For all its inviting toys and colors, sometimes a playroom isn’t what it seems. “This is a clinical space. This isn’t a playroom. It’s play therapy,” Jeannette Simmons says, sitting at a child’s table under a bus driver’s hat, a red phone at her side, as a play therapist might.
Imagine a 5 or 6-year-old child, maybe an abused child or one who’s just endured unspeakable trauma. The child has been incapable of expressing feelings as other children might. The child’s parents have been unable to connect. Play therapy enables the child to express those feelings as nothing else might.
That’s the purpose of the relatively new play therapy room at Flagler Cares, “a place to play, a place to heal,” as the plaque outside the room put it. It is one of Simmons’s parting legacies at Flagler Cares, the non-profit social service coordinating agency that operates the Flagler County Village at City Market Place, and where Simmons was the chief clinical officer until she went to Halifax Health in July to be the service line administrator of psychiatric services.
The play therapy room was her idea. The Early Learning Coalition, a partner at the village, “had extra money and asked us for ideas, and we always have this running list of ideas,” Carrie Baird, executive director at Flagler Cares, said. Simmons had also partnered with Jacksonville University’s play therapy program–back when Jacksonville University was still in town–to develop the room at the Village. She gave ELC a wish list.
“I never thought they would buy every single thing on the wish list, because I went really like crazy, having no idea of how much this stuff cost either,” Simmons said. ELC paid for most of what was on the list. Big boxes started showing up. Volunteers put it all together. “It was like an immediate thing. People wanted to use it. We didn’t even have the boxes unpacked,” Simmons said. “So it was really exciting to see the reception that people wanted to have a space. Play therapy is so important, especially when you’re serving little kids, because it’s really hard to sit across a child for 45 minutes doing talk therapy. It’s nearly impossible. You can’t do it. But in a space like this, you can recreate so many different scenarios and allow their imagination to roll, and you’re able to then do therapeutic interventions.”
Children naturally cannot express themselves as directly as adults can, even less so when they’re victims of trauma. They can express themselves through play, which can also allow them to speak the unspeakable. It’s not a new concept. Rousseau in his 1762 tract on education put emphasis on learning from children just by observing them. In the United States, Virginia Axline, who died in 1988, was to play therapy what Dr. Spock was to child-rearing, publishing a pair of books in the 1940s and 60s that became standard reference works for Child Centered Play Therapy, or CCPT.
“It’s not just like, just start playing, but you do let the child explore and kind of see what they gravitate towards,” Simmons said. “You just kind of let it evolve with the child and see what role-playing comes out of that, or what messages come out of that. You’re observing and you’re interpreting what’s happening, and you’re listening more than anything.”
Re-Nu is a mental wellness center based at Flagler Cares’ Village at City Marketplace. Joni Rodriguez is a licensed play therapist who uses the room at least once a week. Her husband Richard Rodriguez was a therapist at Re-Nu until his recent move to Flagler Cares, whose staff members also use the room.
Before she had access to the room, Joni would bring a few dolls or more often use art therapy–coloring, drawings–to her sessions. The play-therapy room is all toys. “I find the value in it because there are so many different resources in the room,” Joni said. “There is the ability to play doctor in one area, to do a classroom in another area, to have a kitchen set up, to play house, to play dress up. There’s so many avenues for the child to play, to pursue what they need to be working out.”
Most kids resolve a lot of their issues and are able to understand the world around them by the way they play. The therapist is there to observe, but not to guide. More often, the therapist is there to be guided. The room’s toys allow a child to recreate a disciplinary incident, a bullying incident, an instance of abuse, playing out what escalation or violence or a fight between the child’s parents might look like.
“This is where the art and the training comes in,” Richard Rodriguez says. “We allow the child to take control of the room, so they’re the ones who direct the action, and they invariably will allow us into the play.” The therapist will ask the child to be given whatever role the child wants to give, as if the child were a movie director on the child’s own set. “I follow their directions,” he says. “I had a child, she was being bullied at school. She was the teacher, and she was playing it out. And I was a student, and, you know, I was getting it from her.”
None of the treatment is court-ordered. Parents voluntarily bring their children in, typically after referrals from Flagler County schools. The parents are not in the playroom. The child has to have room to explore his or her or their own spaces independently of the altering dynamic of a parent’s presence. A child might be resistant at first, but sooner or later–in the 60-minute session, not longer–the child will play. And play will be telling, though typically it will take a few sessions to get at therapeutic results. Resolutions depend on the age of the child and on the issue.
“Long-standing issues of abuse and neglect for years and years and years, it’s not going to go away in six months,” Richard said. The aim is not just therapeutic but restorative.
Depending on what occurs in the therapy session, the therapist then has conversations with the parents– “how do we implement change in what discipline looks like in the household,” Joni says, “how can we go to the schools now and talk about this being clearly a bullying situation that’s happening in the classroom. Who can we talk to at the school about what’s happening, and maybe we can change the dynamic with the other classmates.”
Richard considers 40 percent of the play therapy experience to be parental education. That’s when the therapist works with the parent to better connect with the child, make life easier for the child and meet the child’s needs better. It may be obvious to some. It’s not as obvious to others, especially when they don’t realize there’s a missing need. “There’s times when the parent doesn’t know how to speak to the child or connect to the child,” Richard says. So it can get to the point where at times the parent must be in the playroom as a participant, if there is to be a breakthrough.
“There’s been innumerable times when we’ve sat on that playroom floor and played, the three of us together, the child, the parent and I, because sometimes a parent doesn’t even know how to play with a kid,” Richard says. “It’s a matter of teaching the family how to reconnect and how to have a better line of communication. Basically, I teach the parent how to cue in to the cues, as to what’s going on with the kid so they can read the child a little better and have a better outcome.”
The room is underused, because it’s relatively new, and therapists around town don’t know it’s there, though it’s available by reservation.
“The possibilities are endless,” Joni said. “It would be amazing if the forensics with DCF or law enforcement would be able to come in and use that.” She added, “any private practitioner in mental health, working with children the schools, some behavioral analyst individuals could work in the room with maybe ADHD, or some children on the spectrum. It’s available. It could be powerfully useful to a lot of different venues.”
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