SUMMARY: In this episode of “It’s Just Coffee”, hosts Kathleen Mills of Lifetree Counseling and Phillip Crum, Content Marketing Coach, discuss play therapy with Christy Graham.
Episode #26 | Kathleen Mills and Phillip Crum discuss child therapy with Christy Graham
Speakers:
Kathleen Mills-Proprietor, Counselor at Life Tree Counseling
Phillip Crum-The Content Marketing Coach
Christy Graham-LPC-S, Child Therapist
PHILLIP CRUM: Do you know what time it is, Kathleen?
KATHLEEN MILLS: I do, Phillip.
PC: It’s time for another happy episode of “It’s Just Coffee”. Give me an update on Lifetree. What’s new there? Anything?
KM: Nope. We’re good, busy, some are on vacation, but we’re busy. Both new therapists are up and running and they’re happy, and it’s fun.
PC: I went to a DFW SEM – Dallas/Ft. Worth Search Engine Marketing – meeting last night. I wasn’t going to go. I was almost home and I got a home from Bill Hartzer – a text, actually – and Bill Hartzer is a big dog in the SEO world. When Bill Hartzer calls and says, “I want to talk to you,” that’s the first thing you do is turn the car around. The second thing you do is call home and say, “I’ll be a little late.”
KM: See? You are intuitive.
PC: I am. I’m very intuitive
CHRISTY GRAHAM: I don’t know if that’s intuitive. That’s just following the rules.
PC: Did you hear something?
KM: The best. CG.
PC: So that’s what I did last night. It was quite entertaining. Bill did an hour-long presentation on Google and pandas and penguins and updates and that sort of thing, so it was quite enlightening.
KM: I appreciate you being there.
PC: I bet you do.
KM: I do.
PC: It would have bored you. It was very good, it was not boring.
KM: I don’t think it would have been boring. It would be overwhelming for me. My brain doesn’t do that.
PC: Good stuff. I got in bright and early this morning, before the rain, because we’re going to talk to…
KM: CG, licensed professional counselor supervisor, registered play therapist.
CG: Supervisor.
KM: Did I say that wrong?
CG: No, no, no. I supervise for two different licensures.
KM: You’re a registered play therapist supervisor, too.
CG: Yes, I am.
KM: Awesome. You are the girl today.
CG: I am.
KM: Thank you for coming in this weather.
CG: I love it when it rains.
KM: Especially in Dallas, in July. We’re supposed to get two to four inches today. Everybody’s happy.
CG: Absolutely.
KM: But it’s not very nice driving right now.
PC: She brought her driver with her.
KM: I know. We’ve got a guest… would you like to introduce our sweet little additional guest, Christy?
CG: This is my oldest, and she is 10 and beautiful, inside and out, I like to say, and that’s my daughter, Amalia.
KM: It’s nice. Take it in, girl. My kids used to be that small at one time.
CG: Yes, but they’re stinky boys.
KM: No, they’re awesome, sweat and everything. I loved it. I loved every bit. I had a call from my eldest one last night. It’s all good. Christy, I want you to tell our listeners about you. I want to tell them, first of all, your website so they can go to it now while we’re talking, but tell us about you personally, then we’ll segue into the professional part, if we can.
CG: Sure. My website is www.christygrahamlPC.com. Please go to the blog. I am having so much fun writing on that blog.
KM: I think it’s all fun.
CG: It’s all about play. Play is such an important part of our lives, and when you ask me about my personal life, I have two brothers – I am the middle – my mom and dad moved around a bit, so I’ve lived in Lampasas, Texas, El Dorado, Kansas; I was born in Enid, Oklahoma, and I graduated from high school – my second high school – in Conroe, Texas, which is just north of Houston. I’ve moved around a bit, but that gave me a really good experience, I thought. My favorite thing to talk about when I talk about play is how my brother and I used to play. My littlest brother and I would – he’s three younger than I – and we would pretend that our stuffed animals could talk; that our parents had died; and that we were in the middle of a forest.
PC: This is getting dark.
CG: We were in the middle of the forest and the FBI were after us, and our wonderful animals helped protect us and tell us when the FBI was coming. It wasn’t that we didn’t love our parents – we wanted them around – but what it was was we needed to be in charge, and we needed to have friends, because we knew we couldn’t take care of ourselves. It was just such a bright and shiny story that we played it so often, and I think that’s one of the reasons I’m really good at play therapy, because I remember how important those themes and stories were when I was a kid. I still think of my younger brother as one of my best friends. We shared so much for so many years. We lived on five acres, and when I say we were in the middle of the forest with our stuffed animals, we would take our stuffed animals out under the trees and build forts and do all kinds of stuff. It was really amazing.
KM: Those are endearing memories, aren’t they?
CG: They are so amazing.
KM: Powerful.
CG: They are.
KM: This has been your calling for quite some time?
CG: Yes. When I was 16, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a counselor and I actually wrote out a 15-year plan, and on almost everything, I hit it on the head. I was only late with Amalia. She was three years later than she was supposed to be. It wasn’t her fault, though. We were waiting for the perfect time.
KM: There you go. Tell me where your practice is located and all that.
CG: I am in Corinth, right behind Angelina’s Mexican Food, which I have to tell you, has not been helpful for me, because I am now reaching around 40 and I should be watching what I eat, and when you walk outside and you smell that, it’s just amazing. It’s right by NCTC and I have a little playroom and a little office and a shared waiting room, and it is really cozy.
PC: And you can see your office complex from 35, so if you get into the woods, then….
KM: North Dallas. It’s north of Dallas, off of I-35 towards Denton.
CG: Actually, I like to tell people I’m right behind the Geico house, because everybody goes up and down 35 to Denton, in between Denton and Lewisville, knows that big yellow house wth the Geico sign. If you turn on that street right in front of it, you’re almost at Angelina’s.
KM: Which you’re almost there.
CG: Exactly.
KM: How long have you been in practice? You got your LPC, and then the registered play therapist. Walk me through that whole thing.
CG: I graduated from Sam Houston in ’99. I should say that I am an Aggie. I graduated from there in ’96, but I went to Sam Houston for my master’s, and when I graduated, I worked for the MHMR. My story is that I really wanted to work with geriatric, chronically mentally ill people because one, it’s a wonderful population. People are really fun and there’s not as much stress because they’ve already decided everything. Second, it’s a growing population that needed a lot of care. I was thinking that would be a really great place. But God had a different plan as he always seems to do, and he changed everything around. I’m glad that He gets in the way. I was working with chronically mentally ill older people and then just moved to a different opportunity at a family center and started working with children. I went back to school and fell in love. I already had my master’s. I’m in the middle of getting in all of my hours for my LPC and I go back to school and find out how to play, and to play therapeutically. I loved it. It is the heart of my life. I love to go and play and learn about these kids, meet their families where they are, and move them to a place that they want to be. Most people aren’t exactly where they want to be, but the people who come to see me are in a worse place than that. They are hurting and discouraged and sad. Sometimes, they even feel like it’s their fault – the parents do, definitely.
KM: That’s where the play therapy really does its magic. You being a play therapist, registered play therapist, there’s another added perk to going and getting that extra certification because it really has brought back to your original – you and your brother playing with your stuffed animals in the forest and reliving those stories. The play therapy just has that all-encompassing foundational. Talk about the play therapy for just a little bit. Your main overview for people who really don’t understand. I think a lot of people don’t understand. What is play therapy? What is it about? It’s mysterious to most people, so to demystify it. Can you do that?
CG: First of all, play is the language of children. Toys are their words and play is their language. I have to say that, in playing with them, supporting the hundreds of children that I’ve worked with since 2000, is about when I started working with kids. I have to say you can get into somebody’s world faster through stories and play than you can get to them in any other way. It is an amazing way to connect with somebody’s brain and to connect with the way that they see the world, to connect with the way that they are experiencing life, and if that’s what…
KM: It’s how they see life.
CG: Yes. If that’s what therapy is about, which a lot of times, just getting to understand what the problem is, is helping people figure out how they can see things differently. If you’ve got to figure out how to change it, you’ve got to figure out what it is. Many, many, parents, adults, don’t understand the kids’ brains and the way that they interact with the world are very different. Very different.
KM: The play therapy bridges the gaps between parent, child. You bring them together, they understand each other’s different languages, and that’s what the play therapy does sometimes.
CG: My favorite thing to do, and it sounds a little strange, is to teach parents to do therapeutic play. I love that because then, I don’t have to deconstruct what the child did in therapy. There’s no secrets, they aren’t going to say goodbye to their therapist because the therapist is their parents. There’s a wonderful program called Child-Parent Relationship Training. It was developed at the Center for Play Therapy by Dr. Landreth and Dr. Bratton. Those two people have moved play therapy from the interesting but not necessarily evidence-based to a well-constructed, well-regulated – not regulated, because you can’t really regulate play.
KM: In a structured…
CG: Right. They structured this filial group in such a way to give people success and help parents to really get to know and connect to their children. Nobody’s going to listen to you if they don’t know that you care, so they’re not going to care what you’re going to say until they know that you actually care about them, and really playing with and setting aside that. Just 30 minutes a week is amazing. A lot of times what I do is I teach parents to be their child’s therapeutic partner. The second thing I do is I get to meet the child. I really love to take the family and just wrap around them and bring everybody in to the playroom that I can, because that is amazing. When a mom can see her son playing out his anger without having to control or be responsible for the boundaries, it is freeing.
KM: It’s powerful.
CG: Very. Because it gets to – and this is the thing that a lot of people miss about play therapy – it gets to the depths of your mind. I spent last week at the Center for Play Therapy’s summer institute. My favorite sectional was talking to Dr. Rick Gaskell about the neurological basis of play. Really, what he did is just say that play and stories connect with all the different parts of the brain. You can actually, when you’re telling a story that includes lights and sound and smells , you can put a little EEG thing on somebody’s head and see every part of their brain lighting up. If you actually have figures and toys and sand and things that smell and things that are ooey and gooey, you really get to the bottom of some of the implicit memories, those are memories you can’t really talk about, but inform your decision-making. Marketing is a lot about working with implicit memories, because you look at the colors, the sound, maybe the word choice, and all of that goes to the implicit memories that people have. The reasons they make decisions that they don’t always know why they make those decisions. So play really helps to heal those things that they missed and things that they haven’t.
KM: You love this because you haven’t stopped smiling ever since you started talking, because you really love doing this kind of work. This is your calling.
CG: I love it. I love playing but I also; honestly, you put a microphone in front of me. It’s awesome.
KM: I’m just going to talk about an adult going into play therapy without their child. I had a client a couple of years ago and there were some things that she was really stuck on. She was having a hard time. A very chronic client that I have had over the years. We went into the play. She kept looking over. I said, “Let’s go over.” We sat on the floor. I said, “Just pick whatever you want.” She said, “What are the rules?” I said, “There are no rules. Just don’t hurt me or you and we’re good.” It was really fascinating because it just lit up her brain. She was able to reconcile some things and we weren’t even talking about it. It changed her. She says, “Can we do this again?” I said, “Anytime.”
CG: I love how your office is set up because it really incorporates play into the whole office. I do like mine, too, because it has a playroom.
KM: I like the whole layout of your office. The play therapy part. I do couples’ work. I have a new set of clients last night that came and the first thing they looked at was, first of all, they looked at the décor, but then they saw the play stuff and they go, “Oh!” And they both lit up and just a brief second, they forgot about the struggles that they were having as a couple and they went to memories of “I remember that game, and that game…” I was like, “This is good. We’re just going to talk about some good stuff right now before we start into the other stuff.” It’s kind of nice.
PC: It works for big people, too?
KM: Yes.
CG: You should see the parents who play with their kids. They get so excited and it’s amazing.
KM: They forgot how to play. Have they not?
CG: They have.
KM: With their children, they think there’s this divide. That’s what I’m seeing, and that’s where the struggle is.
CG: If you talk to speech therapists, occupational therapist, all those guys. Do you know what they tell me? If parents would just play with their kids, I wouldn’t have a job, which obviously, I want to work myself out a job.
KM: I guess I would vote for unemployment in that genre. Our time is getting kind of crunched, so if there are parents out there, and/or interns, new therapists that need resources or just give listeners three valuable things to think about, what play therapy?
CG: In choosing a play therapist or in choosing the direction for your career, those two different people that we’re talking to, one, you want the person to go to for play therapy to be playful. You want them to have a sense of wonder and amazement and curiosity. And that’s just personality-wise. On the other hand, they have got to know about the neurological development of the brain. They also have to know their legal stuff because playing a play therapist is an amazingly legal portion of the counseling profession right now. The people who go and testify the most are play therapists.
KM: You’re saying they have to be comfortable with the whole process and they really have to understand the whole legal genre and not be fearful of that.
CG: Absolutely. They’ve got to have really good supervision, too. You really can’t do what we do without good mentors – you’re definitely a good mentor of mine – you just have to have that.
KM: I think that’s very important, is that you cannot do this alone, at all.
PC: Before we run out of time, we’ve got to talk to the real expert and find out what she thinks. Amalia, do you play in the playroom?
Amalia Graham: Sometimes. My mom’s playroom, not a lot, but sometimes I do, and when I do, it’s pretty fun and she says I can do anything. I love it, and it just makes me feel like I’m free.
PC: Do you get to play with some of the other kids that come in?
AG: No. My mom makes it private. Whenever she talks to me about something private, she asks me if I want her to tell it to Dad or anybody else, and if I say “no”, she doesn’t. She doesn’t even put it on Facebook twenty years later.
KM: Way to go, Mom. That’s a great mom, isn’t it?
PC: Does she make you clean up the playroom?
AG: Yes. Not her playroom.
PC: Your playroom at home.
KM: You have to clean up your playroom at your house?
CG: Yes.
PC: We are, indeed, out of time.
KM: Yes, we are.
PC: Christy, can you give us all your contact information?
CG: You can contact me all the time on my e-mail, Christy@christygrahamlPC.com. You can also give me a call at 940-597-9635. I have online scheduling and patient portal on therapyappointment.com and please like me on Facebook, find me on Twitter, and go to LinkedIn to look at all the different things that are going on at my offices. If you are interested in becoming a play therapist, please contact me. I will mentor you through that, or learn from you a lot. I just want you guys to know that we are growing and, in January, I’m looking for a new place so if you’ve got any prayers for me, go ahead and pray for the right place, the right time, and the right people to come and join with me.
PC: Good. It’s been a lot of fun having you here. Will you come back again?
CG: Anytime you put a microphone in front of my face, I’ll be here.
PC: I’m still PC.
KM: I’m still KM.
PC: I can be found at contentmarketingcoach.us, if you’re interested in promoting your business this way. Kathleen, what do people have to do to find you?
KM: Lifetreecounseling.com, and also my call number is 972-234-6634. My extension is 104 and I will return calls.
PC: It’s been fun. Thank you everybody for joining us, and why don’t you say “On we go”.
AG: And on we go…….
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