What do we mean by “play therapy”?
Is it just another play experience for the child?
Or is it something uniquely different?
And if it is different, why is that so?
What happens to the child as a possible result of the play therapy experience?
What are the dynamics of play therapy?
And what are the implications of it?
Children experiencing play therapy have spontaneously described it in many ways,
A seven-year-old boy, in the middle of a play therapy session, cried out:
“In here I chase my hate into a corner and turn it into a three-inch high toy soldier and beat hell out of it with the hammer. And all of a sudden I see my hate is really my fear. And my fear smothers me. Then I grab my fear and paint it on paper, I can make it big. I can make it small. I can tear it up and throw it in the waste basket and spit on it. There’s nothing to be afraid of if I just know what it is.”
A six-year-old girl who had had a series of operations and who was severely handicapped used the toys to play out her hospital experiences. She reassured the doll patients. And she denied their fears telling them repeatedly “Nothing would happen.” “It’s just a nice nap. You’ll be asleep and when you wake up everything will be wonderful.” But in her play the dolls cried out in protest to the attempt to deny the feelings that were overwhelming to the child. cried out in fear that no one understood how they really felt if they could say it was nothing. Over and over again she played out the agony of one who suffers and who seems to be unable to communicate adequately the deeply felt need to be understood. Outside the playroom at this time she still felt the need to deny her own feelings of fear and anxiety. But eventually she was able to recognize her own fee lings and by the recognition and ownership of them take the first step in gaining control of her feelings, rather than be controlled by them. One day she said to the therapist, “In this room are toys and dolls and water and doctors’ sets and hammers and rubber knives. But it is my operating room. It is a very special room. It has a one-way door on it. And in here what I do stays here with you and with me. And I can keep it here until I want to open the door and say ‘Get out! Go away! You can’t scare me any more. I’m not afraid of you any longer.’ Just a one-way door that only I have the right to open and to close.” This was her way of describing the experience.
There a re many different psychological rationales and methods known as psychotherapy. The overall objective is probably basic to all procedures: namely, to provide a relationship with the child that will enable him to utilize the capacities that are within him for a more constructive and a happier life as an individual and as a member of society. The degree to which this is achieved varies greatly with individual cases. The methods by which we seek to achieve the cooperative effort between the therapist and the client varies.
It seems evident that individuals are learning something a ll the time. It is a cumulative, integrative process. A baby is born into a completely new and different world of experience. With his first breath, he begins his long span of accumulating experiences. The first breath leads to the second breath- and while it is similar in process, it is not identical. The third breath is different from the preceding ones because of the changes in lung capacity, the experience of breathing, the process of adjusting to the outer world. And this begins the individual’s experience in a world of people and things. Life forces interact and the process of learning is underway.
Psychotherapy itself is a learning experience a very complex, cumulative, integrative, personal involvement. The individual’s perceptions of himself and his relationships to his world are as uniquely the individual’s as are his own heartbeats.
Efforts may be made to increase our understanding of how experiences are perceived by the individual and it may be possible to obtain a fairly close approximation of the individual’s perceptions.
However, the individual alone experiences the total impact of any personal involvement because he feels not single, isolated fee lings of the moment, but fee lings that a re created and colored by the affective accompaniment of his total experiences.
In psychotherapy we are dealing with emotionalized attitudes that have developed out of the individual’s past experiencing of himself in relation to others. These emotionalized attitudes influence his perception of himself as either adequate or inadequate, secure or in secure, worthy of respect or not worthy of respect, having personal worth or being deficient in this basic feeling.
His perception then, in turn, determines his behavior.
Photo by Carlos Gustavo Curado
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