Play is the natural way that young children discharge the tensions of their daily lives. When children are picked on at school, they may come home at the end of the day and enlist siblings, friends, or even stuffed animals to play out a drama in which the child, transformed into the school principal, gets to ream out the bully and send him or her to detention.
But when children are too anxious, afraid, or traumatized to play, they can’t utilize this natural resource of childhood to relieve a painful emotional state. Instead, they must use their energy to compartmentalize the trauma, keeping it out of direct awareness. Because play is both releasing and disarming, it may be too threatening for the child to give up control sufficiently to enter into it.
“Child therapists can help children reclaim this vital feature of emotional self-regulation by teaching, modeling, and setting the stage for the child to play,” said play therapy expert, Dr. David Crenshaw. “But as when you’re teaching children with attachment problems to tolerate emotions, this must be done gradually.”
Helping Bobby Feel Safe and Happy Again
This was the case for Bobby, age 2. He was an accidentally traumatized child, and the youngest child that Jasmine, a child therapist, had seen who no longer played.
- Bobby and his mother were visiting family friends and the children went out to play in the back yard, where Bobby suddenly fell through the rotting boards covering an abandoned well.
- After the terrifying plunge, he was submerged in five feet of cold, dark water at the bottom of the well.
- A neighbor, who fortunately was a volunteer fireman, pulled him out of the murky depths, forced the water out of his lungs, and revived him before he was taken to a hospital.
- He stayed in the hospital for two days, where he was treated for injuries that included bruises and facial lacerations.
- By the time he was released from the hospital, he had stopped talking and playing. He clung to his mother, couldn’t sleep, and showed little appetite or interest in food.
He had become hysterical when his parents tried to give him a bath. In the first session with the family, a week after the accident, he was fussy and irritable, and either sat in his mother’s lap or stood next to her, clinging to her.
When a young child who’s too fearful to play enters Jasmine’s office with the family, she typically gets down on the floor and start playing with the toys herself. That’s what Jasmine did.
She got down on the floor immediately and started playing with the toys. Bobby watched intently while tightly clutching his mother’s arm. Clearly this little boy’s anxiety was sky-high, so Jasmine deliberately avoided creating any play scenarios depicting conflict or threat, but instead evoked a playful kind of magic, using puppets to play harmless tricks on each other in a spirit of fun.
Jasmine had the Wizard puppet try to practice magic tricks, but the Monkey puppet kept taking his magic wand and hiding it. The repetition of these silly scenes, accompanied by comic patter, often makes children laugh more and more with each subsequent enactment.
Getting Bobby Involved, Gradually
At first, Bobby smiled hesitantly. But after the fourth repetition, he was fully engaged in belly laughing, along with his parents, watching the Wizard puppet get increasingly frustrated with the Monkey puppet for taking his magic wand.
Why did Jasmine use the theme of tricks and trickery? For several reasons, including:
- Falling into an abandoned well that was supposed to be sealed over could be experienced as trickery of the worse kind, with nothing fun or playful about it.
- But doing several variations of this game with a range of puppets and going to extremes to punctuate the trickery as playful, joyous, and shared fun among friends helped Bobby process the terrible “trick” played on him.
- It provided a healing antidote via the world of enthusiastic, funny, safe play.
On the way out of the office, Bobby’s parents said it was the first time that their son or they had laughed since the terrifying accident. Given the distress of the child and the parents, Jasmine decided to make the next session two days later.
When the family arrived for the second session, Jasmine did the following:
- Poured a small amount of water into a rectangular plastic container.
- Put some of the play animals into the water, starting with the jungle animals.
- Had them splash playfully around, making gleeful noises, such as “whee! and “whoopee!”
- The lion roared—not scary roars, but muffled sounds of delight.
Bobby didn’t seem visibly shaken, but the water was shallow, covering only the animals’ feet. Jasmine took out the jungle animals and put in farm animals, then domestic animals, and finally people, including a whole family, who all enjoyed a romp in the water.
Bobby’s Parents Begin to Help
When Jasmine started putting the farm animals gently into the water, she asked Bobby’s parents if they wished to help. They started adding some of the sheep, goats, cows, and horses. Bobby then picked up a pig and tentatively dropped it in the water, and then did the same with a cow, a horse, and some sheep. Gradually, he became a little more animated, making grunting sounds and laughing as he dropped each animal into the water, though he didn’t yet start engaging the animals in playful actions with the others.
What happened next, when they started taking out the farm animals and drying them off, was amazing:
- Bobby watched intently and didn’t want to join in this task at first, but soon indicated he wanted to help.
- Jasmine showed him different-colored hand towels and let him choose a blue one, and then he joined the rest of us drying off the animals.
- It wasn’t until the rest of us had the dogs playing in the water that Bobby engaged in interactive play with the dogs for the first time, making them chase each other through the water.
- During this session, he was laughing and squealing with enjoyment.
Before the family arrived for the third session, three days later, Bobby’s mother called to say they were thrilled that his speech was returning, although it was mostly babbling rather than the distinct words he had used before the accident. He was also less irritable and clung less to her, though he still wasn’t sleeping well.
The same props were in place for the third session, but the plastic container was filled slightly higher. Jasmine was careful in this session, as she had been in the previous one, to make sure the water was room temperature, because she didn’t want to expose Bobby to the cold water he had experienced in the well. The water was also clear and shallow.
Jasmine began the session by demonstrating the play action of the day:
- She put the larger animals into the water.
- Then she had them come bouncing back out in a gleeful way, as if there were a submerged trampoline in the container.
- She repeated the action several times with each animal.
The parents took their turns doing the same thing. When it was Bobby’s turn, he was a bit hesitant, so Jasmine asked if his mom would like to assist. Together they took turns dipping the animals in the water, only to have them spring out again and again.
Releasing Trauma Through Abreaction
“There are several elements of the play action that are instrumental to the healing process,” said play therapy expert, Crenshaw. “More than 60 years ago, British psychoanalyst David Levy used similar methods of selecting toys that would closely resemble the traumatic experience. He called the approach Release Therapy, because his emphasis was on abreaction.”
Jasmine knows that abreaction is just one of the needed steps. The children also need to derive an experience of mastery and empowerment from the play, and to engage in some corrective action, she said, adding that the action need not be real-world based—in fact, reality-based corrections aren’t always viable or possible for trauma events.
Crenshaw agreed: “The action or solution can, instead, be fanciful and magical, which naturally appeals to children and can better provide the sense of empowerment so vital to countering the feeling of powerlessness created by the trauma.”
Bobby’s parents’ active participation in the play therapy intervention was crucial because they, too, were “shell-shocked” by this horrific experience of almost losing their son, their only child, and had no idea how to help him. Engaging in the play activities with Bobby was empowering for them and for him.
A Clear Sign Bobby Was Getting Better
“A clear indication that Bobby was healing was his increasing ability to play again, both in the session and at home,” Jasmine said. “He entered the play in each subsequent session with more gusto, even at times with screams of delight. This was particularly significant because the trauma event occurred while Bobby was running around in the backyard playing. Meanwhile, at home, he was recovering his language ability, was less fretful, and usually slept through the night, much to his parents’ relief.”
But there was one more major step left to accomplish:
- Jasmine and Bobby’s parents needed to “bracket” the event for him—make it clear that what he had experienced was extremely unlikely to occur again.
- Jasmine conferred with the parents beforehand. This time, when the family figures entered the water to swim, some of the children would get out and start playing with the dog, and suddenly the dog would drop off the table into a bucket of cold water that had been colored with brown food coloring.
- According to the plan, the dog would be rescued by the parents, dried off, soothed, and told that the bucket of water shouldn’t have been there and that mom and dad would make sure that it never happened again.
- They’d say emphatically that the dog was safe now and that the bucket would be removed and taken away for good.
When the dog fell into the water, Bobby gasped. But when his dad’s hand went under the water and pulled the dog quickly to the surface, the mom and dad dried it off, and then made it clear that nothing like that would ever happen to him again, the look of relief in Bobby’s face was unmistakable.
Staying Close and Feeling Safe
“The bucket of ‘murky water’ was immediately taken away and Bobby was told it would never be allowed in the room again,” Jasmine said. “He was then told that he could decide when the dog would want to go back into the clear water and rejoin the family. In the meantime, he and his mother would stay close to the dog and make sure it felt safe.”
The rest of the family and the other dogs began romping again in the clear water again. For the next two sessions, the play within the water continued, and in the following session, the eighth, Bobby put the dog back in the water and he began to play with the others.
“We decided to space sessions out to make sure the gains were solid,” Jasmine said. “The parents reported no further PTSD symptoms after one month and then at another follow-up session three months later. At that time, the parents said, ‘We have our little boy back.’”
Jasmine followed up by phone a year later, and Bobby’s mother reported that they hadn’t observed any residual effects of the experience that had terrified both their son and them. The magical powers of play facilitated Bobby’s healing—drawing on the only language (symbols and fun) available to him at the time.
Reference
Psychotherapy Networker. “The Healing Power of Play: Helping Traumatized Kids Feel Safe and Happy Again,” (January 29, 2018). Blog excerpted from Dr. David Crenshaw’s article, “How Evolved Are We: The Triune Brain in the Consulting Room.” Retrieved from https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/1179/the-healing-power-of-play
