CLINICAL EDITOR’S COMMENTS:
struggle-shaped superpowers could beautifully color the landscape of play therapy. Such innovation reveals unexplored pockets of potential that play therapy could access to reach a broader community and meet often unnamed needs of disabled children navigating complex lives. Let’s get to growing.
Beginning the Conversation Disability can be seen as a socially constructed concept (Friedman & Owen, 2017). Being born with or developing an illness, impairmentand/ or difference doesn’t automatically create disability. It’s when people with these situations encounter a non-inclusive world that disability forms. That’s the basis of ableism: systems and situations that were when those struggles or differences meet externally created barriers.
Ableism can be expressed through large macroaggressions, such as universities or workplace systems that make life more complicated for a disabled person (Lindsay et al., 2023). These might involve the kind of questions used as screenings in applications, how accommodations are requested, and whether those accommodations are consistently enabled. When a play therapist (or one in training) gets an implicit or explicit message from a professor or employer that they are a complication, then that therapist might doubt if they
On a different level, ableism is demonstrated and maintained through microaggressions (Kattari, 2020). Originally coined to describe tragically common everyday interactions that maintain a system of racial inequity, microaggressions now exist as an overarching concept that includes interpersonal insults, assaults, and invalidations of multiple marginalized people groups.
Some of the many possible ableist microaggressions showing up in play therapy might include stating the necessity that a play therapist rooms or furniture with accessibility features interfere with aesthetic and process, or that self-disclosure introduces unnecessary complications. (Many therapists with disabilities don’t have a choice about “being bipolar” or “faking a seizure,” the play therapist with a disability hears that their very existence is laughable and separate. When a person pretends that a coworker’s disability does not exist or makes assumptions about what (if any) accommodations are necessary, they reduce the disabled person’s agency. These microaggressions accumulate in a powerfully devaluing and dehumanizing manner.
engagement with challenge, within and between play therapists.
Before moving on from this brief discussion of ableist macroaggressions and microaggressions, we should address the concept of intersectionality. Some play therapists belong to more than one community that has been historically marginalized and oppressed. This multiplies the likelihood, and possibly the intensity, of experiencing macroaggressions and microaggressions. Overt, consistent, and proactive acknowledgement of this reality is needed in our play therapy community to begin the process of true healing for the harm done.
Why Doesn’t This Type of Inclusivity Already Exist? On the surface, it would be easy to believe that any subset within the minds in the profession. It is, after all, a discipline rooted in discussions of compassion and acceptance. However, espousing thoughts about these qualities is not necessarily indicative of actual introspection around what the inclusive and humble practices of compassion and acceptance might bring forward when deeply contemplated and distance without necessarily listening to how our inner worlds are wrestling with these complicated states of mind and emotion we commonly describe. Looking inward for missed opportunities of extending inclusivity with compassion and humility may bring grief. There may be guilt or shame. There may be an instinct to turn away even be painful awareness about one’s unprocessed place as part of the disabled community. These dynamics have likely interfered with therapeutic systems’ willingness to look at their own involvement in maintaining marginalizing elements for mental health practitioners with disabilities.
Simply put, contemplating inclusivity can scare people, if even at implicit levels. To become more inclusive means that we will need previously inclusive of clinicians with a range of visible and invisible (ones that aren’t immediately apparent like those experiencing chronic pain or longstanding emotional struggles) disabilities. It’s answers.
There is inherent risk in looking inward at complicity in
oppression and, while it is worth it, there are reasons that we don’t all live this way with regularity.
www.a4pt.org | December 2023 | PLAYTHERAPY | 11
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