caseload, purchasing a play therapy tool or bibliotherapy resource, or requesting a computer for administrative purposes. Individually, this may include asking for a certain smell to be diffused in the treatment room, walking outside with a client or family on a nice day instead of working inside, or recognizing a need for grounding after a hard session.
Creating a home environment has been helpful. Both organizations provide a variety of snacks, drinks, warm beverages and cups of soup, etc., to feed clinicians’ minds and bodies. People congregate in our organizations’ kitchens and support each other over a cup of tea. Nurture House is developing a healing garden for the staff. When we hold hard things for a family, experience a loss or a disappointment in relation to the work, we can plant living markers to transform that trauma. Nurture House has weighted lap pads, fuzzy and heated blankets, and a Heavy Bear available for clinicians. Both organizations celebrate self-care decisions when clinicians pay attention to what they need.
We strive to balance caseloads between intensive trauma cases and other treatment issues. Lastly, we employ playful processing strategies. Clinicians can create a sandtray to process or reflect on a case to keep their “containers” healthy, particularly when countertransference is part of the exploration.
Keeping Our Containers Healthy We believe that play therapists, as therapeutic containers, hold the trauma in a tension that requires us to witness and honor the content without absorbing it. Some coffee or tea cups are easily washed and
replaced in the cupboard with no stain or residue of what was held, while others show a long history of previous stains. What’s the difference?
Nonporous cups are glazed in layers that render the inside surface smooth; porous materials will absorb and retain different flavors and aromas from the beverage. If our boundaries are too porous, we hold the flavor of clients’ trauma stories. It is impossible to have impermeable boundaries. However, when we provide an insulated container, the essence of the child or family’s story is preserved while the steam (iatrogenic trauma responses) is vented, diffusing it into the larger airspace. Garry Landreth uses a similar analogy about rinsing individual therapist’s work between sessions, cleansing the mental treatment.
Conclusion The stress associated with engaging in emotionally demanding work 2011). Detail fatigue may contribute to further dissatisfaction. Self- care and organizational care are critical in helping play therapists leach the toxicity out of clients’ trauma, for our families and for us. When organizations become good-enough containers, clinicians can more easily hold trauma stories, cleanse their own containers, go home to enjoy their families, and come back to do it all over again. We can preserve our best self – for our clients and our families – by not taking the trauma home with us.
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www.a4pt.org | June 2019 | PLAYTHERAPY | 45
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