Play Therapy Is No Free for All
On the Origins, Methods, and Understandings
of Jumping Mouse’s Approach to Expressive
Mental Health Therapy for Children
By Dott Kelly, Founder
Jumping Mouse Children’s Center
I.
Where Did the Model of Play Therapy Originate?
The most identifiable play therapy used in Jumping Mouse Children’s Center was begun in the early 1980s by Dora Kalff. Ms. Kalff had been a part of Carl Jung’s therapy circle in Switzerland. Jung encouraged Kalff to work with children and to further a model that a woman, Margaret Lowenfeld, had begun. Dora Kalff brought her version of ‘Floor Play’ to America and began teaching primarily in California. From this, Sandplay Therapists of America was created. This is now a certified model. International conferences are held every four years. Therapists at Jumping Mouse have attended many of these conferences.
II.
Why Is Relationship the Core of Healing?
The work at Jumping Mouse Children’s Center leans most heavily into relationship as the core of healing in children. The sand and the miniature toys can be overstated in the work of young children. A trusting relationship between therapist and child is essential. At the same time, using materials that emphasize play and metaphor over talking is crucial. To land in the midst of relationship requires the language of feelings, the quality of each child’s internal meanings through stories that toys might express. This remains particularly vital here at Jumping Mouse, since our service focus is with the very young in our community: ages three through 12.
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Jumping Mouse therapists are trained to comprehend the unified states that an infant emerges from and the interior stories each child has organized in order to bear intrusions of harm. Therapists must learn to bear the child’s intrusions, as they will learn about hurt places from within the relationship between child and therapist. This model conveys the recognition and the requirement that therapists are not directors in the therapy. They are, instead, co-workers in this emergence of mutuality and trust reparation.
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Relationship addresses the child’s own perceptions. The path to finding each child is in perceiving the child’s own experience as valid—in feeling states that haunt the child and remain nonverbal. Attunement between child and therapist gradually builds. This takes our faith in each child, not our definition of damage done to that child. Definitions come later, after trust has been rebuilt from the inside out. From the heart to the behaviors.
III.
Why Do Therapists Focus on A Child’s Perceptions Rather than Their Behaviors?
For our purposes of understanding, science has shown that there are three primary aspects in our brains: the left and right hemispheres and the limbic brain. The left hemisphere carries logic and reasoning, among other important tasks. The right feeling and creative brain carries emotions and personal meaning making. The limbic system is the survival system, acting as an alarm when imbalance within the brain reactions occur. Play therapy aims to discover each child’s perceptions that have been created and stored through feelings from their own experiences. Play ‘loosens’ and then narrates each child’s own story.
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Children are born with both right and left-brain hemispheres, but they are right-brain dominant through most of childhood. There is little left-brain logic on board in a child’s brain development prior to around age six. Cognition therefore doesn’t yet work; there’s nothing to hang thinking from. Perceptions form the child’s knowing. Left-brain development is a gradual process that occurs through childhood. Imagine how much practicing, updating, and yet more practicing is required of the growing governor in each child.
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Too often what we learn about child development outlines the left thinking side of the brain, leaving the right side of the brain mysterious and unheard from. And yet, play therapists work within the firings of the right brain. We are inter-firing. The therapist engages in the child’s past experiences of inaudible feeling states that wired themselves into the child’s ongoing perceptions and responses. Those experiences, for the child, enter this here-and-now relationship, and they test the ground between child and therapist to see if we are strong enough to stay, to wait it out, to understand. Feelings are once again felt and viewed as authentic. Play therapy explores stored feelings states that move within shared, felt wiring while building in a new template based on the empowerment within this therapeutic empathy. Inter-firing is crucial. It applies to our work as therapists with young children insofar as our attentive focus is on the child’s perceptions as the important focus rather than more logical causes of behaviors.
IV.
Why Are Trust and Safety Crucial to A Child’s Sense of Being Accepted and Understood?
Attunement with the young infant’s needs allows the infant’s nervous system to internalize the necessary structures toward self-love and the ability to regulate feelings. For infants, emotional regulation by the parent occurs completely within the parent-infant relationship. The parent acts as the envelop of safety that houses their infant’s vulnerable growth. Trust and safety are absolutely required in order that the child become confident and empowered so that they have something personal and subjective to say. The child’s own personal story evolves from here.
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Parental protection is left behind gradually, as the interior empowerment of the child’s self practices its strength. Young years are all about practice, not success.
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What is trustworthy and is held in the resonance of the adult integrates over time through tolerable and loving continuity that emanates from the adult. As internal comprehensions shape themselves into a narrative that mirrors ‘me,’ ‘my love-ability,’ the child acquires a self-autobiographical experience. When this doesn’t happen, the child develops around a memory that houses feelings that are bits and fragments. These bits, as they enter the very complex realities of school, erupt in behaviors that are trying to tell and show adults what cannot be managed on the inside. The child’s own internal antennae register the presence of understanding, or lack of it, in another. The more fully the child is understood and held, the more meaning is given to the mutual experience as worthy of ‘storage.’ Storage isn’t what we did together but who we were together. And who we were together is a sacred space, whether or not that space has been treated as such.
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The parent is the source of safety. Trauma lives where this safety has been betrayed. Safety makes or breaks the ability to trust others. When scary parts of ourselves remain unintegrated, a predictable response to environmental situations is unlikely. This unpredictable factor endangers the child’s ability to respond or to learn healthy responses. And when a child’s interior isn’t understood, academic learning genuinely suffers. We therapists are called upon to understand the push and pull of relationship, in order to be available consistently as the child reaches toward that place that might recover resilience and the willingness to try again. Without this comprehension we are the blind meandering about with the blind.
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We begin our search in the landscape of relationships and the push-pull of observable behaviors. The language of behaviors shows us where to start looking. Child therapists are not on an investigation of fault. This is the primary meaning of ‘child-led therapy.’ The hints and smatterings from the child’s interiors are those sensations that were molded into their neurological construction. They are about ‘me’ before ‘I’ had any choice. They are not about the child; they are the child. Trust is the single-most crucial ingredient of dependency: the state of leaning into an other to be understood and accepted. The child is not looking to behave better, but rather to be understood better.
V.
What Is the Task of the Therapist?
It is the therapist’s task to bring the unnarrated story within the child’s experience toward understanding without dependency on words in the telling. If I can’t rely on language, how do I know that a little person and I are approaching healing?
Therapists are trained to discover where the child is who has survived in order to be trustworthy enough to find a new pathway through the rubble together. When the child feels the therapist’s accepting presence, the healing begins. The child will use the therapist to discover her own ‘missing’ feelings. This rapport informs the therapist about what needs protection and attention. Here is the safety that invokes an effort to try again. In this ‘Us’ space, the toys dress themselves in the feelings, experiences, and wishes of the child.
Play therapy is no free-for-all. The room has organization and structure within its setup, and the therapist is responsible for this sense of outward order. At the beginning of the hour the toys sit where they sat last week. The sand is no longer on the floor: the space invites the child in its quiet way. In the space of an hour, the child is able to ponder whether the dragon has carried the ‘conversation’ far enough or if there is still more to say about the domination the dragon has conveyed. The therapist brings the memory of last week along, while not instigating its story. It is as if the therapist brings in the ‘chapter book’ with its marker of having reached chapter seven. But the therapist also gives the book to the child, saying, “This is your story. Where would you like to begin today?”
When the therapy relationship is in place, the toys become alive with the feelings, experiences, and wishes of the child. Each session, through the movement and tension of the chosen toys, builds upon a series of themes. The changing nuances of the dramatic play unmask the child’s own perceptions. The therapist remains balanced between information from the child’s own environments and from the child’s interior environment. The braiding of both of these contain the child’s story. As with any human being, the change agent is the child’s self. We ourselves, in relationship, are the soundest tools. Without relationship, other tools hardly matter to the young child.
VI.
Why Are Acts of Faith and Belief Important to Healing?
Diagnosis is a tool that narrates our own executive function and our understanding of the child. We must be very alert as we use diagnoses. They create an adult short-hand communication. Symbols and metaphors in the use of story and miniatures narrate the need to find safety and trust. As such, the sand and the available miniatures are a powerful tool that makes use of the child’s imagination and her familiarity with play. Each playroom also houses dolls for role play and an array of art as a medium.
Because this model relies so heavily on relationship and the therapist’s own engagement, supervision is a requirement. The supervisor brings their own capacity to see into and contain the child’s process with the therapist, the same approach to trust that the therapist must provide within the child’s process. Always moving from acts of faith and belief in the child finds the child’s self, which is where healing is discovered and restored.