No. 1964
“ ... a safe place to act out their subjective
experience.”
The following submission by Patricia LaPalme illustrates the complexity of the work that we do and the need to be diligent about reflecting on our practice. Further, she clearly illustrates that communication is multifaceted and as such requires us to pay attention to the ways in which we listen to and hear the voices of children.
I am entering the field of Child and Youth Care with full knowledge that I am only just beginning an education that I hope will be a life-long journey of discovery about families and their children. I expect to learn as much about myself in this process as I do about the families I will be involved with. Most of the children that I had encountered through my educational practices were under the age of 10. We spent many hours together doing recreational activities outside when the weather was fair and doing art and play therapy inside when the weather was inclement. I spent time with their parents apart from the time that I spent with the children and was honoured that these parents shared their life stories so generously with me. They indicated that they were grateful to have someone who was willing to be present with them and provide a safe place to be heard in.
My fourth-year CYC practicum raised practice questions for myself that I will continue to look for answers to. As an individual who places a great deal of credence on what is said and as one who loves language, it was difficult for me to make the shift away from relying on language as the door into another's subjective experience. The children I spent time with told me more about their subjective experience by what they did than what they said. In fact, the times that they did use language they were often so indirect that it was only in later reflecting on an interaction that had taken place with a child that the meaning of what they had said to me would become clear. While in the moment, I was only attending to the surface of the words and not their deeper meaning. On other occasions I was often momentarily speechless by the children's use of language. Two separate incidents occurring with two different children illustrate these phenomena.
Near the end of my practicum I had started to prepare a family for termination of my services. I was meeting weekly with a parent and his son, working individually with both of them. About a month and a half before I knew that my time with them would be up, I started to discuss this with the father. As the time drew closer, I also told the son that soon, I would no longer be meeting with him. His immediate reaction was to ask who would be meeting with him after me. He did not express any type of reaction to my leaving. However, it was either in that same session or in one that occurred soon after that out of nowhere he posed this question to me, "Have I ever done anything wrong in this room?" The question took me by surprise. It was unlike this child's usual style of communicating, and I could not imagine why he would be wondering about this. I reassured him that he had never done anything "wrong" when we were together. I asked him why he was wondering about this and if he thought he had done something wrong while he was there. I did not receive a clear response to this, and the child's question nagged at me after we parted. Then it came to me — perhaps he thought that my departure from his life was based on something to do with his behaviour. This same child started to hide from me at some point in every session. I would have to search the whole building to find him, and when I finally found him and would ask him why he had hidden, he would say, "I wanted to see if you would come looking for me." My assumption around this behaviour is that he wanted to know that I cared enough about him not to abandon him. Abandonment had been played out a number of times in this child's life. His mother had been out of his life since he was a toddler, and his father reported to me that he told his son on a regular basis, when the two of them were not getting along, that if the child thinks it would be better living in another family then he could go live in foster care.
The other incident took place with a six-year-old boy during a session in the art and play therapy room. He was playing in the sandbox with a rubber alligator and a couple of small dolls. He had gone to great lengths to bury the alligator completely in the sand. We were discussing the burial and that the alligator was dead. He then uncovered it and brought it out of the sand, at which point I said, "Oh, you've resurrected it." He asked what resurrected meant, and I told him that it was raising something up from the dead. He looked directly at me and said, "Can that happen with people?" In the seconds that passed before I answered him, I was thinking about his biological father whom he scarcely knows but who he is aware has an illness that will eventually cause his death. I was wondering about his family's religious beliefs and whether if I gave the child what I considered to be a truthful answer it would be in conflict with what he had been told at home. Finally I answered him by saying, "No, I don't know anyone it has ever happened to," questioning whether I might be taking away whatever straws of hope that he was hanging onto around his father's invincibility.
Both of these children told me far more about their subjective experience through their actions and play than by the words they used to describe their experience. In some ways language was a barrier to reaching their inner experience. I recognized that art and play therapy was a way for the children I was coming in contact with to work through their inner struggles and fears. It was a situation in which they could orchestrate and have control over the outcomes. I felt cautious about labelling the behaviour I saw played out in our sessions, believing that labelling would be based on my own assumption and judgments. I struggled around language I could use in the monthly reports that I was required to submit that would adequately portray the experiences of the child without prejudicing the child.
During sessions I sometimes felt that I was superfluous to the work that the child was accomplishing and that I should be taking a more active role in some way. Gradually I began to understand that my role was one of being able to use my capacities for language to reflect what I saw back to the child, so that eventually they would develop affective language of their own around their experiences. Further, I was providing them with a safe place to act out their subjective experience.
My concerns about labelling the behaviour I observed in children were re-affirmed in a conversation I had with an art and play therapist who had recently moved into an office in my practicum site. She, too, believed that as practitioners we did children a great disservice when we started labelling their behaviour specifically. Unless we could ascertain unequivocally the source of a child's behaviour we were only making assumptions and placing our own judgments on the behaviour we observed.
PATRICIA LaPALME
LaPalme, P. (1999). Journal Entry. Journal of Child and Youth Care, Vol.13 No.2, pp.155-157
