foreign hi everyone welcome back to the next episode from the lessons from the playroom podcast um I have with me I'm gonna call her one of our Pioneers um in the field and I'm super honored and super excited to have our um our guest speaker join us today to speak about filial um therapy philial play therapy and if you don't know who I'm talking about already even buy a little introduction it is um Risa van Fleet um if for some reason you're not familiar with reset let me tell you a little bit about her and then we're gonna say hello and get this conversation um going so Risa is a licensed psychologist a registered um play therapist supervisor she's a certified dog behavior consultant and a certified animal ethology and behavior instructor she's written many many books um uh award-winning books actually animal assisted play therapy be the human half of dog training filial therapy strengthening parent-child relationships through play child-centered play therapy a parent's handbook filial therapy my guess uh listeners is that some of you actually have these books on your on your bookshelves um she works with children with families specializes in complex trauma and attachment disorders also medical issues that was a cool thing Risa that I learned about you relationship challenges even though she has such a specialization in working with animals we're going to save that we're going to hit everyone we're going to say that for another podcast down the road and have Risa back but for today we're gonna focus on her work with filial play therapy she's received 20 national International awards for her training and writing I really feel like I could just go on and on and on in this introduction um so let's just go ahead and do that introduction hi Risa wonderful to be here and I appreciate the opportunity yeah thank you so much so um filial therapy I mean when I think of that I think of you um I think of the the gurneys as well but I know that you really have taken um you'd learned directly from them and you're really the Pioneer with it now um in the in the world and so um let's let's talk about filial shall we sure so um because people I mean we're talking because we know what it is someone else may not be aware of what we're talking about will you lead us a little bit into your journey with the um the gurneys and then how how things have come to be what they are okay sure I'll try to be sure I tend to talk too much so I'll uh try to be uh succinct it's not I'm not a word that's usually associated with me um I was after my Master's Degree I worked for several years and mostly residential programs I was the head of a multi-county program a very large residential program uh for both children and adults uh and it was very behavioral in orientation the staff were great they really knew their stuff in terms of Behavioral interventions but I started watching the various residents and thought we're missing some things here mainly emotions and relationships and they had both I mean everybody has both so I decided I also had a part-time job doing some therapy on the side just very like 10 hours a week and I started getting marital therapy clients and I realized I didn't really know very much about marital therapy so a workshop came up with Bernard Gurney I went to it and I was so impressed and Bernie is known more now for the relationship enhancement uh family therapy set of set of interventions of which filial is apart but what really impressed me is we broke into small groups and we practice skills and people gave us individualized feedback I also really like the model which maybe we'll talk briefly about um but I just found it really resonated with me so I had decided to go back to school to get my doctorate I got into several clinical psych programs which were hard to get into and what I thought I wanted uh but I had applied to Penn State where Bernie was because I thought this guy has something that I'm interested in uh that feels like it's missing from a lot of the other things that people do in the in this field and so even though I got into the other programs I decided to go to Penn State specifically to study with Bernie um Bernard G Gurney Junior and uh I I went uh there I visited all the other schools but I decided they weren't quite what I was after and I did find out that I could be licensed as a psychologist if I jumped through a few extra Hoops along the way uh so that's why I chose to go there Bernie was uh I was assigned to him for my assistantship and you know helped him out with a lot of the uh relationships and enhancement courses he said you really ought to take my wife Louise's course on filial therapy my first reaction was that I had always loved kids but I had never thought about working with them other than like in the residential setting uh but he said well you know if you're going to be a family therapist you ought to know a little bit about kids so I did take her course and the reason I balked at it it was like a three semester course and then I knew that other students by the end you're running filial groups and it lasted more than three semesters so that was my I thought I was on a track more work with like people with serious mental illness um however I had my first child Center play therapy client which was supervised all the way through and I think about three sessions in it was like she was playing out her stuff already and I was so amazed at that so I eventually not avengers rather sudden switched over to looking much more at child and family kinds of interventions and research and all of that and so I got to study a whole lot with Louise as well I think I'm one of the few remaining people there's a few others who have studied extensively with both Bernie and Louise and they both brought different pieces to what filial therapy really is all about and I'm was very very fortunate Bernie died a few years ago Luis is still alive and I'm still in touch with her um but they were great mentors but what I really loved was I left that initial training feeling competent and you don't always get that when you go to grad school and I've heard that from many people so that started my journey on filial therapy and even when I was at Penn State still working on my doctorate Bernie had me teaching a faculty from other universities I got to travel back then and also helping out and training like the higher level students that were going through his courses as well so um I've had a lot of different experiences through the years I love just for me personally I love hearing that story that's something that I didn't I didn't know and it's just a really cool story to hear about how you how you came into it and um what a gift that you got to work directly with both of them what a what a really amazing a gift and then why you've now been able to do with the work so let's um let's define filial therapy for our for our listeners and um I had mentioned this to you before before we hit record on this I hear filial therapy the phrase thrown around like I do filial as if it's a catch-all phrase to if you ever work have a parent and a child together and it's like no that is not filial therapy philio therapy is a very specific model and so would you share with us what filial therapy actually is yeah um it's it's a little hard to convey because it's one of those things that unfolds in a practical sense I mean for years and even now and it's been I since the early 80s that I learned it um even now something will happen in a session I'll go oh they have that covered too you know there's still these Revelations about the method um the gurneys uh I'll try to again be shorter uh the grannies were both licensed uh either as you know doctoral level psychologists and they were trained in all the usual things at the time that they were younger um and Bernie got this idea in the 50s that you know played they both had learned play therapy and they actually really went through a whole process of looking at x line and you know picking things apart and they were both trained uh in a variety of things but humanism was also part of a humanistic theory was part of it and interpersonal theory was part of it and as they tease that apart and saw how well play therapy worked with children then Bernie had the idea first in the late 50s of if it works so well with us wouldn't it work even better with parents and at the time that that was a very radical way of thinking most of the literature and I've read quite a bit of it at that time said if your child has a problem the mother screwed up and you know thank goodness we're past that phase but we're not a hundred percent past the idea that came next to Bernie which is what if we made parents be the primary change agents for their own children under our supervision as therapists but what if we did that and there was a lot of backlash uh the very first article that came out in a peer-reviewed journal was 1964. there were a lot of people said who did the grannies think they are giving away important psychological knowledge to to parents who aren't going to be able to use it what was valuable about it is that propelled research being done and the granny said okay they say parents can't learn this stuff and so they did uh randomized controlled you know research where they had people that learned to code the play sessions and they had trained trained therapists and trained parents conduct and the the Raiders the coders were blind as to condition lo and behold no significant difference and you know the world has changed a lot but not that much I mean we they had the same problems and things that we have nowadays uh maybe in a slightly different form so that that pretty much said yeah and I think that study was replicated a couple times so they were able to say yeah parents can learn it they got a great big NIMH Grant and went on with it so what is filial therapy it is this idea of parents becoming the primary and that's an important word change agent for their own children and how do they do that they do it because we train them we supervise them to the point where they are very skilled and I too would say based on my clinical experience all these years most parents can become quite skilled because it's not that complicated to actually have the play sessions it is not training parents to be therapists that's one of the things I hear people making criticisms of that's not it at all we're still the therapist but we're helping parents implement this in their own situations it's not always what we use or what we would put in place first but it is always a core for just about everything I do not always but it's theoretically integrative so uh it involves uh run through the list quickly it's in my books and writings if you want to read more the first book I wrote about this was in 1994. it didn't have all this in it but the current volume does humanistic Dynamic behavioral cognitive interpersonal Developmental and attachment family systems and actually some community psychologies in there I think I got them all even though some of those were not in place back then so family therapy was just coming into its own in the early 60s uh cognitive therapy was still not not really developed yet but Bernie had that way of thinking he was the brilliant theoretical mind behind it and he found he said why don't we take the best of each of these theories make it more practical and put it together so the way we train the parents the way we interact with the parents has elements of all of these the way we do things with children or have the parents do things with children do as well and you might wonder why how does how did all these theories work together because if you look at the basic assumptions of psychodynamic and behavioral they're almost in opposition to each other and the reason that we can put them together and this was a brilliant part of it is filial therapy is not based on a medical model which most of our system still is it was based on a psycho-educational model and that basically assumes that most problems not all but most problems that we encounter come from a lack of skill on the part of the participants and if even if they have the skill and maybe they don't know how to apply it in new situations and so forth so uh even if you're looking at things I mean there's things with biological neurological other kinds of faces but sometimes those things are there we know they're intertwined now with behavior and so even those kind of things can actually be very responsive to filial but Bernie was you know it's kind of primarily the humanistic interpersonal family systems and developmental stuff that's in there the other theories uh play a part for example behavioral piece there are some behavioral pieces tooth uh child Center play therapy in that we have limits and boundaries and that kind of thing but it's also we use a lot of Behavioral interventions or ways of teaching parents the skills so we're going to teach the parents these skills we are going to watch them live for a number of sessions until they get really good at using these skills basically holding these non-directive play sessions um and then we will send them home to do it but we continue to supervise them nowadays we can do video and you know we got so many different things at our fingertips but back in the days even when I learned it back when we had three quarter inch VHS I mean I would Age myself but in my mind I'm still in my 40s and uh actually very uh blessed with good health too so what makes familial filial and I'm I'm being a little long-winded but it's helpful to know the background of this is there are some essential features and I do have those in the book I don't know if you want to go into those now but there are certain they're like seven I think different aspects of filial therapy that make it filial and there are other programs that are very valuable in their own right like cprt and so forth there's even a a shorter version that I've created and uh some other people I mean there's several but if they don't meet all seven of those criteria I don't think of them in the gurneys I don't think do either as being filial therapy they might be filial therapy inspired or filial therapy adapted or whatever so I think there are it's it's important for people to understand there's a lot of Elegance I guess I would say in taking all those theories and then translating them into what it really looks like in practice Yeah and maybe maybe we'll get into some of that but that's that it's it's all about from my behavioral point of view which is where I kind of started because that's what made the most sense to me when I was my master's program everything else felt a little bit like how do you know when to do what um behaviorally that we often say you know change the environment change the behavior and of course we're not in play therapy focused only on Behavior we want to focus on the whole child and the whole system uh and so filial to me is how we change the environment because otherwise you can do the best play therapy work in the world but if you don't help change that environment that the child is in day in and day out uh we can't really expect those changes to last I would love to go into the seven things that uniquely make something filial um before we do that will you clarify for our audience um is child centered the only model within a filial framework or is filial therapy something you can apply to other models because that's a question I hear a lot also so let's answer that one and then go into the if it's going to be filial it's got to have these seven things okay all right um if to be filial therapy to just call something philio therapy does mean that you're doing you're teaching the parents to have non-directive play sessions with their own kids and you're helping them understand once they get the skills to that you're helping them understand the play themes not maybe as in depth or uh whatever that we might go but we want them to understand their kids better so that's part of this and then also there going to have their own reactions so what happens is the kids will play in a particular way a lot of times they'll play out family themes and parents start to recognize that and go oh uh you know maybe they have the mother doll yelling at all the other vowels in the family and the mother my mother might be the one actually holding the play session that you're you know they're watching with her and the the live mother the real mother might be thinking oh my gosh he thinks I'm such a nag and doesn't like me and hates me and it could be very distressing and that's the other set of skills we need as physiotherapists is how to help parents uh and then that's where some cognitive therapy actually comes into into play like restructuring the way they're thinking about things um with with all of that but um but what filial therapy can be part of a bigger treatment plan so because of the population that I work with and have supervised a lot of other people working with sometimes there's reasons why we might not start with filial I do filial therapy right off the bat if I can but I can't all the time so sometimes we might need to start with some non-directive or even some more directive and that's a huge category of course as we know uh play therapy um just to kind of get the conditions maybe settled down from an emergency kind of place uh or help the parents get to the right place that they need to be in to do this or help the kids just I I've worked with a lot of kids that are truly I don't like the diagnosis the way it's written reactive attachment disorder but because they are challenging even to therapists you know that some of their behavior is pretty uh wild even in the playroom then sometimes we will first work with that and then we'll have the parents come in later interestingly I've seen this many times where the kids will put us through the ringer and they're just working on their trauma you know it's not like they're deliberately trying to make things hard for us it's just this is what their life has been and so they share that with us and we we can help kind of get them you know by listening and being empathic and understanding and maybe giving them some coping skills along the way uh to the point where their parents can eventually do the non-directive piece while maybe we continue with other types of interventions that they might need uh and what they do is they go back through uh some of the other stuff the the real trauma stuff with their parents but it's usually much shorter so yeah I'm trying to recap because I want to make sure that I'm hearing you correctly so there is the the filial therapy piece which is its own thing but what I'm hearing you say is it can be applied in the context of other therapeutic interventions or in other other Frameworks but one where getting down to actually doing the filial therapy piece it's a filial therapy piece am I getting that yeah that's what I've said so far and that helped me kind of remember the rest of your question too um the other part of it that I'll answer is the skills that we learn in filial uh and it's it it's really a huge emphasis on how we become collaborators with the parents and it's hard because so many of us don't have training of how to intervene with parents I know you've done a lot of work about parents as well um that sometimes we have such a negative attitude toward parents how do we shift that into understanding most of them are just doing the best they can and they don't have those skills or the ability to apply them and uh so we have to have a different attitude toward the parents so that the empathy skill you can use any intervention you're doing and especially with with parents there are other skills that are part of filial that you can use separately um in fact our analyst is the play therapy there's a lot of filial therapy in it but it's not filial therapy so I always call those other things where we're kind of it's a little bit looser uh not focusing so heavily on the actual play sessions that the parents are having with their kids but maybe some other play activities for their kids maybe they're not ready to be non-directive of their kids yet I call that filialesque we'll ask well it's like filial but it's not really Philly well that's a great segue into will you list off the seven um the seven things that are like no if we're doing filial therapy this is this is what we're doing yeah and this is a way you can kind of tell if it's really a filio therapy model or if it's one of the other uh derivatives maybe I'll I'll put it uh because you know there's a there's room in the world for all of these things so I'm not being critical of anything it's just this is how the Granny's conceived of it I've used filio therapy for all these decades and um I have not had to change hardly anything about it it's a very flexible model but then there's these are the things that make it itself and these came primarily from Bernie but also from Louise and then my own thinking but um it's not all my own it's just my own way of putting it the first one is there's a value on the importance of play and the play can serve a healing function developmental function you know all of those kind of things that play is a really really critical thing I won't go into the details because I'm probably preaching to the question anyway we all love clay interestingly I was interested in play long before I ever went to school by fair but I've been interested in animal play since uh the 70s so it's kind of and it's really there's so many parallels it's quite interesting um parents are empowered as the change agent so if we consult with parents but we're not actually asking them to be the change agent for their own child that we're not expecting and believing and that's the big part believing that they can be the main change agent because I think we all like doing play therapy we want to be the change agents but we can be the change agent for the family there being the change agent for their children so we're actually working through the parents with filial so the parents are empowered and it's very much an empowerment model again developed long before we started talking about resilience and empowerment and all of that kind of thing parents are empowered as the change agents and that requires a fair amount of us for some people I think it's very easy to say yeah I've I've worked with enough parents I understand they're really capable of this stuff for a lot of others there's a process you go through where you think I don't really believe parents can handle this stuff and we have to kind of you know sort that through my my my belief is with enough support and enough empowerment they can handle a lot but they really need us to be there to kind of help them through uh the third thing is the client and this runs kind of in the face of the way our whole system is set up for payment and everything uh the client is the relationship not the child not the parent so whenever you're doing filial even if it's in a bigger uh treatment plan uh the what you're thinking about is what's good for that relationship because if we can make that relationship between parent child or caregiver and child so it could be a foster parent we've done a lot of Foster to adopt programs where foster parents do filial all the way over to the adoptive parents then doing filial as they're getting acquainted with you kind of model um the client is the relationship so you're always looking at the not the parent not the child I mean you look at both of them but you're looking at the glue between them and so that helps you make a lot of decisions as you're going through about am I doing this for the child's sake you know so am I I'm the advocate for the child not in filial you're the advocate for the relationship and that has a lot of practical implications and I think that's a huge distinction for our listeners because so many listeners will bring a parent into the process to support the child's healing and I'm just hearing that that's a really important Nuance for listeners to I get to determine are we actually being filial or not if it's really if it's about an adjunct support to the kid that's different than than the relationship itself being that being the target that's a beautiful distinction yeah that's then it's great you picked up that's great but that's true I mean there's nothing wrong I think it's wonderful the more we can bring parents in even when I'm not doing filial I meet with them maybe every week maybe every other week just to kind of keep track on how are things at home I might be giving them things to work on at home you know like like and listening to what they're coping with all of that but philia would be that you actually do get it in your head and it's your part of your attitude and it's really important we get it in our heads because it shows if it's not in very very subtle ways we're not often aware of ourselves but if you really believe in parents then you it's it shows in your behavior um so that's that's another one empathy plays a very very large part and empathy is really viewed as being healing in and of itself and this means we want the parents to be empathic with their own kids and that takes some work sometimes to get there because some of them come into us and they're really furious with their kids or they're ready to ship them off someplace because they are so frustrated but if there's nobody there to help them with that frustration and pull that off and help them get hope again gain hope again that maybe this can be repaired when they feel like I'll always lost then um then that's important so one of the things we do even right from the very first phone call or the very first meeting all the way through is we do a lot of empathy with parents and by empathy I don't mean we just reflect once or twice we're trying to get to the deepest feelings so when I've trained lots and lots of people through the years what I find is most therapists have been trained and how to you know do reflective or active listening I prefer calling it empathic listening because it conveys an attitude of empathy of you know trying to get inside their shoes a little bit um but what I find is people do once or twice and then they kind of move on to asking their questions and saying things whereas you can get a lot more information by a more continuous process doesn't mean I don't ask questions I do doesn't mean I don't give some suggestions or teach new things but the empathy piece is always threaded through that process the other another one of the essential features is that the entire family as much as possible is involved so it can be difficult but it actually isn't there are ways to work within the system uh to make this happen I mean I've done a lot of work with foster kids who are either going to be repatriated with their family or they are going to go on to adoption and because they are Wards of the county or the state or whatever then sometimes that's all they'll pay for but we've still found ways to get the parents involved with the other kids because coming from a family systems point of view you know what you do with one part of the family is going to affect the rest of the family and that's on the medical side I mean we you mentioned that briefly earlier um one of the things I've noticed there's you know if somebody a kid gets cancer a child gets cancer in the family then there's so much family energy goes into helping that child and going to medical stuff and worrying about the child they have siblings and those siblings can feel very left out and sometimes they start acting out or they withdraw and we don't want that to happen so and that was some of my earliest filial groups were with parents of kids with chronic illnesses a cystic fibrosis cancer and diabetes and everything before you go on to the next one because I'm I'm writing these down because they're super interesting can I just um I think I've got that the play right that the pla the play is important um that it's the relationship that's the client um empathy was belief in the parents a separate one or was that part of empathy um it's that's actually one of the empowering parents as the change agent okay the empowering parents and the entire family is involved did I did I miss one in there or did we get it no I think importance to play parents are empowered client is relationship empathy in the entire family so far okay great beautiful all right more to go yeah so um so in filial the way I I always try to do it if I can is that you want to have each parent have a play session with each child at least of a certain age each week so that's what we're headed for whether we can do that in session or not depends on a lot of other you know kind of logistic factors and things like that but um but that is a family systems approach that uh and even though sometimes family therapists will ask the question well it's the one parent is having a play session with one child at a time you're leaving everybody else out well no in the end we actually do a whole family play and that becomes something we add on kind of toward the end but the but the bottom line is that parents might parent very differently so you might have one is the limit Setter another one who's the nurturer uh to use a kind of an example uh that's quite common and if they were to work together and hold the play sessions with their kids this is again psycho-educational we want them to learn something different so I want the limit Setter to learn how to be nurtured and have some empathy I want the one that's very empathic but also learn how to be firm with their limits um and so they will do that better if they have individual play sessions and then each relay a family is made up of lots of dietic relationships plus the kind of that that whole uh that's kind of hard to for even family therapists to Define so then um the next one is that we use a psycho-educational model of training so the way the parents are trained it's not a lot of like analysis we're not pointing things out to them I mean we point things out to them but it has more to do with their behavior and how they are holding the play session and I like to think of the play session this is still part of the kind of the whole thing the play session I often describe to parents it's kind of like a little um and I can't remember what I usually say to them uh it's kind of like a little uh trial period it's just like a little experiment we're gonna do for a half hour every week and see if these skills in this method Works to kind of help uh with the problems you came in with because those we want to see changes in in all of that but also um we want to just give that a chance if it works then we'll spread it out over the rest of your life but unlike other like parenting skills program where people come in and we teach them you know this is how you do empathic listening and um now go home and try it in different locations as Louise always said we're asking them to go into a highly complex environment and change their behavior and if you do that and they don't do very well you know because they're learning a new skill then they're going to try it once with their kids and say oh you feel such and such the kid says oh you're talking funny I mean they do that sometimes in the play session too but we prepare them for that but it's very easy for the parents to become discouraged and not keep doing it so this is a model where let's try it as a little experiment I'm here for the first four to six play sessions that you have with your children and it might be back and forth between the kids but I want to see each parent four to six times make sure they're getting it they get individualized feedback at the end and um then we give them one or two things to work on the majority this is like part of the psycho-educational piece too I always teach people 75 of what comes out of your mouth after you've watched a parent-child play session needs to be positive and specific sounds a little behavioral it is uh so you're gonna say oh I really like the way you got the feelings here here and we're specific about that and then you give them one or two things to work on next time you're not correcting them and saying oh you shouldn't do that it's very aware that that you need to do that you're telling them what you want them to do instead um that's something we do in dog training and horse training and everything too we we communicate not that's wrong because that doesn't give much information about what to do about it we say this is what I'd like you to try now um and that helps so that's the psychoeducational training uh we support the parents throughout the process so we are there to help them first learn the skills and apply them secondly as they hone the skills as they refine those skills then they go home and do it on their own but they come back either with videotapes or uh sometimes it's just verbal reports I did it with verbal reports for years but I do like videotapes or recordings um and uh so I can give them feedback to kind of keep it going then we're helping them understand the um the themes and what they mean to the child which in the long run help the parents understand the kids better you know it's not the kid is not deliberately trying to get you mad the child is expressing frustration or they're expressing something about the trauma where they felt helpless and so in order for them to be powerful they're kind of putting you in a role where you're you're the quote unquote victim not that we allow kids to truly victimize parents but you know they'll put them in a role whether the either the tough ones the child is um and so we help them with that and we help them with the whole family Dynamics then we help them it's a very deliberate process at the end of how do you transfer these skills to daily life so that it's just the opposite of what most parenting skills program are so instead of here's the skills go try it it's here's the skills let's let's keep it in this contained little area and then at the end we'll spread it out and then finally I don't know how many I had one two three four five well I think the psycho-educational training and the support for parents goes together the ways you do it and it's truly a collaborative approach and I always mean it when I say to parents you know I I don't like the word expert I don't like that because we're never really an expert there's always so much more to learn when we're dealing with behavior human Network animal um but I I'll usually say I'm an expert in these skills they'll say well why don't you do it you know I don't want to do this I've been trying things for years now and nothing seems to work and my response to that is um I know you know first I'll I'll be empathic you know it seems like you're worn out you know it's it's exhausting to kind of have tried so many things and you can't imagine how you're being involved now is going to help any more than it has listen a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more but then I'll say the thing is I'm I know these skills backwards and forwards they've their skills that have been used with lots of families with really really good results this whole approach is one that I know backwards and forwards you are the world's best expert on your own kids they might be driving you crazy right now they might be um you know really frustrating but you know what happens every night when you finish dinner you know what happens every morning when you're trying to get them ready for school and so we need to join forces and I can help you but I think ultimately you're going to be capable of learning this and so there's a lot of Hope and encouragement but at the same time acknowledging and I really believe that I even when we get to the phase where the parents are doing their home sessions and they might bring in a recording of it and we watch part of it together sort of like I might do supervision with a colleague um I will be thinking certain things and and looking at it but I always start with the parents and say what do you think that was all about and because they know the context way better than I do and you can't really interpret play without context context of all the play sessions that have come before but also of their lives School home Church community whatever um then parents will come up with something and say could it be this and I want them to have that freedom to say that to me where I stop and think gee it could be yeah and let's talk about that a little bit more or there's times where they will come up with something where they take it very personally and oh my child hates me and I will listen first but then eventually come around to say well I can see how you might get that idea but I think there might be another explanation for it so we actually look up multiple hypotheses of what the play might mean and it might mean they're mad at you right now they're angry with you right now but that doesn't mean they hate you they just don't know how to express it any other way so um let's let's we'll keep keep at this because the thing is your child stayed in there and played me the whole time I should tell you something about uh you know how they feel about what's going on and that's it that's the list but the collaboration piece I think it goes hand in hand with the the empowerment piece because it does re we do have to start thinking of parents differently then I think a lot of times we do and I can get just as frustrated with parents as the next person but I think we that's where we have to stop ourselves and think okay what's that all about for me we have to look Inward and then start reframing for ourselves a little bit well could this parent have done it any differently given what I know about them and the answer is usually no no exactly Risa that was um oh gosh those I I'm sitting here with a completely new appreciation for filial I um probably about 17 years ago was when I first saw your videos of um you had a write a series and um and it caught my attention then and to hear it now um like coming back around I'm just so appreciating when you were describing it as it really is a model that helps build skill um and and I'm hearing this beautiful undertone of um we believe in the parrot we believe in the kid but we believe in the relationship and we're going to empower the parents with these skills so that they can transform their relationship with their child um and I I'm just I just want to say thank you again I'm just sitting here with a new appreciation um of uh of filial I'm listeners I'm I'm hoping that um that you also have a different understanding and appreciation for filial or if you are a practicing filio therapist that that you've also further deepened your commitment to the filial um the filial model Risa thank you truly for your you're welcome I think it's one of those things I see sort of a Resurgence and I think again people some of the derivative approaches that are very valuable in their own right for certain circumstances the oil isn't for everything all the time either but I think uh people think well if I take uh you know the shorter term model or whatever that I've learned filial and they haven't really because they're really filial as the grannies conceived it was certainly uh and still is very much family therapy and not all play therapists have had that training if they have that's great but I think um I I use filial a lot and it's not that long term I feel like that's another misconception about it I think my average it depends on the nature of the problem so you know you're dealing with heavy duty you know complex trauma you might be talking about um you know a year but my average for other kinds of problems was about 17 to 20 sessions so it's not got to be a real long kind of thing um but I think it's important I I like learning all the models that are related with it or learning at least a couple like I always recommend that people learn both filial and cprt uh Philly on the way I train it is exactly the way I want the therapists that I train to go work with parents so it's a parallel training model and I only trained six people at a time so I can go through that whole feedback process with them I mean I've done bigger presentations but you don't really learn it in that way but there seems to be I've always been curious that so many people kind of I've heard people say well I'm not going to go to learn filial because it's so hard I thought it's not our job to go easy it's our job to do what works and uh there's other different reactions that people might have but I'm pleased that there are more and more people seemingly interested in the Gurney's original model which is what I do and teach um and it's it's just I've never seen change in families both in the parents and the kids like I do in filial and one of the parents are doing it it takes a little bit on the front end two or three sessions to get the parents trained to start with their child I see child change so much faster most of the time it just happened because the relationship is already there might have been damaged but and it might take a couple sessions two or three or four with the parents for the kids to really believe their parent is being that empathic and different but then once they get they said Gee mom's different dad's different uh then they start trusting that and then then usually the therapy works so much so much faster not the fastest what we're after either but with actual Behavior change on everybody's part which is what I'm looking for so resets A beautiful wrap-up point so for individuals that have heard this and they're like I want to learn more so listeners you already heard me mention the books that that Risa has written on the topic I'm assuming they can get them on Amazon and the the main places where you would buy books is that true we said those would be the main um most of them the parent handbooks I saw myself okay it's just I we haven't I just had my one one I have two websites but uh the one when it has to do with more the animal stuff it's just my name Risa van Fleet it looks like rise van fleet.com and then there's a shop there so I do have most of the books there I do want to mention that Louise Gurney along with Virginia Ryan also put together it's a book called group filio therapy I do both group and individual um but that's also a very good book that I did not mention but it's it's sort of like took me back to the Tuesday afternoons and Louise Gurney's class for four hours all the wisdom that I was trying to soak up and that's another really good resource but everything that uh you mentioned in the beginning I do sell my own stuff um and a little bit of a discount usually but you can always check Amazon for like the filial Therapy book and right so listeners grab a book um check out risa's website check out her trainings uh recess hinted throughout this too that there's a some parallel here's with the the work that she does with animals so if that's got your attention before we have her back again go check that out on her website to find out what she's up to in the in the animal um therapy world and uh Risa thank you again so much for being a guest on the podcast um lovely to learn from you and to have this conversation with you thank you very much for having me I appreciate everybody that's been listening in and Lisa I very much appreciate the opportunity so yeah take care thank you so everyone wherever you are you know what I say at the end of these things you're the most important toy in that playroom so take care of yourselves and until until next time everyone thank you [Music]