3.12 The healing powers of our personal psyches
If we’re going to ask more of ourselves in order to ask more of love, if we’re going to take on a challenge of this magnitude…
We need all our inner resources working for us.
And one of those resources is the…
Power of play.
It might seem counterintuitive that play could help us with something as serious as upgrading love, because play is usually associated with kids, so adults often devalue it.
Look at the phrase “child’s play.” It’s used in a dismissive way to mean something easy and maybe not very important.
But…
Play is the developmental superpower of the human species.
During the long millennia of our hunter–gatherer history, we’ve depended on play to make our tribal way of life possible. Without it we would not have become who we are.
Our ancestors lived in small bands within relatively small tribes where the group was the authority and enforced a demanding discipline of cooperation that everyone had to learn as kids and follow as adults.
But kids didn’t sit immobile in a classroom all day where they were forced to study things they didn’t want to learn. And they weren’t indoctrinated.
Instead…
Hunter–gatherer children played their way into full membership of their tribe.
They followed their own path to get to the result the tribe required of them.
Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, describes what life was like for these children. He says there’s agreement among anthropologists studying a wide range of hunter–gatherer communities about six key features…
1. Kids spent their days playing, and through their play, they managed their own self-development. They were self-directed not adult-directed.
2. From the age of four or so they spent much of their day playing in a small group of children of different ages. And much of what they learned they learned from children older than themselves.
3. They learned how to settle disagreements and decide on activities through negotiating with each other. The ability to work through differences prepared them for the cooperative life of the community. And while there were conflicts for sure, there were no injurious fights, because the kids got good at negotiation, and because they understood how much they needed each other.
4. Kids were motivated by desire not shoulds. They were eager to learn all the skills they needed to be a valued adult in their tribe. They played with small bows and arrows. They practiced hunting by tracking down small animals and birds. They played at weaving baskets and doing food preparation.
5. They watched adults closely and learned from them through an iterative process. They’d see an adult doing something they wanted to learn to do and they’d try to do it themselves and fail. Then they’d try again and fail again. But over time they got better until they succeeded and eventually mastered that skill. They didn’t memorize facts from a book. They engaged in action learning. And they understood that failing was no big deal. It was just a natural part of the process.
6. Adults were indulgent with the kids. Whenever children asked to learn something, the adults would go out of their way to help them learn.
The anthropologists Peter Gray refers to also found that in these hunter–gatherer tribes there was no child sexual abuse or child battery. Nor did the tribe break the spirit of any child with emotional abuse.
I remember talking with a man who grew up in a small village in north Africa. He said that since everyone was involved in each other’s lives and since the huts of the families were mostly open to view, there was no child abuse. It would have been impossible, he said, to keep such a thing secret. And if it started to happen, the village would put a stop to it immediately.
At first I was a bit skeptical, but when I thought about it, it made sense. For our hunter–gatherer ancestors, survival was hard, so it was all hands on deck. The tribe couldn’t afford to let anyone diminish or damage any child.
Kids were not allowed to violate the core rules of the tribe, but within that context…
The tribe wanted each of its children to grow up to be at their best so they could contribute to the welfare and survival of the tribe.
Kids had to become full–on members of the tribe, and there were strict standards for what that meant, but, as I said, they got there through the process of…
Individual play.
Each child made their own way into tribal membership. And what was the value of this?
They internalized what they learned.
It was personal to them. It went deep. It stayed with them. No one grew up to be a perfunctory member of the tribe, a member in name only. You had to be all–in.
There was another advantage to kids doing their own self–development. If the environment changed, for example a shift in climate, or a new tribe was muscling in next door, then the home tribe would need to change its behavior in response.
Normally hunter–gatherer tribes were conservative. They followed the rule that if things stayed the same, if their way of life was working, they would keep everything as is.
But if the time came when a change was necessary, adults who had become masterful at self–development as children, would be in the best position to now help their tribe do…
Tribal development.
Evolution turned us into developmental beings. There are many things that set us apart from the other animals: fire, language, agriculture, technology, and more. But these were made possible by the fact that hunter–gatherer children grew up in the safety of communities that supported their self–development and gave them the luxury of the time they needed to play their way into adulthood.
There’s no chance it would have worked for us to be developmental beings, if evolution had not given us…
The power of developmental play.
A power which we still have, but now we get to use it differently.
In our hunter–gatherer days…
Taking deep dives into our personal psyches was not encouraged.
If everyone had done that, the unity of the tribe would have been fragmented, and the survival of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy.
Making your own way into tribal membership was okay. In fact, it was the standard. And…
Becoming a tribal person was necessary.
But that’s very different than taking deep dives which was not okay because…
Becoming a personal person was not okay.
With tribal fundamentalism now putting our species in danger, it will not help us to follow the old ways and do more of what we’ve done throughout our history.
Our modern mega–societies, as contrasted with tribal bands, are awash in the mistreatment of children.
This ranges from undermining their self–esteem and suppressing their talents to the trauma of sexual abuse and physical battery.
And what do child advocates and therapists use to help these kids?
The power of play.
They have found that the best treatment for most children is in fact…
Play therapy.
Of course there are play therapists who coast along with a casual attitude, staying on the surface with the kids who are their clients.
But the therapists I follow and admire, practice an intense kind of play therapy that has the power to help kids deal with trauma from sexual abuse, battery, and neglect, or the chaos of living in a dysfunctional family.
These therapists accompany their young clients deep into healing, and so I call this…
Primal play.
And the key to this is that the therapists help the kids…
Use play to mobilize the healing power of their personal psyches.
For the rest of this section I’m going to relay a handful of stories from the work of my two favorite play therapists, Violet Oaklander and Dennis McCarthy. I love these stories for their own sake. I love re-reading them. I love how these two hold in their hearts these kids they work with.
But there’s another reason I love these stories. In story after story what I see is little children…
Feeling for themselves and fighting for themselves.
That of course is the essence of the journey to upgrade love.
By studying play therapy, I deepen my relationship with my upgrade journey. I discover new dimensions and nuances that matter to me.
I get much more inspired by these unknown kids than world–famous easy–step gurus.
And I’ve gotten to calling on primal play so often that I’ve come to think of the upgrade journey not only as my life’s mission but as my personal play therapy.
So now let’s look at some of the elements of primal play and how they apply both to therapy with children and to us upgraders on our journeys to make of love something better.
Permission.
Dennis often starts his first therapy session with a new client by asking the child to…
“Draw a picture of what you would look like if you turned into a monster.”
Really? You’re going to ask a child dealing with abuse or neglect or family dysfunction to imagine himself or herself as a monster?
But Dennis says that in the many years he’s done this with a huge number of kids, the kids almost always dive right into the drawing. They are eager to do it.
There are some kids who take a little longer to warm up to the idea, so he might repeat his request like this…
“Imagine you have drunk a magic potion and your body is changing into that of a monster. Really try and imagine that it’s happening to you. Then draw what you look like.”
And what do the kids draw? Of course there are the expected scary monsters with sharp teeth and grasping claws. For example, one 7-year-old girl drew a figure she called, “Mouth.” Why? “It eats everyone.”
Dennis says the monster theme works because…
“Children come into therapy with monstrous feelings—monstrous grief, monstrous rage, monstrous longing—to name a few. These feelings are unacceptable, unfaceable, and unmanageable to themselves as well as to the world around them.”
But in response to the monster-question, the kids draw a remarkable range of things.
Six-year-old Eli was brought to therapy because of thumb-sucking, wetting and soiling himself, and having no friends….
He drew a key in human form, then next to it added a heart. “It’s the key to the heart.”
Then he told Dennis, “Take care of it!” Immediately he went in and used the office bathroom. It was the first time in weeks he had not just soiled his pants.
Eli didn’t actually draw a monster. What he drew was a request for help and care. And doing just that one thing shifted something in him. And this was just the beginning. Session after session he drew more “monsters” and made more progress.
Another boy drew a picture of himself as a “bloody pulp.” So it was not a monster, but a representation of himself as monstrously hurt.
An adult might have said, “I’m hurting really bad.” But this boy, dramatized his pain with one image that was worth many thousands of words.
When his parents came in to pick him up at the end of the session, he happily showed them the picture and they were horrified. Before leaving they asked for therapy for themselves so they could help their son.
It seems to me that the request Dennis makes to draw yourself as a monster, is child–speak through which he’s saying…
I give you permission to do what you need to do and ask for what you need to ask for. I give you permission to tell me the truth about your life.
What about us upgraders? We get to take permission from our key question…
What if we could ask more of love than we’ve ever asked of it?
We get to give ourselves the freedom to pursue what is the deepest longing in our hearts and not hold back because maybe it is not socially acceptable or because maybe it is too radical for most people.
I can imagine a child’s surprise coming into the playroom thinking, I’m going to have to deal with one more adult telling me to behave and be a good boy or a good girl. And then here’s Dennis saying, imagine you’re a monster. And they get the message…
In here you don’t have to please the adults in your life, some of whom are hurting you. In here, you get to take very good care of yourself. And I’m going to be right here with you as you do that. I’m going to be on your side. And if you’ve never experienced that before, you’re going to get to see what it feels like.
And similarly, when we upgraders take our upgrade– question to heart, we’re breaking the spell of society. We’re giving ourselves permission to do what we need to do so we can make our lives our own and live out our mission.
What Dennis is doing with his monster–question is throwing the switch for the child from external motivation to internal motivation. The child gets to pursue what she needs and she gets to do that following her own path.
And the same is true for us as upgraders. We’re aficionados of intrinsic motivation, instead of the external motivations of shoulds coming from society. There are no shoulds on the upgrade journey.
In hunter–gatherer societies, the heart of the tribe was cooperation between members of the tribe. By terrible contrast, our modern mega–societies run on exploitation. Which means some people control other people. Tell them what to do. And in many cases get to punish them if they don’t do what they’re told.
Look at our school system. It’s basically a system of external motivation. A child doesn’t get to learn what he wants to learn at his own pace. He’s forced to learn by according to a curriculum that doesn’t engage him. He gets graded by the teacher. He spends his precious days resisting learning—even though he’s biologically and psychologically designed for growth and development.
How is this supposed to help our society, this suppression of talent and good will? Well, it doesn’t. But it’s great for the exploiters who want nothing more from children as they grow up than for them to become submissive workers.
You can’t run a journey to upgrade love on shoulds, because shoulds are anti–nurturance, and nurturance is the name of the upgrade game.
All-in.
Violet tells about 14–year–old Jenny. They were playing a game together where you used pieces of playdough for making moves on the game board. If you landed on one of your opponent’s squares, your opponent got to take a rubber mallet and smash your game piece flat as a pancake.
But then Violet made up something extra. If your piece was about to be flattened, you could use a pretend voice to try to convince your opponent to spare you, like by “crying, whining, pleading, screaming, begging, arguing, commanding, and so forth.”
In Violet’s words here’s what happened:
“Jenny decided to scream. At first her screams were tentative and rather weak, but then they got fuller and louder until they were blood curdling. I became alarmed and stopped my smashing and looked at Jenny and said, ‘That was amazing screaming. Have you ever screamed like that before?’
“Jenny replied, ‘No, this is the first time. But I wish I had screamed like that when my father used to come into my room at night and touch me.’
“I knew that Jenny had been sexually molested; but this was the first time she openly and willingly talked about the abuse. It was a beginning to her healing.”
What about us upgraders? The more deeply we see into the human operating system, the more deeply we feel the reality of our impending extinction…
The more pain we end up carrying.
And we need to do something with it.
There was a period of some months when I used to drive out to the top of a remote cliff above the ocean. I climbed down an almost vertical path which was the only way into the isolated rocky cove below. Once I touched down, I took a deep breath and shouted my distress into the crash of the waves, taking inspiration from their abandon.
Sometimes my distress would give way to a short burst of tears. I couldn’t let myself go into my sadness like I wished I could. But this was better than silence.
One night years later, a surprising question came to me…
What would it be like for us as a species to step out from behind our collective defenses and admit just how scared we are in the face of the dangers ahead of us? And how helpless we feel.
And I wished there were some way for us to come together, all of us at once, and cry our way down to the bottom of our pain with abandon. But that would be so awful I wouldn’t want to be there for it. I’d call in sick that day.
Still, not wanting to do it doesn’t mean we don’t need to. Because if we can’t take ourselves to heart, all the way down to the bottom, really all the way down, why would we ever care enough to fight for ourselves as fiercely as we need to fight?
The element of surprise
Fundamental to play, of the primal kind, the developmental kind, is surprise.
The kids in play therapy are not following a prescribed plan. They are making their way forward minute by minute. Each moment shaping and motivating the next one.
This means they get surprised. And there’s a bit of a paradox here…
They are running the show, they are leading the way in their play, but their play is also leading them.
So they get surprised into new discoveries and new identities. Which is to the good.
But…
They also get surprised into vulnerability and hard truths.
Also good, but not so much fun.
So…
Primal play is both scary and exhilarating at the same time.
Surprise is what gives this kind of play its sense of adventure.
Which means play is risky. This is very different from prefabricated programs where the guru has laid out everything you’re going to do step by step.
Such gurus make sure to prevent surprises. One of the things they’re selling is safety. They assure their customers that nothing unexpected will happen to them. It’s like the program has guard rails.
Primal play couldn’t be more different. And yet while it is risky, the heart of it is nurturance, and that means…
The kids come through okay in spite of the very real risks.
They are risking pain, but not damage. They move through the pain into healing. Healing they couldn’t get to without unlocking the pain.
What about the upgrade mission? My psyche sprung it on me. I didn’t plan it out in advance. It was a surprise.
And it’s super risky because you have to confront the hard, hard truths of the human operating system. And you find yourself immersed in pain again and again.
Yet this upgrade mission has an inner compass. And that compass is nurturance.
My psyche surprised me, it dragged me down into painful territory, and it made me vulnerable like never before. Yet at the same time it was looking out for me. It kept me moving forward to a better kind of love and a better life.
So it turns out the upgrade journey, like primal play therapy is…
Risky but not risky.
Mystery and magic
Dennis tells this story about James, age 7, who was referred because he had bowel and bladder “accidents.” Which only happened in the presence of his mother who infantilized him. His father was angry about the infantilizing, but took it out on James instead of talking with his ex–wife about what she was doing to her son.During his first session, James made his way to a side room with a bare wood floor…
“He removed his shoes, walked to the center of the floor, and began to slip suddenly as if he were on ice. After a great deal of slipping with a great deal of drama he collapsed. With enormous effort he rose to his feet, only to collapse again. It was very funny but also felt very important.
“Eventually he asked me to help him up. He allowed me to do so very dramatically, pulling me down with him several times before he actually let me get him on his feet and off the ‘ice.’”
After this one session, James stopped having “accidents.” And over the next few sessions, he became more assertive and self–possessed. He was better able to stand on his own two feet. Meanwhile both his mother and father, with encouragement and guidance, were able to appreciate and support his new sense of himself.
Dennis couldn’t explain why the slipping episodes made such a difference. And he didn’t try to because he didn’t need to…
It was a mystery why it worked, but it was not a mystery that it worked.
And that’s what mattered to James.
Another story from Dennis…
A boy dealing with a potentially terminal illness, after weeks of angry sessions, quite on his own began to make a pair of paper wings.
“They were a surprise to both of us. But he was unusually insistent about it…He let me help him color in each rainbow–hued feather. He worked on these wings in each session for several weeks in total silence.
“When they were done, he had me put them away, He never spoke about them while he made them or afterwards. He didn’t need to. For this child who faced likely death to make wings clearly helped him in some deep way.
“Whatever they meant for him was bigger than words or any meaning I might ascribe to them. They simply were.”
And one more…
“One little boy announced to me one day that he was going to become a seed. He proceeded to curl up on the ground and for at least ten minutes was silent and still. I witnessed and contained this quiet process and then I became a bit concerned. Would he ever emerge from this seed I wondered?
“So out of my own impatience I finally inquired, ‘Would the seed like a little water to help it grow?’
“A much stronger voice than he had ever used before came from the curled up form, ‘If you would be quiet and let him alone the seed will grow just fine!’
“So I sat, put in my place by this once very passive little boy, and after another five minutes passed he leapt up into the air with a loud ‘Tadah!’ He had become a large tomato plant, covered with juicy fruit.”
What was going on inside that boy during that long silence, Dennis doesn’t know and will never know but all he needs to know is that serious healing work took place. Or, serious healing play.
Whenever I see it in the stories of little kids in play therapy, and whenever I experience it for myself in my own upgrade work, this healing power of the personal psyche…
Feels like magic.
But it’s not. It’s nurturance.
It’s…
Nurturance that goes as deep as our hurting goes.
Healing without words
We adults can be wordy. But healing doesn’t always need words.
A case in point from Dennis…
“Many years ago a boy came from a great distance to see me each week and almost never spoke to me. He made several monster drawings and played intensely in the sand, however, and his symptoms rapidly disappeared. He looked and acted more self–possessed and his day–to–day life was going very well.
“I asked him one day why he enjoyed coming to see me so much. He thought about it briefly and said simply, ‘I can really talk to you.’
“I was surprised, as he had rarely spoken to me. When I mentioned this he looked at me with great disbelief. He had been busily making an elaborate scene in the sand at the time. He simply nodded with his head toward the sand in amazement, as if to say ‘This is how I talk, silly.’ And that was that.”
I’m definitely into words. My art is writing. The books I’ve written, together run to several hundred thousand words. And I understand how helpful my writing is to people struggling with the upgrade journey.
Yet, there’s a dimension of this journey that takes place in the realm beyond words. There are wordless discoveries and wordless breakthroughs. There’s a dimension of understanding beyond talking that only takes place through incarnation.
The fast track
Violet tells this story:
Terri, a 13–year–old girl, drew a picture of a snake in the desert. Violet asked her to speak for the snake, as if it were a puppet. And after a few questions, Violet asked, “What’s it like for you being out in the desert by yourself, snake?”
And Terri answering for the snake said, “Lonely.”
Then Violet asked her, “Do you, as a girl, ever feel that way?”
And Terri burst into tears and sobbed and sobbed.
Violet tells another story of loneliness:
A 12-year-old girl who never smiled, made a clay sun, and it was happy and warmed everybody. And it was smiling. Violet asked this girl if she ever felt like this sun in real life. She said, “No! I can’t let myself be like the sun. If I do everyone will think things are good in my life and nothing will change.”
Look how quickly these girls went from a play technique into revealing deep pain and urgent need.
Violet says that if she were to ask a child, “What are you feeling?” or “What do you need?” they would most likely say “I don’t know,” or “Nothing.”
Instead of opening the conversation with direct questioning, she goes in the side door with play.
What we get to see in primal play is how the psyche works. For both these girls…
The play strategy allowed them to feel themselves, then feel for themselves, then fight for themselves.
By contrast, I’m thinking back to some periods in my therapy when I’d go for months hammering away at an issue directly. I’d talk and talk and talk and figure and figure and figure. I was stuck, but busy stuck, working hard to fill each session with intense analyzing.
But in those periods I didn’t get the breakthroughs I needed.
I was being linear and rational and direct, and I thought this is the way adults are supposed to do therapy.
But what I was really doing was building my defenses. I said I was trying to go deep so I could make important changes. But really I was keeping therapy at arm’s length. I wanted the benefits of therapy without going through the pain that comes with genuine therapy.
Then there were times when I got thrown off balance and let go of trying so hard, and was able to just be with myself, and let myself know the truth about how much I was hurting. Let myself experience that hurting, not holding back, not protecting myself from it. That’s when I made progress.
From the point of view of the human psyche, play, which on the surface might look indirect, is the fast track to healing.
When it comes to us upgraders, given how hard this journey is, and given how we need all our inner resources working for us, why would we deny ourselves a resource as powerful as primal play? Why wouldn’t we treat ourselves to it? Why not let it give us everything it’s got to give?
Doing the work.
Violet tells about a boy who was fighting with his brother nonstop. In the therapy session, she asked him to make a clay figure of his brother, then encouraged him to pound the figure down with a mallet. This boy was eager to do it, and did it over and over again, shaping the figure then pounding it flat.
There are people who are opposed to children expressing their anger. They believe it will make the anger worse. But this boy went home that night and had a peaceful evening with his brother. And from then on their relationship was significantly better.
How did this happen?
Violet gave him a jumpstart. She suggested the play activity…
But the boy did the work.
He felt his own feelings. He did his angry pounding again and again until he was done and didn’t need to do it anymore. He went through a transformation that, once Violet got him started, he managed.
And what was the secret? Well, we don’t really know. But my best guess, which is informed by my own experiences with anger, is that in expressing his anger in such a forceful way, he got to see that he could be bigger than it, he could take charge of it and manage it.
And then in subsequent therapy sessions, he was able to work on what was making him so angry. Which was not really his brother. It was just safer to take out his anger on his brother instead of the adults in his life who were the ones who were hurting him.
So…
This boy was not a passive consumer of therapy, but a proactive creator of his own healing.
He did the work. And maybe afterwards he felt, “I did that. It was me who did that.” And maybe then he had a deep sense of ownership of his healing.
Imagine if instead of going to Violet, this boy had been cornered by a teacher or minister or parent who gave him a severe talking to…
You should not fight with your brother. You should not be a bad boy like that. You should always be kind and thoughtful. You should never be angry. You should always behave like we adults want you to behave. And if you don’t we will punish you.
If this boy had been lectured to, what might have happened? Maybe he would have crossed into open rebellion. But more likely he would have been trapped inside his anger, and he would have held it in, and held it and held it until one day it exploded. And maybe this would have done long–lasting damage to his relationship with his brother.
Here’s another Violet story which illustrates how important it is to help the child find her own way to healing:
“A 13–year–old girl told me something at the end of our time together that I will always remember with gratitude and warmth. When I asked her what stood out for her in our work together, she said, ‘I’ll never forget our first session together. You took me on a fantasy trip and had me draw the place I came to. You never, ever lectured me like everyone else did. You never told me to shape up. I’ll never forget that.’ ”
And one more from Violet:
“An 11-year-old boy said to me when I encouraged him to talk as the superhero he loved to draw, ‘I know why you are asking me to do this. You want me to feel some power inside of me.’ ”
I love seeing what the kids can do in play therapy. They haven’t read any self-help books, they haven’t studied psych textbooks, they couldn’t write a term paper or give a TED talk about therapy, but…
They are able to create a remarkable, intuitive relationship with the healing powers of their own psyches.
What about us upgraders? Luckily for us, there are no easy-step programs for upgrading love or dealing with the death of hope. So from the get–go we get to be proactive creators because there isn’t an alternative for us.
And it’s true with this as with so many other things, that no one can take our journey for us. We have to take charge of our own development and progress. That’s how it has to be. It’s not possible to upgrade the love in your life, if you don’t do the work yourself.
Although let’s hope there’s a lot of play mixed in with that work.
Delight.
Violet tells about a girl loaded up with anger. So she invited this girl to make a clay figure, then take a mallet and pound it down and shout out all the things that made her angry. The girl got into it and her anger was intense, but then between the forays of anger, she started bursting into giggles. Like she couldn’t help herself.
And why was this happening? My guess is because she was no longer trapped inside her unhappy anger with no exit. She took charge of it. Instead of it hurting her in repressed silence, it nurtured her in the process of bold expression.
Even when I’m suffering through a low point in my upgrade journey, it always happens that…
If I look a little deeper, I find an undercurrent of delight.
Meaning delight in the fight.
Your own best friend.
This story is from Violet about a ten–year–old boy:
Andrew saw himself as clumsy because he banged into things and fell down a lot. In one of his sessions he drew a picture of the clumsy part of himself, which he named “Mr. Klutz” and who he said he was disgusted with.
Then Violet gave him a fairy godmother puppet and asked him, through the puppet, to talk to Mr. Klutz. After a while, through the puppet, Andrew said to himself, “At least you try things!”
He then turned to Violet “in wonderment” and said, “That’s right! I do try things!”
And now instead of being his own worst critic, he was his own best friend. With this shift, he became much less clumsy at school and at home. And when he did do something klutzy, he asked this fairy godmother to talk to him and tell him how much she liked him.
If someone had tried to pep talk Andrew into a better relationship with himself, I doubt it would have worked. But because he found his own way there, this breakthrough took hold and stayed with him.
When I look back at my pre-mission days, I see that I was suppressing my longing for a better kind of love.
But once I claimed that longing and launched myself on my upgrade journey, I began to be a coherent person like never before. And over time, became an advocate for myself like I had never been. I became my own best friend. Not that I can’t have other best friends, too, but now I get to number myself among them.
Transformation.
Violet tells about 12–year–old Zachary:
Starting at age four he was often battered and he concluded that if he was being mistreated so badly, he must be a bad person and therefore he deserved it.
After the abuser was gone from his home, in his play–therapy sessions he began to recover a positive sense of himself.
Zach told Violet that even though he was doing better, sometimes at night at home he started feeling bad about himself again. He felt like he was four years old again.
Violet asked him to talk to his younger self and tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he never deserved to be beaten, that he was worthy of love. After practicing this in his sessions, Zach was able to do it on his own at home.
Zach went from despising himself to feeling okay about himself. But then he did something more. He transformed his identity…
He went from being a victim to being a healer.
What does this mean for us upgraders? We’re transforming our identities, too. We’re taking charge. We don’t suffer the downside of our humanness silently. We fight for better. We’re not victims of our circumstance, but healers, doing what we can to make a better version of human love.
And to finish, here’s one more story from Violet:
Molly, 2 years old, had been abused and abandoned. She was brought into a shelter and was crying non–stop. The therapist sat with her and held a big doll in her arms and said, “This is Molly—this is baby Molly.” Then she rocked the doll and murmured, “Poor Molly. I know you’re sad. I love you. I’m here with you.”
She handed the doll to Molly who immediately stopped crying. She hugged the doll against herself then began to rock the doll and croon to her.
Note: If you’d like to read more about primal play therapy, here are two books by each of the two therapists I featured:
Violet Oaklander
Hidden Treasure: A map to the child’s inner self
Windows to Our Children
Dennis McCarthy
“If You Turned into a Monster”
A Manual of Dynamic Play Therapy: Helping things fall apart, the paradox of play.
