Final fantasy 2

What is fantasy
It seems safe to say that fantasy or daydreaming is primarily a cognitive task. It involves thinking about stuff. So how is this different to memory? Memory is also a cognitive exercise that involves the recollection of past events but it has nothing creative in it where as fantasy does. Fantasy has to involve the fantasizer being creative and thinking up new ideas where as memory does not. Memory involves no creative thinking.

However it should be noted that memory and fantasy can often go together. Each of us at some time has recalled a past event (memory) and then fantasised about what I really wanted to do and say in that situation being recalled. As psychological research shows human memory is very fallible and is notoriously unreliable. This may explain one way by which it can become unreliable.

Memory + fantasy = new memory.

Over time the person comes to believe the recollection of the facts of what happened is indeed a recollection of the facts that did happen plus fantasising about the event.



The other thing about fantasy is that it has to result in some kind of mood change or serve the person some kind of psychological advantage. It seems safe to say that over time a person will not engage in a cognitive task if it does not benefit him in some way.

Thus we have three main characteristics of fantasy:
It is a cognitive process
It involves creative thought
It causes some change in mood or leads to some kind of psychological advantage

It is sometimes said that the more intelligent are more likely to be neurotic. From my observations I would tend to agree with this truism. The more intelligent one is the more they can think up the thoughts required for a neurosis to exist. If the person who reports a snake phobia is asked what they think about snakes they may say something like they are all slithery and slimy and hide and jump out at you when you don’t expect it. The person of low IQ is less able to think up all the bad things just cited about snakes.

With this in mind we now can assess a persons ability to fantasise and indeed their propensity to use fantasy as a way to cope or use it neurotically.



IQ + CQ = FQ

Intelligence quotient + creativity quotient = fantasy quotient

The higher the intelligence and the more able one is to think creatively the more propensity one has to fantasise.

Magical thinking and fantasy
Are these the same thing? Magical thinking in the technical sense involves a person believing something that is magical. If they do or say something that will result in some outcome that defies the laws of nature. For instance a man who prays three times every night as he believes it will prevent his mother from dying. Or the father who believes if he has angry thoughts about his daughter she will get ill. If a woman walks under a ladder she is convinced she will suffer bad luck.

These could be seen as fantasy thinking and thus one could say that fantasy is a central part of magical thinking. It transcends from fantasy to magical thinking when the individual ceases to realise it is fantasy and takes it to be factually true.



Fantasy and behaviour
This is a misunderstood area that has caused much consternation over the years. It is not uncommonly presented by clients in therapy and most often relates to sexual or violent fantasies.

I recall recently a woman presented with what she referred to as a phobia of sharp implements. She reported being very frightened to open the draw in her kitchen and seeing the sharp knives. After further investigation it was discovered this caused much anxiety because when she saw the knives she would have thoughts of stabbing someone with them. She was most concerned that she would stab someone.

Indeed it was not really a phobia of sharp knives, instead she was frightened about the violent fantasies she had which were precipitated by viewing the knives. She was concerned that because she had violent thoughts that meant she was going to act on them. Not an uncommon connection which a lot of people make.

However it is a quite erroneous connection to make. Fantasy and behaviour are two quite different things, that involve two quite different psychological processes. The vast majority of people who have violent fantasies will never live them out and behave in a violent way. To be physically violent to others one has to have a particular psychological make up. One has to be under socialised. This diagram shows the usual socialised individual:



The vast majority of people have this psychological make up at least to some degree. There are specific groups who don’t, such as many in the prison system. In society in general the vast majority of people are socialised to not physically hit others. The person may feel frustrated such that the Free Child ego state wants to hit out or they may have violent aggressive fantasies. The vast majority of people have such aggressive or violent fantasies at some point and they will never act on them.

Their Parent ego state has been socialised such that it thinks hitting others is not right or an OK thing to do. Also the Adult ego state knows if you hit others you may be charged by the police with assault. Thus they never act on such violent fantasies.

As an example. Have a violent fantasy now and make it a good one where you can be as violent as you want. Of course you can, its JUST a fantasy. In fact have six violent fantasies in a row and draw pictures of them all one after the other. Then walk outside the house into the public. Are you going to hit anyone? I wouldn’t because I don’t want to hurt others and also I don’t want to waste a lot of time and money dealing with police, lawyers, courts and so forth. I have better things to do with my time and money.

Violent fantasy does not equate to violent action. If there is no parental socialisation against hitting out then there may be. If the persons thinking does not allow for the Adult controls to take effect then there can be. This is a very small group of people. The vast majority of people are adequately socialised in this way. It is not about the violent fantasy its about the structure of the personality of the individual having the fantasy.

I asked of my client who was scared of sharp knives.
Have you any criminal record?
Have you ever been charged with assault?
Have you been questioned by the police?
Have you ever stabbed someone or been physically violent in the past?
As a child were you ever physically cruel to animals or kill any?



Of course she answered ‘No’ to all of these. She has no history of any physical violence at all, in fact she is a kind and caring woman. That means it is extremely unlikely she will at the age of fifty years suddenly have a violent outburst and stab someone with a sharp knife. Instead she allowed herself to have all the violent fantasises she wanted, worked on some anger issues she had and that was the end of that problem.

What I am suggesting above is a fantasy is just a fantasy, simply a particular series of thoughts about something that does not mean the person wants to live it out in real life. Sometimes even the scientific literature fails to see this.

The psychological literature is interesting at times. It has certain things deeply embedded in it that the general public rarely hear about. Although quite interesting the press seem to avoid it for what ever reasons they have.

Over the years a significant body of research has evolved on the topic of rape fantasies which women have. A 2009 article in the Journal of Sex Research found that:
62% of women have had a rape fantasy
The average frequency of such fantasies is 4 times per year
14% of women who have such fantasises have them at least once per week.

9% find the fantasies complete aversive (fearful)
45% find them completely erotic
46% find them both aversive and erotic

There is some considerable variety in the content and form which these fantasies take.

These fantasies are of particular interest to psychologists because why would women have fantasies about something so repugnant? Two explanations have been proposed to answer this question.
1. These fantasies tend to occur in women with high sex guilt. Because the fantasy involves force she cannot be blamed for its sexual content.
2. They are just the natural expression of an open and guilt free approach to sexuality.

To my mind the question just cited fails to make the distinction between rape in real life and fantasy rape. As I have suggested above they are two quite different things. A fantasy is simply a series of creative thoughts that has little meaning for actual behaviour (in most instances). However as I have mentioned before they can be useful diagnostically.

My explanation for women having rape fantasies has little to do with actual sex. Rape is more about power than about sex. The rapist in real life has power issues that have become eroticised. I would see the same in rape fantasies. The woman has power and control issues. It may be that she feels she has little power and control in her life and she has eroticised that. On the other hand she may be the powerful one in the relationships in her life but she desires to be the dependent one and has eroticised that. There maybe many other things which the fantasy may mean depending on the actual content and form of the rape in the fantasy.

This post has sought to define what fantasy is and what are some of the features of fantasy. Fantasy is used for a whole variety of psychological reasons and that will probably be the content of Final Fantasy 3. For those of you who don’t know Final Fantasy is a very popular video game.

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The Parent contract and the no run contract (Part 1)

Here is another request.




A “No run” contract. I certainly have used this contract in the past, and it is that the client makes at least one more appointment before ending treatment. The motive behind it is that for some reason you want to lock the client in to this relationship. That maybe to close the escape hatch of running from a relationship when you feel reliance or for some other reason. The counsellor is seeking to increase the clients distress by not allowing them to ‘run’. Or indeed it may heighten a sense of security for the client. There could be a whole range of motives for a therapist to suggest such a contract to a client.



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Expressing internalized anger

The internalised anger transaction can take two forms.



Firstly the person receives information of some kind. It is disturbing information to which the person reacts in an angry fashion. The person may have been criticised at work, they may have got a “B” for an assignment when they expected an “A”, they may have been rejected by someone or many, many other possibilities.

Once the information has been acknowledged by the Adult ego state the internalised anger can be expressed in two ways which are indeed quite different in their origin and indicate two quite different psychological processes.

The person can express such anger at the Child ego state from the Critical Parent ego state (CP). This person can be said to have a large internal critic inside their head which at times actively scolds and derides them. The origin of this comes from an introjection in childhood of the parent figures around them.

The child may have observed mother and father being critical of others and themselves and he copies that. However the more potent source of an active internal CP is when the parents have expressed criticism of the person when they were a child. The young child is criticised directly by mother and father. This criticism is then internalised by the youngster and stored in their Parent ego state through the process of introjection.



Often the words the person says inside their head as an adult are exactly the same words that were expressed to the person as a child by mother and father. Or the self criticism is about the same kind of things mother criticised the about child as a youngster.

This type of self directed anger is the least pathological and the easier of the two to treat. As with all treatment contracts it is better to look at increasing some behaviour rather than decreasing behaviour. One would not want the contract to be - “I will decrease my Critical Parent comments”. Instead one would want the contract - “I will increase my Nurturing Parent comments”. If one increases their Nurturing Parent ego state then the Critical Parent will naturally go down. One focuses on the Nurturing Parent rather than the Critical Parent.



Interestingly if a person has a high internal critic directed at self then there is always the potential for it to be directed at others as well. If one is working with a client who has a high CP for self then one also wonders if there are high CP thoughts about the therapist as well.

Some with a high CP for self can also have a high CP for others. Those critical thoughts of others may be openly stated or they may never be stated and just remain internal thoughts. But the potential is always there compared to the individual who does not have a high internally directed CP.

Child ego state anger
As the diagram shows the other type of internally directed anger comes from the Child ego state and is directed at the Child ego state. As a consequence these angry statements are not introjects from our parent figures. Instead they result from decisions that the Child has made about itself. These represent more serious psychopathology and thus the person can be seen to be more ‘damaged’.



The nature of the CP statements tend to be; “I am bad because...”

The Child ego state angry statements may also be precipitated by an event and thus one gets statements like: “I am bad because..... and there is an inherent badness in me anyway”. At other times there may be no precipitating event and the person simply expresses anger at self for no obvious reason. At times this can result in self harming type of behaviour.

Whilst an internal directed CP is common, almost every one has an internal critic of some kind. The internally direct Child statements are far less common. It requires the person to believe and feel there is something basically and intrinsically bad about self. This probably represents 5% of the population. As a result it is much more difficult to treat as one is looking to remediate a basic belief about self and not simply encourage NP statements to counter the CP statement from the Parent ego state.

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Adult ego state strengthening **

This post is on the Adult ego state for my Serbian friend Mirko.

This will be a work in progress. I will write some now and then add to it as the days go by and I think of things to say.

The Adult ego state is suggested in many psychological theories as the state of psychological health. In the Adult ego state the person sees the world as it is in the here and now and the person is not reacting to the world as they did when they were a child. (i.e. not in the here and now but reacting in an archaic fashion).

Living in the here and now

As a result many psychotherapies are designed to give the person more access to their Adult ego state. They aim to assist the person to get into their Adult ego state and to stay there. In these approaches awareness is seen as facilitating cure. The assumption is awareness is cure, and thus some fall down a bit on this assumption.

The first and most obvious example is Freud and psychoanalysis. One of the main goals in psychoanalysis is to make unconscious material conscious. For instance through dream interpretation one can access the client’s unconscious. Once done the client can become aware of it (i.e. make it conscious ) and then they will be cured because they will understand the unconscious and can act in a conscious way (the Adult ego state).

CBT is the same. You seek the irrational thoughts or thinking errors and once discovered the person then can think about them and then use certain strategies to nullify them so as to remain in a rational state of mind. With feelings in CBT one thinks about them. What lead up to me feeling this? What irrational thought is underlying the feeling? And so forth. Once discovered one can be in the Adult ego state and fix things and avoid such situations in the future.

Classical TA is all about Adult awareness as well. One analyses games and scripts. Once understood one is more aware of them and thus can choose to stay out of games and so forth.

Whilst there are some significant difficulties with the idea that Adult equals health or cure without a doubt the more one has access to their Adult ego state and can stay in their Adult ego state when under stress the more they are going to deal with difficult situations in a productive way.

People can move out of their Adult ego state in two ways because there are only two other ego states. The Parent and the Child. If the person stops thinking in Adult and moves into the Child ego state that is called regression. The person regresses to an earlier state of being. They start to think and feel like they did when they were 7 years old. They will adopt their old problem solving styles from those early years which most often are not effective and lack logical problem solving.

Regression

The person may also move out of their Adult ego state by moving into their Parent ego state. This is sometimes known as crystallisation, because the persons thinking and problem solving becomes crystalline and thus lacks any flexibility which the Adult ego state think has.

For example, the person may say we drive this way to work because we always drive this way to work on a Monday. This is a Parent ego state solution to the problem of which way to drive to work. It has no flexibility. The Adult ego state solution is, “We drive this way to work today because the man on the radio said the other way has a traffic jam.” It is flexible depending on the current environmental conditions.

In older age when one starts to loose the Adult ego state functions with a bit of dementia people will go either into regression or crystallisation. With crystallisation they can be quite infuriating to debate with because they will not be willing to see any new information or other ways of thinking.

Which ego state?

Of course some people will move out of Adult thinking much earlier in life and start problem solving with regressive or crystalline thinking. This can occur for many reasons and what is required is Adult ego state strengthening exercises. That is ways and means of strengthening the Adult ego state such that the person can maintain it better under stress.

I will outline various ways of doing these over the next few days as I add to this post. But for starters one would usually begin with awareness of the ego states and that can be done with the “Parts Party” exercise.

One gets three pieces of paper and writes Child, Adult, Parent on one of them each. They are placed on the floor. The therapist gets the client to stand on the piece of paper with Adult written on it. They are given something to talk about such as a person, a relationship, a difficulty they are currently having at work. Usually it is related to the reason why they came to therapy in the first place.

I think they are fairly sure to get their wish

When standing on the Adult ego state paper they can only say things from their Adult. If they start talking from their Parent or Child ego states the therapist brings this to their attention and they move to that bit of paper and speak from that ego state that they moved into. They move to the various bits of paper as the exercise goes on and are allowed to only speak from that ego state.

This lets the client get some idea of what the various ego states are like and is allowed to begin to differentiate the three. They start to experience what it is like being in Adult, then Child and then Parent. They get a first hand experience of each ego state.

In addition they may have thought they were being in Adult when in fact they were in Child or Parent. So this can be an ego state decontaminating exercise as well. It will also show the client and the therapist what ego states they are most comfortable with and know the best. If they move onto the Parent piece of paper and find it very difficult to say anything one knows they spend little of their time in that ego state. If they move to the Child ego state and speak freely they are comfortable in that ego state.

After time as the client gets used to this exercise they can begin to correct self. If they are talking in Adult and feel self slip into Child then they can self correct which is the whole idea of Adult ego state strengthening. They begin to get an understanding of what it feels like to move out of Adult into the Parent or the Child and thus they can then self correct. Thus if they are in discussion with someone they can do the same and thus avoid communication difficulties.

One can do this exercise with other ego states like, NP, CP, FC, RC, CC & A.

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Transference cure and introjection

It is interesting how at times normal psychological processes can end up being defined as pathological states. The American Psychiatric Association (1994) in the DSM-IV discuss what is known as a Folie a Deux or shared psychotic disorder.

In this case two people who are in a close relationship over time develop the same delusional belief system. This could include a delusion where suicide is seen as the only real solution. Usually there tends to be one dominant party and the more submissive party takes on the delusion of the other. This means that should the relationship end the more submissive party will tend to drop the delusion over time even though the submissive party probably has a tendency to have the same delusional beliefs.

However this happens in every relationship that has an attachment. As I have said before when an attachment develops both parties take on personality characteristics of each other. There is a blurring of their identities and the process of introjection occurs where one literally takes in the personality characteristics of the other.

Transactional Analysis can explain this process at least in part with the development of the Parent ego state. That ego state is merely a collection of parent tapes as they are called and can be drawn as such;

Each person we model off will be incorporated into our Parent ego state. The more emotionally important they are for us the more we will introject them into our Parent ego state. This can occur in a marriage as is shown in the diagram below. Here the wife is incorporating the husband into her own personality.

In this process it is not necessarily equal and the less emotionally potent figure will tend to introject more of the dominant figure than the other way around. This is a natural process that is inevitable. It will occur unconsciously and relentlessly in all significant relationships one has.

If the husband happens to have significant paranoid delusions then we have a Folie a deux with the husband seen as the ‘inducer’ as they are called. If they should separate then the wife’s paranoid delusions will subside over time as her Parent ego state readjusts and the other ‘tapes’ gain more of a presence in her personality or she may even begin incorporating a new partners Parent ego state who is not delusional.

There is nothing odd about this process. We are all doing the same psychological processing everyday. If his wife happens to be of a low self esteem and the husband happens to be a strong character who believes in himself and others then she will tend to take those personality characteristics in as well. Over time she will begin to have a ‘spontaneous recovery’ as it is called. How much that recovery occurs depends on how strong the Child ego state believes she is worthless, the strength and quality of the relationship with the husband, how selective her perception is, other Parent ego state influences in her current life and so forth.

But it is certainly not going to hurt the wife if this situation exists. However what usually tends to happen is people who believe they are of little worth will tend to form relationships with others who also believe they are of little worth. So the wife would be constantly introjecting new Parent ego state tapes that support her self deprecating beliefs.

This introjecting process can manifest in other interesting ways. It is particularly strong with teenagers and why ‘peer pressure’ is particularly important in that stage of development. In childhood it is the parents who dominate the young child’s attachments and thus dominate their introjections and Parent ego state tape incorporation. For a child the mother is the inducer and the child introjects her personality. If the mother has paranoid delusions then they may develop a shared paranoid disorder together.

When the child becomes an adolescent it begins to form strong attachments to others besides the parent, most often its peers. The parents rapidly begin to loose their psychological control over the child because the child is not dependent on them for its primary attachments. It starts developing its primary attachments to its peers.

In addition to this adolescence is when there is a growth spurt of development in the Parent ego state. Parent tape introjections are particularly influential at this point as the teenager’s Parent ego state is immature and very susceptible to influence by tape incorporation. Mothers and fathers realise this at some level and can become quite concerned of the peer pressure that they feel their son may be under. The introjection process is particularly prominent in adolescence.

This same process can also explain how a suicide pact may develop. Just as two people can develop shared paranoid delusions they can also develop shared delusions about all sorts of things including suicide. As they talk about suicide over time their Parent ego states can become more and more similar and thus become more and more supportive of each others beliefs about suicide as a solution to problems. Eventually one can end up with a suicide pact where both parties attempt suicide together. Again teenagers can be particularly susceptible to this as their Parent ego states are immature.

Then we can have the same process in what is called a transference cure in psychotherapy. The introjection process is at times quite prominent in the counselling process. If the therapist and client form a significant attachment then they will of course be introjecting each other into their Parent ego states. In this situation most often it is quite uneven and the therapist is very much the ‘inducer’ with the client doing much more introjecting than the therapist. However it still will occur both ways. Over time the therapist will become one of the client’s Parent ego state tapes.

When this happens you will hear client’s say things like. “I was talking with someone the other day and I suddenly realised that I sounded exactly like you”. Or the client will adopt some behavioural idiosyncrasies of the therapist and maybe adopt some similar dress or other attitudes they have.

This is sometimes called a transference cure. By introjecting the therapist the client is introjecting beliefs that the client is OK, worthwhile and important which the therapist believes. As this new tape becomes more influential in the personality it will dominate more and more and thus the pre-existing tapes which told the client they are bad and worthless will have less impact.

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Highs, lows & life

I like it when an idea comes together. This post has its roots in two separate writings that are far apart but that I did just happen to read at about the same time. They worked as a catalyst for each other and bingo!! I ended up with this.

My delay in writing this is because it comes from a Parent ego state contract given to me by Kahless - yes it’s all her fault!

She wrote about her teenage years (see here) and then said that I had to because she did. She says that her teenage years were a bit boring. Well I must admit, from what she wrote one could conclude that but I suspect there were bits that she deleted or didn’t elaborate on that could have spiced it up a bit.

So I thought about my teenage years and what I could write. As I did this I also read a brief article written by a psychologist about what in essence amounts to a meditation and relaxation approach to therapy. It stated that when ever one had a negative emotion (she actually used that phrase) like anger or sadness or fear then one can basically meditate it away, and she describes how that is done.

This disturbed me and made me question what I do as a therapist.

My teenage years weren’t boring, like some others may have been. It was charged with a lot of highs and a lot of lows (and a few mediums as well). There were not a lot of dull moments and there was plenty of action both physically and emotionally. The good times were great and the low times were sometimes very low.

Then I thought, well if I successfully did the meditative therapy as suggested by this woman then there would be very few low times. I would of only had highs and mediums in my teenage years.

OMG!! Is that what I am doing with my clients? I hope not.

But then I was left with another conundrum. As I reflected on my teenage years I felt good about them because there were highs and also because there were lows. I wouldn’t want a life where I only had highs and mediums so I felt good about the lows as well. It made me feel like I had lived that part of my life such that it had texture and varied experience which is what I want in my life. It gave me a feeling that my life at least at that time had some depth and was full flavoured. I liked that.

But then came the conundrum. The low times gave my life some depth and also it allowed me a more fuller and complete understanding of the highs and the mediums. If I had never had any lows then my understanding of the highs and mediums would be limited and one dimensional.

Upon reflection I was glad that I had had the lows but at the time of the lows I was not glad at all and wanted the lows to go away. If I had successfully done the mediative therapy then I would have achieved that but then on later reflection my life would only have highs and mediums and thus be one dimensional and boring.

So are the lows a good thing or a bad thing?

As a therapist am I stopping clients having lows so their lives are more one dimensional, lack a depth and rich texture?

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The therapeutic relationship with the teenage client

Sometimes when you run a workshop you end up leaving with more questions than answers. This happened to me recently at a workshop on “Counselling with teenagers” in Belgrade. Here is a picture of me with the group.

Sometimes I get a question or group discussion where I don’t have a response and it sparks some more thinking and research on the topic for me.

At one point in this workshop I was asked about my approach to the counselling of teenagers and did I come from a parent position. That is do I see my self in a parent type role with the teenager. This did not mean necessarily in a Critical Parent type of role but overall do I feel like a parent type person when working with the teenager.

As I thought about the answer I found this question perplexed me. I obviously had not thought about the topic in detail before. My initial response to the question was yes and no. Which obviously is not a clear answer because I did not have a clear answer. As I thought about it at the time the ‘yes & no’ answer was right for me but I did not answer the question to my satisfaction (or the participants I would imagine).

How do I relate to the younger client?

As the discussion continued someone then said that as I did not see myself in a clear parent position then did I relate to the teenagers in a sort of peer role. Like a friend to the teenager. My answer to this was with a more definite, “No”.

Then it was stated that if I did not come from a parent type role or a friend type role what was my role? My answer to this was, I don’t know.

Travelling to Serbia and Croatia from Australia means I am on the road for about 24 hours (well more in the air than the road). I find this very useful time in that I can do precisely what I did in this instance. On the trip back I basically sought to answer the question that was asked and could not answer for the group.

The time allowed me to make many notes and formulate my thinking on the question of the therapeutic relationship with the teenage client. I now have a much fuller answer to the question should I ever be asked it again.

I understand now why I was perplexed with the question and did not have a clear answer. After much deliberation on the subject my answer involves articulating a complex set of relationships which I will do in the near future.

It seems I got something out of the workshop as well!

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Group therapy with children

In the previous post I mentioned how I originally trained in group therapy with children. Historically play therapy rooms have been set up with a whole array of apparatus that allows a child to express itself. For instance there can be drawing equipment, a sand tray, clay, paint, water play area and so forth.

The theory behind this is that the child through the use of such expressive opportunities will begin to display their internal conflicts or emotional distress. For instance with drawing the child can draw conflicts in the family or between its own internal ego states. This allows for the therapist to begin to understand what the child’s internal conflict and emotional state is like.

Some then hypothesise that as the child displays its angst through play that will allow it to express them and thus they will reduce. This is typical of the theory behind art therapy and some psychoanalytic perspectives. Alternatively those who follow more of the Carl Rogers approach see play as a means by which the child can express itself in the presence of a therapist. That therapist provides an environment that is safe, empathetic and unconditionally accepting of the child. It is the theorised that the child in such an environment will naturally begin to grow and develop towards health.

The woman whom I did my first two years of play therapy group training with was quite psychoanalytic in her perspective. The psychoanalytic, art therapy and Rogerian perspectives described above to me certainly hold merit. When running play therapy groups I use those approaches.

After I finished my training in play therapy I went out on my own and ran groups. Over time I noticed that they changed from the style of my original training. As I worked with children I found myself moving onto other techniques that seemed to have a result. This was not a cognitive process on my behalf but more of an intuitive process that just evolved over time

Three techniques that developed over time.

1. The approaches described above one could call quite passive approaches. The child is simply left to its own devices and would proceed and progress at its own pace with little direction from the therapist. That is indeed why Rogerian therapy is sometimes called non-directive therapy. Over time I found myself becoming more action oriented with the children which more suited my personality as a therapist. Instead of just letting a child express itself through drawing or clay I would be much more interactive in my questioning and comments with the child as he played. Asking what this and that was, requesting that they draw word bubbles for the people they were drawing, asking them to write what the various parts or people were thinking and feeling. Getting them to include pets and various other people and objects in the drawings or plasticine.

This allowed for more diagnosis and also I was getting the child to identify its internal conflicts and to basically do two chair. Offering them the opportunity to expressed the unexpressed feeling or thought or need.

2. Whilst the techniques being employed tended to be more action oriented so was the relational. The therapeutic relationship between the child and myself moved away from the passive “blank screen” therapist that one would find in the psychoanalytic and Rogerian approaches. When a child made some kind response to me directly I would seize upon it and use it to some therapeutic advantage.

For instance if an anxious child with a high Conforming Child ego state said or did something a bit rebellious to me I might highlight it and request that she do it again or some other derivative of it to me directly. Alternatively if there was another child in the group who expressed some defiance of me I might ask the conforming child to see if she could say the same thing to me. Once done she gets to experience the new behaviour and sees that my response back to her is not catastrophic or demeaning and so forth.

The relational contact between the child and the therapist became very interactive and goal oriented with myself manipulating it in various ways for various means. Over time this became a point of significant departure from how I was originally trained.

Again this was not a conscious goal of mine but it just evolved over time. As I became more adept and confident in working with children in the group therapy setting I think I just allowed my own natural personality to come out in that forum. This is certainly what I say to trainee therapists. Initially you begin as a technique based therapist. What you do with the client is based on what techniques you have learnt in your training. As one gets more confident then you the therapist as a person enters into your therapeutic style. One transforms from being a therapist named ‘Tony’ to being “Tony’ who happens to be a therapist. Hence the client will experience you as a person who also happens to be a therapist rather than the other way around.

3. Finally there was the development of romp play. By far the most common approach in play therapy with children is as I described before. A low key, meditative, self explorative type of approach. Over time I developed this thing called romp play which is a far more cathartic approach. It is high energy, boisterous, jumping, rough and tumble, very interactional type of play. From what I have seen of the literature this is quite unusual. Whilst some other approaches do have some cathartic methods they are nothing like the romp play described here.

Originally it evolved as a method for children to develop their own internal Parent ego state controls. It is structured such that the group proceeds with - romp play on, romp play off, romp play on, romp play off and so forth.

Romp play is high energy Free Child behaviour. Whilst that is all good and well the problem with high Free Child is people can end up getting hurt physically and emotionally. Unrestrained Free Child can be dangerous. One needs to develop a Parent ego state that can control it when necessary. In the group any child could put a stop to the romp play at any time by using a prearranged word and all the romp play would stop. Those children who found it hard to stop would be stopped by the therapist. This allowed the children to begin incorporating this into their own Parent ego state. They learnt how to be Free Child and how to contain it when necessary. They were learning the internal controls to do that by their own Parent ego state.

However I think there is more to romp play than just this, although it is hard for me to articulate what that actually is. I could just recite the theory and say that the Free Child is that natural part in all of us and thus when expressed we are being our natural selves in this way. One can assume that when such expression is achieved this will be therapeutic in itself. This is probably all true but there is something that nags in the back of my mind about this. There is something more to this romp type of play for children that I feel the theory is yet to enunciate. When children have an opportunity to do a very free type of play and relating there is some kind of therapeutic effect on them that I cannot yet describe.

Graffiti