‘I had come looking for an experience but left with only an explanation.’

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart

I recently came across a fascinating article on the importance of play, creativity, mindfulness and spontaneity, by Psychology Today blogger Ditta M Oliker Ph.D.

Increasingly it is being accepted that throughout the lifespan, play supports neurological growth and development while building complex, skilful, flexible, responsive and socially adept brains.

She writes that play has long been an important tool for the innovative therapist. And in light of neuro scientific research findings that there is an ongoing active interaction between the brain and the body – the brain affecting the body and the body affecting the brain – it is now clear that emotions can materially affect the body. There are thus important aspects of positive feelings such as delight, playfulness, feeling ‘good’, enjoyment, laughter, connectedness, and mirroring which are now seen and understood and validated as crucial elements of physical and psychological health.

Research offers evidence that the lack of free play has a strong negative effect on individuals of all ages.

How may all of this play out in a clinical setting?

Much psychological training is focused on the somewhat serious business of therapy, therapists trying to understand their clients and their worlds, and hopefully offering elucidating and useful comments, insights and interpretations, as clients talk about their lives and their histories.

The emphasis is often on the ‘skilled’ clinician trying to solve the conundrum of the client’s unhappiness and dysfunctional behaviour and, despite the ‘charade’ of therapist/client equality, suitably encouraged through increasingly nuanced and tendentious terminology of equality, little in the room changes. Thus, despite the fact that ‘patient’ becomes ‘client’ becomes ‘consumer’, while ‘Doctor’ becomes ‘therapist’ becomes ‘provider’, the clinical setting often is bogged down by its very seriousness. As Mark Epstein has written after having consulted a psychiatrist, ‘I had come looking for an experience but left only with an explanation.’ He had left the consultation reassured that his ‘condition’ had a name, but he was otherwise untouched by his encounter.

Playfulness, humour and delighted interaction is an ideal way to transform a clinical setting from a possibly didactic ‘helping’ but one-sided and unidirectional offering, to a mutually satisfying experiential interactions between two connected human beings both of whom mirror and share. And as I write these words, I mindfully hold that the session is about the client’s experience and not the therapist’s, and yet …

And let it be said that play and humour is far from being the vehicle to allow merely the client to move into a more authentic and experiential place, a place to experience their core. It is as much a vehicle which allows the therapist to break free from a limited and limiting role of Therapist in order to share as a ‘therapist’ in the therapeutic experience of mutual delight and fun.

In my next post I will describe some of the ways in which humour may be introduced into the room both in and of itself, as well as a means of fostering the here-and-now of the ongoing clinical interaction; so vital as our understanding of Mindfulness grows.

Michael Cohn – April 2015