Trauma and Play Therapy by Paris Goodyear-Brown

Author:Paris Goodyear-Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Figure 5.7 The Mighty Battle

Another nonverbal nuance of the narrative involved the miniscule changes you see in the images below. When we got to the part of the story where the owls are scared to come out of the castle, Randy looked more intently, with a photographer’s eye, at the placement of the owls inside the castle. It may help us to remember that Randy and his brother were removed together from their sexually abusive father. Internally, I wondered how close Randy was to the edge of his window of tolerance for focusing on this content. However, since the work was all happening in metaphor, the threat level was significantly reduced. I wondered if we might extend the moment of focus by shifting mediums. The world in the sand was one medium, rich with metaphor. The storytelling was a second medium for exploration. Would he appreciate a third medium? I decided to offer. He took a first picture in which the owls are deeper inside the castle and tucked close to the wall. He was not satisfied with the arrangement. He paused, moved the owls closer to the entrance, and took a second picture. It felt like he needed to depict the owls’ miniscule risk in coming closer and closer, by degrees, to the entrance of the castle to risk seeing the world differently. He would move them ever so slightly closer to the door and see how it felt. I printed off the pictures he had taken so that we could begin a hardcopy book at his next session. He was unhappy with the quality of one picture. His empty Doritos bag was sitting by the sandtray, and he wanted it cropped out of the picture, and while I am reasonably adept at editing, I could not figure out how to do this. Randy suddenly said, “I know! We can get Brad to do it.” Brad is Randy’s newly adoptive father, and enlisting his help was a huge shift: it acknowledged both a need for help and his growing internalization of his new dad as a “bigger, stronger, wiser, kind” person who is becoming his helper.

Figure 5.8 Two Guards Come to Help. The First Humans in the Animal World

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