CLINICAL EDITOR’S COMMENTS: Integrating transactional analysis theory into
sandtray can help adults attune and respond to their children in appropriate ways.
safe, seen, soothed, and secure (Siegal & Bryson, 2020). When healthy caregivers tune into their child’s feelings and behaviors, they better understand their child’s needs, and meet those needs directly or by helping them co-regulate and organize feelings (Siegal, 2020). As caregivers respond to their child’s emotions, wants, and needs, young children internalize this process and learn to self-regulate (Hughes & Baylin, 2012). Unfortunately, some caregivers carry the burden of unresolved intergenerational patterns that entangle with the child’s here-and-now behaviors and corresponding needs, ultimately impacting attachment within the relationship. When the caregiver’s own childhood experiences prevent them from being present in a way that recognizes and responds to their child’s needs, by their own childhood experiences, resulting in anger, blame, dismissiveness, or withdrawal.
H Transactional Analysis
provided a framework for understanding how ego states are shaped Parent, Adult, and Child. In contrast to psychodynamic theory, each ego state in TA represents a consistent pattern of feeling, thinking, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors related to the messages received from caregivers and other influential figures. The Child represents the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings experienced during the developmental years (Stewart & Joines, 2012). When one relates from the Child ego state, they may respond to present-day scenarios the Adult ego state as a “computer” (p. 12) that is grounded in the here-and-now, analyzes facts and data, and responds with currently available resources. None of the ego states are either all-good or in the present.
For example, when a child needs to have his sadness heard and validated, but his parents belittle or dismiss his feelings and walk away until he stops crying, this interplay between caregivers’ and
ealthy attachment
is developed when caregivers consistently provide the child experiences of being
child’s ego states may influence the child’s early decision (conscious or unconscious) to avoid sadness. This decision made sense in that context. In exchange, for not talking about his sadness, the is reinforced. When this boy grows up and becomes a father, he may interact with his children from his Child ego state lovingly and playfully. However, if the father is personally triggered by unmet emotional needs, he may act with the positive intent to protect his child, imploring his child to repress his feelings of sadness. In this case, the father is confusing his progeny’s needs with his own Child ego state’s needs.
Family therapists and play therapists recognize that when caregivers struggle with parenting,
they are often replicating
childhood dynamics and intergenerational trauma. From a TA perspective, the stored feelings and unmet needs held within the Child ego state can trigger “old decisions.” Old decisions may look and feel like they are coming from a Parent ego state. However, they were formed by the Child ego state during times in which children do the best they can to make sense out of and respond to the world within their limited capacities. For play therapists working with caregivers, it is important to guide parents into the awareness of this largely unconscious process so they can disentangle the there- and-then response from the reality. As caregivers identify personally missed childhood needs, they learn when and how to meet their child’s emotional, physical, and relational needs, facilitating a corrective experience for their own Child ego state by giving to their children what they didn’t experience themselves.
In adult play therapy, play therapists invite caregivers to identify and experience the inner child or Child ego state to increase awareness of unmet childhood needs and to increase empathy and compassion for their child and in themselves. Sandtray therapy facilitates perspective regarding patterns and triggers typically outside of the caregiver’s awareness (Homeyer & Lyles, 2022).
www.a4pt.org | December 2021 | PLAYTHERAPY | 11
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
