Author: Gouri Salvi | Sep 22, 2015
When five year old Roshni (not her real name) first came to me for psychotherapy, she was a silent & withdrawn. Her play verged on being violent and destructive. Crayons would be broken into bits; toy cars went crashing over “cliffs”; drawing paper would be torn to shreds, and the toy house in the therapy room would be filled with noises of frightening “ghosts”.
Roshni’s parents were going through a difficult marital situation and I could see that their little daughter was terribly confused and scared. Over time I was able to fing the right language to talk to Roshni about things that she felt were “breaking” and “crashing” and being “torn to bits” all around her at home and how extremely frightening that must feel to her.
Gradually, Roshni began trusting me enough to show me, through her play, more and more of what was going on in her world. Through her play Roshni communicated to me things that were going on in her mind. As her psychotherapist, I had to take in her painful experiences, process them in my own mind and then communicate them back to her in a more benign form so that she felt understood. This process, known as “containment” is what mothers also intuitively do with their babies. It’s hardly surprising then that we therapists are often referred to as ‘therapist-mother’!
Like Roshni, young children use play as a very effective tool of communication in their therapy sessions. When observed closely, their play offers me a fascinating window into their inner world and that helps me to help them. As Greek philosopher Plato said so many centuries ago: “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation!”