as human beings. And I don't mean to interrupt, but I don't want to forget this.
But when I was a community, because I'm grounded in community-based interventions, that's where I started. I still do it. But when I was working in the homes.
I would incorporate, you know, like you have the identified child and when you're doing this work, but you have the siblings and they like sitting around or they keep interrupting because they want to be a part of it. And I would bring them in because what I found too, that sometimes the kids would start having behavioral problems just so that I could become their therapist. And I would be like, no, let's back that up. Right.
They may not get me as your therapist, but let's just incorporate you, of course, with the permission of the parents. But we have to work in the system. So I would bring the siblings into the sessions as well. One, so, you know, they wouldn't start developing these behaviors and, you know, not get the outcome that they want. But it was important for them to be a part of it, too, because there is sibling conflict.
So I just wanted to say that. I'm sorry for interrupting you, but I know my mind would have forgotten to go back. to that. I totally get that.
It happens to me all the time. Yeah. Well, the other thing about that, making sure that adding the siblings is because once you get one part of the system stabilized, the system... takes time to integrate in their new dynamic, the healthier dynamic.
So I find in family systems, different kids will pop the symptoms. So maybe they brought in one child as the identified patient, that child gets stabilized, and then another child starts popping symptoms. So for family space, like I said, it's based on the attachment and the neurobiology. So The S is structure and flexibility. We need to be able to provide structure within the family.
We don't want it to be rigid. So if you have no structure or an overly rigid structure, both those end of the spectrum do not help create those healthy attachments in children. And we know from research that children with secure attachments tend to be more resilient. in life. And to me, that's the goal, creating resilient people.
And then the next one, well, one, because I'm a play therapist. In my work with children, which kind of goes back to the 80s, if being playful with kids is the key to building relationship. I always used to tell people, I still tell people when I supervise them, how do you build a relationship with adults? By talking.
That's how you build it with them. How do you build relationship with kids? By playing.
Children will engage with you more easily when you're playful with them. Even teenagers, using more of a playfulness helps to engage them. Coming to therapy is hard. And if we can use some playfulness in just our whole way of being with kids, in addition, you know, like this is play therapy, and it's an attachment family play therapy model. So we're going to integrate in the therapeutic powers of play in the interventions.
So it's kind of both of those things. The other one, the A, is more based on a lot of the research we're finding out about mindfulness and the healing aspect of being able to increase kind of a mindful presence in the moment. So the A stands for being...
aware. So being aware, reading the cues and tapping into, I call it like tapping into our resonance circuits that Daniel Siegel talks about, which is basically the way that I look about those, think about those has to do with my ability to be attuned. So I'm aware what's going on in my body.
I'm aware of what seems to be going on in the bodies of the person that I'm working with. And I have to be. present, fully present in the moment with them. My mind can't be focused on the next client or feeling bad about the argument I had with my child earlier that day, or all the paperwork I have to get done and all the things I have to accomplish.
I need to be fully present in that moment in order to also engage those awareness skills. And the C is curiosity. I find that I've always called this my Columbo mode. I don't know if you guys...
I love Columbo. Yes, isn't he awesome? My family has like, when there's a Columbo Marathon, everybody texting everybody saying, hey, did you know Columbo Marathon is on? Yes. I've always called it my Columbo mode.
It's, he's unassuming. He just kind of asks a lot of questions, like he doesn't understand. Irritating as hell, like you can be with parents sometimes. And kids. Yes.
And kids, yeah. So the curiosity piece also helps me not think I know everything. Helps me to stay away from being prejudging. So the curiosity, it is about, one, it's less intense and intimidating way of being present in the moment. Right.
If I'm just curious, you know, like I'm curious what was going on in your mind when this happened, you know, or I noticed that you got really angry when your mom asked you that question. I'm just curious what was going on in your mind or not that your mom said it, but what do you think your mom meant when she said that? And it helps to invite them.
to share as much or as little as they're comfortable sharing in the moment. Which brings me to the next one, which is empathy. That's the E, empathy and acceptance. Acceptance. And this is one of the things that I love about DBT.
DBT does an acceptance and change framework. That's one of the dialectics. And a dialectic is two things.
Essentially, two things can be true at the same time. So the acceptance part is in DBT, we're doing the best that we can at any moment in time. And I love that.
And then the change part is, and we can always do better. So if I can be accepting that my client is doing the best, best that they can in that moment, in this phase of their life, then it also helps me to have more empathy. And the empathy is what helps to create that safe space of feeling understood.
I don't necessarily have to agree that the way that they're going about it is effective. It's not about that. If I'm accepting they're doing the best that they can in the moment, I can have empathy.
with them about how difficult it is to parent a traumatized child and deal with behaviors that make absolutely no sense to the rational human being. Like, why does my child have to lie to me? I've told them over and over, I'm going to love them no matter what.
So why does my child keep lying to me? Well, my child keeps lying to me because something in them doesn't feel safe enough to share and they're fearful of something. And if we can figure out what that is, we can begin that process.
So that's the family space. To me, the family space is about the how we are teaching parents to be in relationship with their kids. And then the three R's of relationship are, I call them the what.
What do we do? So... The first R is a concept called reflexive communication.
It uses a little bit of that curiosity, being aware, being present, empathy and acceptance and those things in the moment. So with reflexive communication, it's kind of a back and forth. Like for instance, if my child is reactive every time I ask them to go clean their room and they throw...
this big giant fit that makes absolutely no sense. Reflexive communication is kind of engaging them in the process to have a dialogue with you to figure out what is going on with them. So I can say, you know, Sammy, I noticed when I asked you to go clean your room, I noticed you get really upset about that.
And I'm just curious what that is. And so Sammy says back, you're always making me clean my room. You don't make anybody else clean your room.
It's not fair. I don't like it. You're mean. So then the parent all in the moment. So it sounds like you're really upset when I ask you to clean your room because you feel like it's not fair that I ask you to do that.
And yeah, you're not fair. It's not fair that you make me do it. Nobody else has to do it.
You're mean. So then the parent kind of responds, it sounds like this is really hard for you. And I'm wondering what it is about cleaning your room that is really hard, like, because you get really upset about it.
So I'm just trying to understand. So you go back and forth like that. It may take a little bit of time.
And I think that's the hardest part is just kind of realizing I need to be going back and forth with my child. I use a lot of validation. empathy and understanding in the moment and helping to invite them to clarify.
Because really one of the things that I want to get at with the reflexive communication is there's a concept called mentalization. It's also called reflective functioning. And it is basically the meaning we're making of a situation based on our experiences and understanding from previous life experiences.
And these all get stored in our minds, in our memories, even implicit memory, which is memory that's stored without language. So it'll get activated through our senses. So I may see something or smell something and it might trigger a memory of something. And if that memory is a positive memory and has positive associations with it, then I'm probably going to stay calm.
If it's got really negative and upsetting, hurtful, dangerous associations with it, then it's probably going to trigger my threat response. So I'm really trying to figure out what that story is in their head about the situation. And the only way I can do that is by being empathetic and attuned with them and have that give and take in the situation.
And then the next R is regulate your emotions. As parents, we have got to regulate our emotions. And one of my favorite skills with DBT, dialectical behavior, is called wise mind.
So wise mind is about recognizing our emotions in emotion mind, using logic mind, which is just logic, just the facts, consequences, cause and effect. And then wise mind is the synthesis of both of those, bringing out both of the positive aspects of those two states of mind. and using them for wise mind to help me navigate through a situation using wisdom. And so I need to be able to regulate my emotions. I like using the idea of I need to access wise mind.
So it'll help me regulate my emotions through the process. Because regulating your emotions as a parent is key. That's the co-regulation piece. My kids aren't going to regulate their emotions unless I regulate my emotions to help. navigate them through that.
Yeah. Sometimes I think it's important for parents to take their own time out before addressing with their children. Yes, absolutely. And then the third R is repair any relationship ruptures. Like we've mentioned earlier, we've got to go back in and initiate the repair process, which goes back to the thing you said from the very beginning, the children can't be the therapeutic agents of change.
The parents need to be therapeutic agents of change. And even as when you think about repairing, I know that, and I'm just transparent and I'm real about how I practice. I talked about this.
That's why I don't record any of my training live because no one will replay what I say. But I think it's important for the therapist to repair as well. Yeah. don't always say the right thing. We cannot be arrogant and say, well, I'm the therapist and what I say is law, no matter how it affects the parent or the child or any client.
And so it is important for the therapist to do the repairing as well. And I know I've had to repair sessions and the client is like, okay, it's fine. Let's go.
No, let's talk about it because I want to make sure that we're okay moving forward. Absolutely. Yep. Definitely. Yeah.
So, but can you talk a bit about, because you mentioned safety. So can you talk for a few minutes, talk about establishing safety within the relationship and what that looks like for traumatized children and their families? Yeah.
And that for me, using that mindful kind of neuroscience based presence where I'm empathic, where I'm attuned, where I... I'm fully present in the moment and I'm picking up on their cues. That's going to help me know when to back off or when they're open to me inviting them into the change process.
I've really, that's the pacing piece of the therapy process as well. Because if I go too fast and I am not reading their cues about this is making me really uncomfortable, then they are not going to be able to engage in the moment. So Stephen Porges calls it that we have these neuroception circuits.
So the neuroception circuits are involved in helping my brain to recognize threat. Because we're wired to stay alive. First and foremost, we are wired to stay alive. We get wired to stay alive. Those circuits start forming in utero.
And the very first circuits that come online after birth are the ones that use a lot of our sensory input, like facial expressions, voice tone, touch. Is it a soft touch or is it a rough touch? Because... Babies require their caregiver in order to keep them alive. So those circuits are really, really important and come on early in our development.
We cannot engage our social engagement circuits until the threat has been assessed and then the threat circuits get turned off. So we can't engage in relationship. Unless we're feeling safe.
And in order to feel safe, that's going to vary, especially with traumatized children. Their threat circuits are going to be... on duty all of the time.
And so to establish that sense of safety, we need to be able to cue in to what their cues that they're giving us. How close in proximity can I be to you? I once had a little kid. You guys have probably had these too. Like there was one little boy.
Well, there's a few to be honest. They would sit on the other side of the playroom, backs turned to me, whispering, as they're playing out the toys and ordering me to sit on the other side of the room. So guess what I did? I sat on the other side of the room and I didn't talk.
I just watched because if I'm in child-centered play therapy mode and I do the tracking, I would get yelled at to stop it. That's a child's way of saying to me, I don't need you to do that right now. I don't trust you. I don't know who you are. I'm not ready to invite you in.
You need to stay over there in order for me to stay safe. So what that says to me is the trust building process is going to take a little longer than usual. And I've got to go at that child's pace in order to have those threat circuits disconnected so they can do the social engagement with me. Yes. So, and a lot of what we do as therapists is help clients to develop, you know, their feelings.
vocabulary to communicate their emotions and their, by labeling emotions and also making that connection to the thoughts and behaviors. And we have to help them to identify emotional triggers and as well as their emotional needs. So I think that what we do is so important, especially working with traumatized children and their families.
We have to make sure that we are up to speed on necessary techniques, theories. And, you know, just all around being relational in what we do and relating to our clients. So Kathy, how can the listeners get in contact with you?
I have a website. That's one way they can go on the website. There's some trainings, there's some information.
The website is RRH. So that's like Robert Robert House, rrhcounseling.com. They can also email me, kathyspooner at gmail.com.
Those are two ways. How can they find your book? My book is being published by Rutledge Publishers. So if they go on the Rutledge website, Rutledge is spelled R-O-U-T-L-E-D-G-E.
Pretty sure that's how it's spelled. And they type in my name, Kathy Spooner. And Kathy is spelled C-A-T-H-I.
I like Indian, Kathy Spooner, then it'll pull up my book. Yes, or you all can just Google attachment-focused family play therapy and Kathy's book will come up. It popped right up. So, and it also again, be in the show notes. So thank you so much, Kathy, for joining me on the Chronicles of a Play Therapist informational podcast.
I am your host Althea T. Simpson. Thanks for playing and until next time, play well.