...Or the story of the conception!
I qualified with a Post Graduate Diploma in Play Therapy from Roehampton in 2004 and initially practiced in schools, in a variety of rooms, mostly fairly small and with periodic interruptions. These happened despite all my attempts to ensure staff knew the sessions were not to be interrupted, including a large ‘no entry’ sign on the door!
I had chosen play therapy because many of the young people I had encountered in my day job as a specialist SEMH advisory teacher had little self-awareness and often did not know what they were feeling, and if they did, too many had poor language skills so could not articulate their thoughts and feelings. Play certainly was their prime means of communication and developmentally, often due to traumatic interruption, many were still in the early sensory exploration phase.
I began to wonder if being shut in a room was the best place for them and whether working in outdoor settings might not provide the more real and visceral sensory environment that they needed to process embodied experiences. But deeply drilled into me as a result of my training was the issue of psychological safety and the need for confidentiality.
Somewhere around the end of 2010, one of my colleagues who knew I had been looking at how I might take my play therapy practice into outdoor settings sent me a paper published earlier in the year in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. The authors, Martin Jordan and Hayley Marshall had been working in outdoor settings for some time as had many other therapists engaged in ecotherapy, wilderness and adventure therapy. However, what Jordan and Marshall’s paper – ‘Taking Counselling and Psychotherapy Outside: destruction or enrichment of the therapeutic frame’ did was to emphasize how aspects of the therapeutic frame, key features of which are the relationship and the environment are affected by moving outdoors. Their particular focus was contracting in relation to confidentiality (and timing), something I had been grappling with myself and in supervision sessions.
Although working with adult clients in psychotherapy is very different from working with children and young people in play therapy, the basic principles of the genuineness of the therapeutic relationship and the psychological and physical safety provided by the environment and supported by our boundaries or limit setting, hold true for either.
Following discussions with my supervisor I realized that I could conduct my play therapy sessions in outdoor environments and not compromise my client’s safety, the therapeutic relationship or confidentiality, so out I went.