26: Mastery and Endings
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
Windows to Our Children on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Our-Children
Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Play-Therapy-Adolescents-Adults
Prologue
Here we are at the end of Season 4. I have really enjoyed sharing my conceptualization of play themes with you. I’m feeling a little sad that it is ending, but that seems fitting since today I want to talk about mastery and when it is time to end therapy.
Before we talk about that, I want to remind you to write a short review of the podcast. If you listen in Apple Podcasts, just scroll down to the review section and click on “Write a Review.”
If you want to learn more, you might be interested in my book, Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents And Adults. This is everything I’d want to tell you if we went out for coffee and had hours of time together. In Part 2 of the book, I go through the stages of Creative Play Therapy. Chapter 12 is all about ending. I suggest 4 questions to help you understand how you approach endings and what you need for them to end well. Here they are:
How did you celebrate a university graduation?
What do you do at the end of a semester or your child’s school year?
What do you do at the end of a movie that has moved you?
How do you prefer to grieve the death of a loved one?
Think about your answers for a minute. You can pause the podcast if you need to. I want to read a clip from the book about how I answer these questions. This starts on page 162.
[Expert from Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults}.
You can tell that I like to anticipate the end, review our work together, tidy up, and then privately process. That’s my ideal. Sometimes therapy ends this way, but sometimes it doesn’t. Today, I’m talking about knowing when it’s time to end, not how to end abruptly.
Mastery is the client’s way of preparing to end. It’s often their version of tidying up. This isn’t when you pull out everything in the catch-all closet. Mastery is after you have decluttered and organized the closet and you are taking the trash to the trash bin, putting the donation box in your car, and closing the door on a neater, more organized closet. It also doesn’t mean that you won’t ever have to deal with the contents of the closet again. But for now, that job is done.
Mastery play themes may be a play version of the before and after photo. “Remember when rabbit used to yell at porcupine because porcupine wouldn’t listen? Rabbit doesn’t have to do that much now.”
Mastery play themes might be like sitting on the couch with a cold drink after cleaning out the closet. It seems like you could do something else, but that’s enough for today, and it’s good to be done with that. It feels like an accomplishment, even if it’s not perfection. In play, this might look like ambivalence around the toys or playing games without the therapeutic work.
Finally, mastery play themes might be like the final reveal. (Okay, maybe I watch too much HGTV when on vacation…). This is a desire to share the therapeutic work with others, but it has a real sense of closure around it. For older clients, it might be sharing their story more publicly to help others, or considering a career in a helping profession.
When you start seeing play that is like the before and after photo, or relaxing on the couch, or the big reveal, these are indicators that it’s time to end. Sometimes, there is a pause before going to the next layer of work, but when that is the case, it’s more like the person with the energy to tackle the next closet. They may admire the already organized closet, but then they move to the next one without reviewing, without fully stopping, and without the desire to share it with others yet.
And, speaking of sharing with others, I can’t wait to hear what book Rachel is going to share with us today.
Rachel’s Book Review
It’s hard to believe this is our last and final episode! I hope that over the past few weeks you have added some wonderful books to your professional library.
For our final episode, I want to talk about a book called Windows to Our Children: A Gestalt Approach to Children and Adolescents, by Violet Oaklander. Oaklander has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, a Master’s of Arts in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling, and a Master’s of Science in Special Education. This book is like a treasure chest—it’s filled with methods, materials, techniques, transcripts, and case examples. She combines a Gestalt approach with so many amazing expressive arts techniques, like painting, poetry, storytelling, and music. This book offers practical interventions to use with children and adolescents in therapy.
One of my favorite expressive arts techniques she describes is called “The Rosebush.” This activity combines fantasy and drawing and is used to help deepen self-awareness and can also be used as an assessment activity during the beginning stage of counseling or as a way of highlighting a client’s growth towards the end of their counseling journey.
Let’s imagine you are the therapist and you’re facilitating this technique in a session. You’d start by saying to the client, “I want you to close your eyes and imagine you’re a rosebush. What kind of rosebush are you? Are you very small? Are you large? Are you tall? Do you have flowers? If so, what kind? Are you in full-bloom or do you have only buds? What are your roots like? Do you have any? Are they twisted or straight? Shallow or deep? What’s around you? Animals, people, birds? What’s it like to be a rosebush? How do you survive? Does someone take care of you?
There are several other prompts listed in the book. Oaklander says that she gives a lot of prompting, suggestions, and possibilities. She believes that children who might be defensive or emotionally constricted due to past trauma might need several suggestions or prompts in order to feel competent and open to the creative process.
After giving the prompts, you’d say something like, “You can open your eyes and draw what you imagined. Don’t worry about the drawing, you can explain it to me after you are finished.” After the child has completed the drawing, you’d ask her to describe the creation in the present tense, as if she were the rosebush. You’d likely ask some clarifying questions and in doing so, gather information about the client’s perception of herself.
In the book, Oaklander gives some case examples and transcriptions from her own sessions, all of which show the powerful ways that this activity and the metaphor it offers can provide valuable information to both the therapist and the client. Oaklander talks about how the creative process and the externalization of feelings and beliefs tend to unlock something inside of a child, making it safer for them to self-express. I have personally used this technique in several sessions and I am always amazed by what it reveals.
Conclusion
In some ways, mastery themes in play aren’t really themes at all. They don’t have the intensity, the repetition or the emotions like the other themes do. But that is exactly what makes them mastery themes. The work is done, at least this layer and at least for now. As we know, children who have experienced trauma may need to revisit things as they develop physically, cognitively, and socially. That’s just the closet getting messy again. But for now, it’s good.
This season, we’ve covered the four core needs: Safety and Security, Empowerment and Control, Inner Value, and Relationships. We talked about the play themes of safety, security, protection, power, control, perfectionism, anxiety, chaos, revenge, nurturing, inner value, hopelessness, helplessness, self-sufficiency, relationships, reparation, abandonment, separation, integration, grief, loss, and mastery. That’s 22 play themes. There are more, but these are some of the most common that clients will show you through play.
And now, we are at the end of season 4. You’ve heard me anticipating the end multiple times. I just reviewed our season together. I’m ready to pack up my podcast equipment and clear space for other things while we take a break between seasons. Then, I’ll go quiet while I privately process this season and plan for the next. Yep. That’s how I like endings. I hope you’ve learned things this season that make you a better play therapy practitioner. Let’s talk next season.
