Our Child Holds The Truth

I am a trained play therapist.

When my kids were very young and my energy was entirely devoted to caring for their needs, something inspired me to seek training that would help me better support young children.

We met on weekends in classrooms in New Hampshire for my post-masters play therapy program. During our very first class, our professor, who later became a mentor to me, said a few things that stuck.

“Most people who work with kids are very playful and childlike. They are like the ‘kid who never grew up.’”

I shrunk a bit. Shit. That’s not me. I’m not particularly playful. Am I in the wrong program? I’m generally serious, probing, and so responsible. I was never really a kid when I was a kid.

Then she said:

“Most therapists are pessimists.”

I shrunk again. Is it weird that I’m an extreme optimist? Is it okay to be a therapist and an optimist?

Once again, I didn’t fit the mold. A very familiar feeling. That pattern continued as I joined different organizations and peer consultation groups. The play therapy mold, the general therapy mold, and now even the society mold, just aren’t right for me.

Conformity doesn’t work for me.

Forced conformity is toxic. It can become dangerous.

I no longer engage in spaces that ask me to conform.

Kids have a way of opening us up to spaces hidden from our view. Before conditioning sets in, kids aren’t open to conformity either. It’s not something they seek, it’s not an oppressor for them usually until teen years.

They remind us what authentic expression looks and feels like.

Young kids have this untainted, unfiltered, deeply real way of showing up. It’s how we were all meant to show up.

At some point, children are taught to conform to parental expectations, to school standards of intelligence, to cultural trends and language.

That’s why connecting with your youngest self, your purest child self, can reconnect you with your true essence.

Looking back, it’s obvious now: play therapy training was a clear path toward my own inner child healing.

I bought a sand tray and tiny figurines. Paints. Clay. It got messy.

I’m not a messy person.

But in the spirit of supporting trauma healing, I learned to sit with the messiness, to be in it with them.

As I sat on the floor role-playing, storytelling, creating it became clear that my younger self had never been fully seen. And that was the gift I was meant to offer other little ones: pure presence, acceptance, witnessing.

I found myself drawing in spiritually gifted children without trying. Nobody called them that, of course. Instead, they were diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety, sensory issues, and more.

Those labeled “too shy” are often the seers of our society, sensitive, perceptive, aware in ways others don’t understand.

Instead of writing them off or labeling them, as others had or as I sometimes felt as a child, I probed gently and allowed them to share their visions with me.

As I allowed them to lead the way, to guide the play sessions, I learned that many of them had psychic sensitivities. They could see beyond the physical, feel the unseen, sense what was really going on to express this to others; it's easy to see how this led to phobias and anxieties.

At some point, getting messy with kids became too much.

And play therapy over Zoom during COVID? It just didn’t light me up.

So I slowly transitioned to working with adults.

But the truth is, I never really stopped working with children because the key to truly transformational therapy lies in connecting with the inner child, no matter our current age. I didn’t know that when I entered the play therapy program, but as I integrated over time, it all came together.

Our adult healing is rooted in our child healing.

I don’t focus on the age of the person I work with anymore, it’s really about resonance.

That training helped me vicariously access a kind of childlike freedom I never experienced growing up. I gave those kids permission to be free, wild, expressive, unfiltered and while that was often against my natural grain, it was the freedom in them I needed to see so I could finally offer it to myself.

Learning to connect with and embrace your child self is crucial to healing.

We cannot truly love, accept, or care for ourselves if we reject any part of who we are.

As I write this, I realize it was my work with children that reminded me to write.

At the end of each play therapy process, I’d write a story for the child, something they could take home as a memory of our time together.

It felt vulnerable. I’ve never considered myself a writer. In fact, I was often told in high school and college that my writing wasn’t that strong. And maybe that’s true to some. But I still wanted to give them stories. So I did.

Those kids led me back to a part of my purpose that had been inside me all along, waiting to be rediscovered.

I think about your child self and wonder: what were you all about? What thrilled you? What scared you? What motivated you? What was so unique about you? What part of you wants to be rediscovered?

Wishing you a deep connection with your youngest parts. Perhaps they hold the key to your freedom?

As one wise former client I worked with during her high school and early college years said during her last session,

“I’m going to be kind to myself now. I’m not going to say mean things to myself anymore, because when I do, I’m saying them to my child self too and I don’t want to hurt her anymore.”

With love, Julia