22: Power and Control - Chaos, Revenge, and Nurturing Themes
Note: Play Therapy Across the Lifespan is created to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio so that you are able to appreciate the emotion and emphasis that cannot be captured by text alone. Transcripts may contain errors and differ slightly from the audio. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it in print.
Resources and Links
Dibs in Search of Self on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Dibs-Search-Self
Dr. Dee Ray’s Advanced Play Therapy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Play-Therapy-Essential-Conditions
Prologue
Glad you are back for episode 22. This season we are talking about play themes, but we are grouping them into four categories, what I call core needs. This helps because when you are in a session, you can remember the four categories, and then you can tease out the more specific themes. If you haven’t already, listen to episode 20 on safety and security play themes, and episode 21, which is part one to this one.
Today I want to share with you a few more themes that fall into the Empowerment and Control core need category. If you remember from the last episode, this category is about being able to order your life and have agency in it. It’s about being empowered and having some sort of control over what happens. Since this doesn’t always happen, and many of our clients have experienced times of clearly being overpowered or unable to make decisions that impact them, this need has been compromised, and the client will need to do repair work. That’s the work.
The first theme I want to talk about is chaos and instability. The themes I’m sharing today, and a few in later episodes are from Dr. Dee Ray’s Advanced Play Therapy book. This is my favorite section of her book. The first time I really started to conceptualize client work through themes, it marked a significant shift in the way I did play therapy. Now what I’m about to share with you is my own understanding of themes she outlines. She might not claim or agree with my conclusions! But, I love to share helpful resources, and her book is a good one. I use it as the text in my Advanced Play Therapy classes.
Back to chaos and instability. I’m sure you’ve worked with clients who live in chaos. Maybe it is a disorderly physical space or drama-filled relationships or uncertainty after a natural disaster. Maybe the adults in a child’s life act more like children or they move often or a caretaker is very sick. You can see how any of these situations could feel very out of control, especially for a child. The client’s play behaviors may show you how chaotic they understand their environment to be, how chaotic they feel. This theme is usually the client showing you what it is like for them, and the next two themes are attempts to cope with it.
Revenge is one way to claim some control, and it feels very powerful. You may see this this theme combined with or closely following the previous theme, but what is underneath is a desire to feel powerful in an attempt to be empowered. They aren’t the same, but for some, feeling powerful is better than being powerless, even if it isn’t empowered. Don’t be distracted by what is expressed as a desire to hurt someone else (sometimes in graphic ways). The underlying need is to have some power and control.
The last theme that may be related to empowerment and control is nurturing. As always, you want to assess the true core need, because nurturing can certainly point to safety and security, inner value or relationship core needs, too, but here I want to consider nurturing as a way to meet the empowerment and control core need. One example that I’ve seen is an oldest sibling taking on much of the caretaking when a caregiver can’t. It might be a way to keep the family together, avoid the authorities or children’s services from getting involved, or protect a caregiver. When you see this, it’s about controlling what is possible when many things are not directly in control for the client.
For those of you who work with adolescents and adults, this core need may have been activated in childhood, and they’ve had years of trying to meet the need. You may also have a client who has recently had the need activated, such as suddenly being furloughed, forced to quarantine, or not being able to follow through on plans or goals. Any trauma experience can trigger feeling out of control and disempowered, regardless of the age when it happens.
I’ve got a few more tidbits I want to share with you, but let’s hear another interesting book review first.
Rachel’s Book Review
Today I want to introduce to you a book that was actually the very first book I ever read on play therapy. It is called Dibs in Search of Self written by Virginia Axline, psychologist and play therapy pioneer. In fact, so much of the more current play therapy approaches were built off of her work and the Axline Principles.
Dibs in Search of Self is a story about hope and healing. It exposes the reality that so many traumatized children in our world face — the experience of being labeled, even by their parents, as “a behavior problem,” “out of control,” or “mentally defective” or “psychotic.” This book reminded me, as many have, how important it is for therapists to advocate for our clients, to be their voice when it has been taken from them, and to step into family systems and reframe the problem-saturated narrative they may have about their child.
Throughout the book, Axline gives her readers almost a play-by-play of each session she has with her client, named Dibs. I read this book prior to beginning my clinical experience, and I found the scrips of her interactions with Dibs to be really helpful. She gives so many examples of strong reflections and explains her intentions and motivations for guiding each session the way she does. I found this enormously helpful as a new clinician.
There’s a story Axline shares about a duck and a sand mountain, and I want to share it with you. Dibs comes to see her for a therapy session and he quickly notices that what he built in the prior session has been deconstructed and put away. Axline reflects that Dibs wanted it there and someone moved it, but that she didn’t promise him that it would remain the same. “It’s gone”, Dibs says. Axline responds, “And you feel angry and disappointed because of it, don’t you?” Dibs nods yes.
Axline reflects on this experience with Dibs stating, “What would ultimately help Dibs the most was not the sand mountain, not the powerful, little plastic duck, but the feeling of security and adequacy that they symbolized in the creation he had built last week. Now, faced with the disappearance of the concrete symbols, I hoped that he could experience within himself confidence and adequacy as he coped now with his disappointment and realization that things outside ourselves change — and many times we have little control over those elements, but if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us.”
I’m going to re-read that last sentence: if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us. What she wanted for Dibs to know is that he had what it takes, the strength and the adequacy, to deal with his feelings of disappointment.
What awed me the most throughout this book was Axline’s unwavering belief that what Dibs needed most already existed inside of him. Yes, he needed to develop strength to cope with his external world and yes, her work with Dibs was deeply meaningful. But from the beginning of their work together, Axline stayed true to her conviction that what Dibs needed most was to find his way back to himself — back to his dignity, self-respect, and worthiness.
Conclusion
Well, if you are one of our faithful listeners, you’ve already heard me talk about the importance of good therapeutic relationship grounded in empathy, genuineness and unconditional positive regard. You’ve also heard me say, “Reflect, reflect, reflect.” That’s my answer to what you do when you identify empowerment and control core needs with a client. I’ll have some more practical suggestions coming up in future episodes for those of you who want something more concrete for beginners.
As I wrap up this episode, though, I want to talk to you, the therapist, for a minute. It’s likely that while we were talking about clients’ play themes that you identified something in yourself. Since we all have these needs, and you have your own hurts and wounds, too, this may be unsettling or triggering. Hear this: you are not disqualified from doing this kind of therapeutic work because you don’t have all your own stuff resolved. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be qualified to do counseling, teach or record this podcast. Neither would anyone who has taught or counseled you. Let me tell you a secret. Well, it’s not so secret if you’ve ever taken a class with me. Here it is. I believe that our hurt places can be our biggest strengths. Those very places that still hurt when touched by things like this podcast are how you learn compassion, empathy and hard lessons about pain. Without them, you would be unrelatable as a counselor.
So maybe you are a perfectionist because it puts you more in control now. You’re not trying to control others, but you can be ruthless with yourself. If this is you, I bet it helped you get to (and then through) grad school. But it also added a lot of negative feelings along the way. Maybe that attempt to meet your needs has cost you relationships and held you back. That’s what often happens when we try to meet our needs from an unhealthy place. Controlling is better than out of control, even if it doesn’t fully meet that need for healthy control. Isn’t that what perfectionism is?
What I just did was attempt a reframing strategy. I haven’t found that this works well without a relationship marked by unconditional positive regard, but maybe it was helpful to a couple of you. The more you trust me and believe me when I tell you that your attempt to take care of yourself, something like perfectionism, is your best effort at meeting a deep need, the more you may trust a reframe of that behavior.
I hope that you heard some encouragement in this. We all have our stuff. Some of us are farther in our healing than others, but wounds still leave scars. I like to think of mine as my street cred! It’s the experience I draw from. I trust that yours can do that for you, too.
