Trauma & Play Therapy: Holding Hard Stories | Paris Goodyear-Brown, MSSW, LCSW, RPTS | TEDxNashville

[Music] [Applause] it was Plato who said you can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in the year of conversation I am a play therapist and nowhere is this more true than when I'm working with traumatized children I'm going to share with you this afternoon about play and trauma and the power of one to heal the other so when I went to graduate school for clinical social work I already knew that I wanted to work with traumatized children I learned some valuable things in my graduate program including how to do differential diagnosis how to do a suicide risk assessment and how to do fairly traditional talk therapy with regulated grownups I did not however learn what to do with a three-year-old who is trying to pee on me from across the room or a six-year-old who is trying to stab me with adult scissors both things that I had happened as soon as I got into my first job out of school so I was desperate for answers for these children and I went to my first conference on play therapy it was hosted by the Association for play therapy and it was in Orlando Florida that year and I fell madly in love with the field and really do believe that play is the primary language of children and for traumatized children especially the play is their talk and toys are their words I'm gonna give you an example of that up here on the screen but first I'd like to lead you in a very brief exercise if you would turn to your neighbor and share one of your most embarrassing experiences with them okay I'm not gonna really have you do that and everyone's relieved but what if instead I had said turn to your neighbor and share your most shameful sexual experience I think he would have been hard-pressed to do so right and if we as high-functioning grown-ups find that difficult how much more challenging is it for the little ones who have limited experience and limited vocabulary so this is the play creation of child who's been sexually abused he came into my playroom he undressed the baby doll he got the doctor's kit and started to fix it and after a couple of minutes of intense fixing he sighs and then he goes over gets the spider he puts it on the private parts of the baby and he says ms palace take a picture he doesn't have any words to describe his abuse experience but he can create an evocative image that communicates visceral volumes to us so I remember being in my first play therapy workshop and seeing slide after slide of this kind of art and sand and play creations what I now call the glimpses and snapshots of trauma the children gift us with along the way and the speaker was helping us to become kind of bigger containers for this story so that when a child gives us a glimpse of trauma I can say I see what you're showing me and you can show me more I see what you're showing me and you can show me more I was hooked armed with this new understanding that children can articulate the unspeakable through play I return to my little inner-city school office and turned it into a playroom very soon after that I had a young lady come to school who was wearing the same clothes she been in the day before and she was bouncing off the walls which was highly unusual for her so I pulled her aside and I was pretty quickly able to get the kind of superficial linguistic linear narrative of what had happened her mom had gone out to do her second job she had forgotten to leave a key under the mat and my client and her sister had spent the night on the front porch in a very violent neighborhood when she comes to school the next day I'm not gonna try to therap eyes her right away write Maslow's hierarchy of needs first I make sure she has a good meal then I put her on a cot in a darkened room for a couple of hours and let her sleep because if she had any sleep at all on the front porch it was hyper-vigilant sleep and only then do I bring her to my playroom and even then I don't ask her to give me more details of the scary thing that happened I introduced her to the tools of play and she goes directly over to the child guitar and starts to strum pretty fanatically at first but as she calmed I invited her to create a song and this is her creation [Music] [Music] so it hurts inside so bad this is why we do the work that we do I was aghast at this child's ability to take those tools of play combine them with her story and get to deeper in deeper levels of emotional expression this was a pretty sophisticated telling I have lots of other children who don't have any words to describe their abuse experiences and some of that has to do with the ways trauma gets stored it's more in the right hemisphere than in the left and children already live more in the right hemisphere than in the left trauma also gets stored iconically & somatically so in pictures and in our bodies so the ways in which we invite children to show us and tell us have to honor those ways in which we store trauma johnny is one of my best examples of that johnny was playing in the living room with Legos when his mother's boyfriend barged in high as a kite grabbed the first thing he could find which happened to be a clothing iron and bludgeoned mom repeatedly until she slipped into unconsciousness the children thought she had died she did not die she in fact made a remarkable recovery but at the time that they came to see me the children were living with their grandmother and mom was recovering in the hospital and so the first day he comes to see me he draws a picture of mom that looks like this so you see the tears coming down mom's face you see the wide open mouth where she's crying for help he also talked about their bling being blood on a pillow he then went over to my home living section and he took a little wooden iron and he said misspell with can you draw this so I drew the iron and then he looked at it for a minute and he went and got the purple play-doh and he stuck it on the iron what is he showing us what his words cannot it would take me some time to get to the gray matter of the brain stuck to a household object right but he was able to tell us quickly through his iconic expression so it's these insidious in coatings of trauma that hijack us when we least expect it through a little thing called the amygdala the amygdala is an almond-shaped cluster of cells in the midbrain that are sort of the seed of somatosensory memories as they relate to heightened emotional experiences so if you have had a joyful memory the day you got married or the day your baby was put in your arms for the first time you probably have some crystal-clear sense memories of that event so the taste of the wedding cake or the smell of your new baby's head if that is true of your joyful memories than it is doubly true of the things that terrify us we are not meant to hold the atrocities that we are often forced to hold you have a fist come at your face and hit you the next time a fist comes at your face you duck out of the way the thing is that the amygdala is a pretty sloppy processor and so I like to unpack this using a little army guy I'll say to the kids and their parents let's pretend like this guy is in Iraq and his job is to take care of the tanks so he gets up in the morning and he's watching the big windshield of the tank and he hears gunshots bang bang and he drops to the ground his heart starts to race he freezes he doesn't move till it's over when it's over he checks himself and he's safe he didn't get hurt the next day he and a buddy are out there trying to get the mud off the big tread tires of the tank and again he hears gunshots bang bang and they dropped to the ground his buddy doesn't get dropped quite as fast and gets a little bit hurt he's okay he just needs a band-aid but our guy drops really fast and that keeps him safe and that happens day after day in Iraq and after a year's tour of duty he gets to come home and he's been home for maybe six months and he's out at the mall doing some Christmas shopping and he is Laden down with packages walking in the parking lot and he hears a car door slam bang what's he gonna do and five-year-olds can tell me he's gonna drop to the ground we just don't do it with scientific jargon and tell children your brain becomes obituaries esteem you life we don't do that with kids but we can give children and their caregivers permission for the idiosyncratic ways that children tell us about trauma we call this post traumatic play and Bobby is really my best example of this he was four at the time that he came to my playroom he had grown up in domestic violence for the first three and a half years of his life mom and dad then split and he lived with mom dad would come to pick him up for visits one day when dad came to the front door he seemed calm and regulated he asked to use the restroom so mom said sure and let him in the dad took Bobby in the bathroom with him locked the door and then he shot himself Bobby was trapped in the stuff of the trauma for about 15 minutes so when he first comes to my playroom he goes directly over to the red finger paint and he mucks around in it and then he goes over to my water source and he washes his hands and then he goes over to the red play-doh and he mucks around in it and he goes over to the water source and he washes his hands these are called cleansing rituals in trauma play and we see it when children have a full body dirtying experience from their trauma they then need a full body kinesthetic experience of being cleansed from trauma I could tell you more about Bobby's play process it was pretty amazing when he became more regulated and I could give a more directive prompt I invited him to choose from the miniatures on the wall a toy to be his mom and he chose a nicely dressed woman with a cake pretty nurturing I invited him to go and choose a toy to be himself and he chose a disproportionately small naked baby which I think shows the vulnerability in the chaos of the aftermath of the bathroom and then I said go and choose a toy to be dad and he gets all the way over to the shelves and he turns to me and he says his pea with can I choose more than one and I said you can do whatever you need to do in here which is my standard response and he chose three he chose a giant aggressive wrestling figure a little kind of wimpy character and Prince Charming what is that it's the domestic violence cycle it's what I went to graduate school to learn about is what we see on the billboards on the side of the road this four year old was more expert in the domestic violence cycle than I will ever be not having lived through it he did not have the words to show us but he was eloquently able to articulate the three faces of dad in his play and just because children have words does not mean that will be their chosen form of expression so I learned this from Danny Danny is an 11 year old boy who was growing up in significant neglect maltreatment lots of sexual abuse in his background but the first five years of his life then he moved in with a wonderful adoptive mom and afterwards came to see me and he's already taller than me when he comes in three and a half months into treatment and he says I want to watch the babies and points to the tub on the top shelf I say okay we're gonna get the tub down so I bring it down he fills it with hot water and soap he gets a baby doll and undresses it and he begins to watch the head of his baby and as he washes the head of his baby and he's looking at it he says my mama used to shove my face in my baby brother diaper and I say that sounds like a really important part of your story thank you for sharing it with me and I believe so strongly in these glimpses and snapshots of trauma the children gift us with along the way that I keep little sticky note pads under everything at nurture house and so I grab one out and I extend the moment of holding the story with him just a little my momma and he comes around behind me and he wants to make sure I get it right and I would suggest to you that he was only able to tell me about that humiliating shaming experience because he was actively engaged in washing the baby the play itself mitigates the approach to the trauma so why is play so powerful this way well it helps us to understand a little bit about bottom-up brain development so the reptilian brain stem begins to grow first in utero and is responsible for breathing and heart rate and respiration all the basics keeps us feeling good the limbic brain or feeling brain grows over that and then eventually the thinking brain or neocortex grows over that but is highly underdeveloped in human babies at birth so Becky Bailey a developmental psychologist created an elegant pairing of simple questions with each part of the triune brain so the reptilian brain stem is always asking am i safe the limbic brain is always asking am i loved and then the thinking brain is asking what can I learn from this but if the lower brain region questions aren't answered satisfactorily then the thinking brain is offline I was deeply convicted that I wasn't giving enough yes to these children yet so I went in search of sweet cozy space that would answer those lower brain region questions am i safe and am I loved with resounding yes and that became nurture housed the trauma treatment center you see on the screen everything about the way that nurture house is put together is based on our most current understandings of the intersection of the neurobiology of play and the neurobiology of trauma and in a given moment when you walk into nurturer house you will hear laughter and see high fives you will see kids eating and jumping and playing playing for their lives there's a secret drama unfolding beneath the surface and epic neurochemical boxing match in which the stress hormones and the joy hormones are vying for primacy and play gives the joy hormones a leg up so how does it do this well this is my picture of cortisol cortisol and I don't know what it means that this was my son and I took the picture before I took the cortisol inducing thing off his head so cortisol is the stress hormone and is needed in our bodies for us to move forward I probably wouldn't have been here on time today if I didn't have some cortisol but when it is released in massive quantities and our blood streams do to overwhelmingly terrifying events it can make us sick and it's responsible for a lot of the big big behaviors that we see in traumatized children if this is a picture of cortisol then this is a picture of oxytocin oxytocin is the bonding chemical and it's released between mom and baby while they are nursing joy chemicals dopamine are also released and are enhanced through competency and mastery experiences in play so when a baby is in a mommy's arms and he goes and she goes I knew in that moment the baby learns that he can impact the world that he has a voice and that he matters we want as much oxytocin and dopamine on board during trauma recovery as we can get so play becomes the digestive enzyme that metabolizes trauma how does this digestion happen it's bit by bit and it's in the presence of an other so play can help to tell the story but the story has to be heard and held Maya Angelou wrote there is no greater agony than burying an untold story inside of us sharing it with an other helps to leech the toxicity out of it I have the great privilege of getting to be another for the children and families in my care you have the great privilege of getting to be another for those in your spheres of influence so I would leave you with two questions whose stories are you meant to hold and how do you bring your playful presence to those around you thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 278,044

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Behavior, Childhood, Children, Creativity, Depression, Emotions, Family, Health, Hope, Parenting, Personal growth, Play, Psychology, Sexual Assault, Youth

Id: SbeS5iezIDA

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018