Healing isn't a one-size-fits all. It looks different from person to person and comes in many different forms. Play is one of those forms you likely used as a child but may have forgotten along the way.
Child me loved to play and had many ways of expression. I loved to make up stories and play them out with my sisters, my friends, or by myself. I would gather my family in the living room and put on plays for them. I would bike for hours, often coming home with scratches on my legs and a big smile on my face. When I was struggling to learn how to read, I often made up my own words for the pages. I created pretend realities where I could be anything; from a damsel in distress in need of saving to a mighty warrior doing the saving. In these worlds, I got to play out my fears, my desires, my frustration, and my grief. I played with the unknowns, possibilities, and the what-ifs.
A while back, I took a course on play therapy and was surprised to find the class focusing so much on our own therapeutic play, rather than how to facilitate therapeutic play in clients. As a result of this course and other learnings at the time, I began to understand more fully the connections between play and emotion, play and rest, and play and wellness. I also began to recognize a great lack of play in my own life, especially at that time. There were ways that playfulness was still with me, but I was not actively leaning into it as something that could be beneficial to me. So, I started to wonder, journal, and reflect on what happened to that little girl's playfulness. I asked questions like: Was my play gone? If so, is that just a natural part of growing up? Or could something else be true? Could it be that we are not meant to lose our ways of expression and our playfulness? Could it be that my play was there all along and I can re-engage with it?
An important reminder for me in my personal growth as it relates to this profession is the statement that says, “I cannot lead my clients to places I am not willing to go myself.” Expressive play is no exception to this. So, I began to reconnect with that playful part of me. In the process, I unlocked new outlets for emotional energy and avenues of emotional expression.
Just as children use play as ways of organizing their inner world and expressing what they feel in safe ways, adults can too! Yet we have seemed to forget this in our culture. Business creeps into our lives, work and areas of striving for excellence take precedence, easy entertainment and doom-scrolling feel more accessible, and leaning into these places of expression and play take a backseat. Many of us have also taken on messages that keep us from these ways of expression more so than our schedules. I wonder if some of the messages that keep us from true expressive play are about our play having to be a certain way or about meeting a standard. Maybe well intended others expressed how wonderful our pictures or made up games were, and our play became about gaining their approval and acceptance. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe someone told us that we were not good at drawing, singing, dancing, you name it, so we told ourselves I am not a good artist, musician, or athlete and therefore I should not play that way.
So let’s talk about play. The idea of play in many of our lives has become something very different than what I mean by it. Play is not for real. It is freely entered. It is about inner rest, and about connection with self. It involves engagement, curiosity, and freedom. Play is not performance. It is not expressive play when it has a strict agenda. It has no repercussions in the real world. It is all about the process, and not about the outcome (though sometimes we end up being very proud of the outcome). It lacks judgment and evaluation, and as soon as we add these things it moves out of the realm of expressive play and into the realm of work. True play is therapeutic. Avenues of play, or "emotional playgrounds" as Gordon Neufeld, an expert in child and adolescent psychology, calls them, are places for our emotions to come out. Emotional playgrounds can be music, art, movement (dance, running, hiking), nature, animals, story (acting, reading, writing, watching), words (poetry, journaling), imagination, humour, ideas, food (cooking, baking, eating), etc.
Play is a powerful resource at any age. Play offers a safe place for emotional energy to be released, a place we can find rest and connect with our true selves. In fact, I think children have wisdom that we can all learn from. Emotional expression is a natural result of wellness and safety. Babies do not have to be told to cry and toddlers do not have to be taught how to yell or stomp their feet, nor do they have to be taught how to imagine and play. I wonder if we can learn to listen to this same intuition again.
Something really significant shifted for me when I began to re-engage with play. I began to scribble or listen to fast music when I felt frustrated. I wrote poems when the words could not seem to come out in a way that felt accurate. I began to paint when I did not have the words at all, giving myself permission for it to not have to look great. I spent more time outside. On walks, swimming in lakes, or even just sitting on my balcony, I would take deep breaths and allow nature to provide the metaphors that felt fitting for my life while I just sat with them. I somehow found the time while in a full-time masters program to read fiction, to immerse myself in pretend worlds and use them as avenues to practice feeling my feelings.
We often use metaphors, abstract concepts, pictures and hypotheticals in therapy. We often ask you to lean into that playful creativity intentionally as a way of helping you connect with your inner world and engage with the right side of your brain a little more. So, I write this for you because I have personally seen how play can be an important part of the healing process, in and outside of the therapy context. What if you tried something new? What if this blog was permission for you to offer yourself rest in a fresh way and give your emotions new and creative avenues to be released (in or out of your counselling session)? Consider finding at least one playful thing you can do this week to help you reconnect with yourself, and I’ll do it too!
Isabella Wade
Counselling Intern
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