25: Grief, Loss, and Resilience
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:
The Whole-Brain Child on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child
Prologue
Theme: Relationships, Grief and Loss Play Themes
Hello again. This is episode 25! I read somewhere that the average starting podcast only makes it to 9 episodes or less, so I’m pretty excited to be recording episode 25, and I want to thank you for listening, posting it to your social media, and sharing it with your play therapy friends. Here’s what some of you have said... Thank you for posting those positive 5-star reviews to help new people in the play therapy community find us, too. I mean it. Thank you.
Now, let’s get back to the reason you listen. This season it’s to learn more about thematic work. If you have just found us, you might want to listen to previous episodes this season to learn more about the core needs I use to macro-organize themes. The four core needs are Safety and Security, Empowerment and Control, Inner Value, and Relationships. We’re talking about Relationship play themes today and next time, in our last podcast in this season, we’ll talk about mastery themes that indicate this layer of the client’s work may be ending.
Last week we looked at the relational play themes of reparation, abandonment, separation, and integration. Today, I want to talk about grief, loss, and resilience. Now, remember, I am talking about these through the context of relationship, but if you are using the core needs framework, be alert to other core needs that might be expressed.
So, let’s begin with Grief and Loss. These two things are usually run together, but it might be helpful to recognize that they are different things. Grief is the mourning, the grieving, of a loss. People grieve in different ways but I generally see two broad categories: those who grieve openly and socially, and those who retreat and grieve privately. Let me give an example to explain. When my brother was a junior in high school, he was playing around, wrestling with some friends. He landed in just such a way that he broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. One sunny, Sunday morning my grandparents called to give me the awful news. My grandmother got ready and went to church to be around friends that she knew would hug and support her. She needed that. My grandfather uncharacteristically stayed home to weep and pray alone. He needed that. What struck me was that after decades of marriage, they each honored the other’s way of grieving without trying to get the other one to grieve the way they did. My brother is doing well now, but the experience taught me a lot about this. I’m a private griever. I need to go in my cave, lick my wounds, and when I’m ready, come out and engage with others. What kind of griever are you?
Grief is, of course, mourning when people die. But, it is more complex than that. We also grieve the loss of our hopes and dreams. Our family had to let go of many hopes and dreams. My brother would never walk again, would not get that football scholarship to college, and at the time, we didn’t know if he would even graduate from high school. We mourned over his pain, the injustice of an accident, and significant life events that were forced to be different. There are often dozens of little griefs that are felt around one major grief event. This is where identifying losses comes in. The loss is what we grieve, but again, although it can be a person, it also might be less tangible.
The coronavirus pandemic is a good example of degrees of loss. A couple of months back when I was feeling low and having a difficult time figuring out why, I created a list of losses from COVID. I knew I was grieving, but I haven’t experienced a death close to me from it. Some of you have, and I am truly sorry. My losses weren’t through burial, but I did involuntarily lose living the way I knew and liked. I couldn’t teach the way I wanted, see my colleagues in the hallways, or even grab a coffee with a friend anymore. Nearly nine months later, that is still limited. I couldn’t see a friendly face while trying to buy enough rationed tomatoes at Aldi to make spaghetti sauce. My skills of planning ahead and being productive at new things weren’t as valued anymore. Instead, I was expected to be highly adaptable and flexible with change, things I’m not very good at. The losses keep coming, but nowadays they are more subtle. I missed the Association for Play Therapy conference and seeing people I only ever see there. In comparison with my colleagues’ daughter getting hospitalized with the virus, it’s a small loss, but the loss is real, and they keep cumulating.
My dissertation study was on the topic of resilience and protective factors in children of divorce. One of my findings was so obvious that I almost didn’t include it… and yet, it really is important. Here it is: without adversity, there is no resilience. We tend to want the benefits of resilience without the pain of adversity, but you have to grow it by working through whatever the adversity is. That is what we are helping our clients to do. When you see your client playing out themes of resilience, you are seeing evidence of progress. You are seeing evidence of the client’s developed resources and strengths. With older clients, you may be seeing them making sense of the suffering. Resilience is the recognition that while it was a terrible, hard thing, she now has gratitude for what she has become. This theme includes play around overcoming, defeating the bad guy, and accomplishing a hard thing.
Speaking of resilience, I wonder what Rachel has found for our libraries this week?
Rachel’s Book Review
Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson are names that might ring a bell. Among many other things, they are the authors of one of my favorite books about parenting and child development, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind.
The authors of this book explain and make accessible the new science of how a child’s brain is formed and how it grows. They offer amazing illustrations, diagrams, and examples of how to implement these strategies. On the back of the book’s cover, Daniel Goleman writes, “Anyone who cares for children—or who loves a child—should read this book”, and I couldn’t agree more. I think this book is especially helpful to recommend to the parents and families whose children are in therapy. It unpacks the science behind tantrums and meltdowns, allowing parents to use these moments as opportunities for learning, integration, and brain growth.
Siegel and Bryson use the word “integration” to describe the importance of giving children experiences that help them connect the various parts of their brains, including the right and left, and the upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs brain, the authors explain, is the most mature part of the brain, the part of the brain that engages in analytical, higher-order thinking and isn’t fully developed until about 25 years old. The downstairs brain is responsible for basic functions (like breathing and blinking) and impulses (like fight or flight). The authors posit that what is ideal for optimal development and what leads to ideal behavior is when the upstairs and downstairs and the left and right parts of the brain are working together, achieving a state of “integration.” Why? So that they can use their mental resources to full capacity and experience good mental health.
The authors also speak to the consequences of having a poorly integrated brain or a brain that relies too much on only one part. They describe how this can lead to either rigidity or chaos, two different extremes. They talk about how the many challenges that parents face are during times when their kids are feeling too chaotic or too rigid. The authors offer this example to help explain these concepts.
“Your three-year-old won’t share his toy boat at the park? This is rigidity. He erupts into crying, yelling, and throwing sand when his new friend takes his toy away? This becomes chaos.”
The strategies in this book are all about guiding children back into an integrated state to avoid both chaos and rigidity and to promote mental and emotional health. What I love about their approach is the way that they offer scripts and visuals for parents or therapists to use to help explain to kids how their brain functions. There is even a script that walks a child through understanding how implicit memory works which can be such a helpful way of helping kids understand where their fears might come from.
I am currently in a season of life where several of my closest friends are having babies. Because of the nature of my work, many of them have already asked me for parenting book suggestions, and to be really honest, this one, along with The Connected Child are always the first two that come to mind!
Conclusion
Children’s play, when it is about parents and caretakers, may be challenging to talk about with them. Besides the fact that legal guardians have a right to know about what is happening with their child, these are also the best allies in our work. In fact, the research indicates that filial play therapy – when parents spend time using play therapy skills with their children – is more effective than when we, the professionals, do it. Don’t miss that as a way to help the children you see.
Still, it is awkward and potentially trust-eroding for the therapist to talk to parents about their child’s experience of hurting. Themes give you the language to help parents understand what the child needs. When you tell Mom, “Johnny played with the puppets today. The mommy and the daddy had a loud argument.” You are just describing the behaviors. Mom is likely to feel embarrassed or maybe ashamed, and she might respond defensively or try to evade it. “He must have seen that on television.”
If you instead talk about themes, it helps you explain what is important without any sense of accusation. “Today Johnny worked on a couple of themes that might help you understand some of the outbursts you’ve been noticing. His play today was working on the themes of reparation and abandonment. It seems that when you fight, he really has a need to see you make up, but also to know that his relationship with you is okay. One of his fears is that he will be left behind if one or both of you leave. Have you noticed any of that with him?” The idea is to focus on the child’s experience of the event instead of on the fighting, the event in this case. It also helps you suggest or prompt something helpful that Mom can do. Maybe she can assure Johnny that she still loves him even when the parents fight, or just make a point to notice his response. Even if the parents aren’t going to make up with each other, they can be intentional about repairing the relationship with the child. See what an ally can do for therapy?
Of course, I know that parents can be really challenging for those of us who work with kids. It’s even harder when we blame the parents. And sometimes, we are right. They are hurting their children, and some do it with intention. But if you want to create a healthier environment for your child clients, your consultations with the parents might be your most important conversations. Identifying play themes gives you a way to do this.
