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Led by Eileen Dunn, a seasoned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, The Art of Listening explores the transformative power within the space between speaker and listener. Join us and our guests on this collective journey of self-discovery, as we navigate the depths of human connection and the power of listening.
Sarah: [00:00:04] Play frees us. It frees us from the here and now. It frees us from the patterns of the way that we behave, the way that we think, the way that we move around a room. If you're playful, you get to do things differently. And so it frees the mind.
Eileen: [00:00:31] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth. Talk therapy. Today's guest is Sara Abel. We never forget childhood. And when we drift back to that time long ago, we find that there are magical days etched in our hearts like an indelible memory. An afternoon spent with a little friend, playing pretend in a fantasy land far, far away. Where the endless days sitting on the soft carpet of her childhood bedrooms, building cities with plastic blocks and toy cars holding the entire universe in the palm of our hands. It's also moments splashed in paint and chalk. Imagination running free. We love to remember these moments. The way they flowed effortlessly. How time stood still. And more than just a pastime, our games provided a sense of liberation. When we played, we could try new ways. Make things up as we go, and we could find meaning in a world we were only beginning to know. As we grow older, play becomes harder to engage with. But it's always there, actually. From the contagious belly laughter shared with close friends to the knowing looks traveling across the family reunion table. With a quick, magical, intimate moments where a partner takes one look at your face and picks up on your thoughts. Bumping into levity. Play allows us to find humor in the way we so know ourselves and experience others. Catching the moment of serendipity and aiming for that state of flow that feels like flying. We therapists and analysts do well to remember that therapeutic work can and should aspire to play. My next guest teaches me as much.
Sarah: [00:02:52] You know, that flow back and forth a little bit of free association on both sides. That's play. That's two play worlds kind of overlapping. And that's the space in which you can say things that you wouldn't typically say. What was that that just flashed across your face. Where did your mind go just then? Those are comments that do incorporate what I mean by play, which is a little bit of freedom to explore more deeply.
Eileen: [00:03:31] This is Sarah Abel. She is a psychotherapist and analyst who has always been passionate about child psychology in every aspect of her work. In today's episode, she shares her stories exploring the role and the value of play within the psychoanalytic environment. Together, we'll reflect on our own experiences, discover how our origins shape our adult lives, and how we can preserve our playfulness and use it for healing. As you listen, I'd like to leave you with a few questions to consider. What do you think it means to be playful? How has your understanding of play evolved as you've transitioned from your youth into adulthood? Are there specific activities or hobbies that ignite your sense of playfulness? And now please welcome Sarah Abell. She is a former teacher social worker with 20 years of experience as a psychoanalyst and private practice. Sarah works with a range of patients, including children and adults, and she's the author of a book entitled Calming Stormy Feelings A Child's Introduction to Psychotherapy. She is also another beloved member of my virtual peer group inspired by the pandemic. So, Sarah, you've been working in the field for two decades. Can you give me a brief overview of your journey into psychoanalysis?
Sarah: [00:05:16] Oh my goodness, two decades. That seems crazy long. Where to begin? So for me, it all begins with play, because play is front and center and has always been front and center in my life. Starting as a young, young child playing in the playroom of my parents house, surrounded by all of their academia. But in that space, they gave us the main room of the house to create our play and all their academic friends when they would come over for meetings, learn to step around it. So, you know, while my parents didn't play with us, they gave us that space.
Eileen: [00:06:03] You know, I'm trying to picture your parents room, their study. I'm picturing books. Books upon books upon books all around. And your stuff in the middle, like, specifically and concretely, what was the stuff of your play?
Sarah: [00:06:17] Oh, the stuff of the play is Fisher-Price Little People. Do you remember those? They had no arms, no legs. And with that and blocks and, you know, the Fisher-Price houses and schools and this and that, we could create entire worlds. But my parents are academics. And so we were surrounded by books, floor to ceiling, imposing bookshelves of information that, you know, we knew the we knew the covers. And that was about it. We didn't pay attention to their world. They didn't really pay attention to our world. So from there, I kind of reluctantly grew up as one has to do, graduated college and took a job as a preschool teacher, and was pretty quickly frustrated because that was not as playful as I wanted it to be. There were rules we had to teach kids to do things, walk in lines, being kind to each other, that type of thing. And I realized in that year I was much more interested in the individual. So I went to social work school, and the social work school that I went to was very analytically oriented. And so it pretty quickly segued into analytic training and work with an analytic sort of view in which there's a lot of play, there's a lot of looking at layers, investigating, finding connection. Finding connection within a playful frame where two people can really. Find each other and start to open things up. Delve deeper.
Eileen: [00:08:00] It really took a deep root within you. You went into the world of children and the world of school systems and rules and regs was constricting. And so you found your way to analytic work and training beyond that. So I wonder if you could think back to some of that early work, like those first experiences in treatment.
Sarah: [00:08:23] What happened was I was working at Bellevue Hospital and I was there when 9/11 happened. And about a year later, six months to a year later, a little girl was brought in for therapy and she was selectively mute. She had been a child who was healthy, spoke development was going fine. And then suddenly, according to her parents, she stopped talking. She would talk to them inside the house and that was it. And she and I began to play in my office. She was preschool age, and in the first session she built a tower with blocks and then crashed it down with some kind of a vehicle. And from there, we started to talk with her parents and understand that on the morning of nine over 11, she was on the way to preschool. The first building was destroyed, went down as they were walking to school. They went home instead of continuing, went upstairs to the roof of the building and watched the second tower be destroyed. And in this her parents, you know, were keeping her close, but had been so absorbed in their own trauma that they had missed that this was also happening to their child, and that she had witnessed everything. And it wasn't until she stopped talking that they started to worry about what was going on from her, from her perspective, what had she seen? And as we linked this together, she was able to play to express herself in the play, to allow me to put some words, some depth to what it was that she was acting out and to then bring her parents into this so they could also, you know, really appreciate what it was that she had seen, what it was that she had witnessed. But she wouldn't have been able to do this if there wasn't that room for play, if there wasn't that room to just allow her to relax, to open up to, to present the world from her perspective, without all the barriers of the rules that are set up. Talk. Tell us what's matter. She couldn't do that. She didn't have the language. She didn't even have words for a while.
Eileen: [00:11:00] Did you ever hear her speak?
Sarah: [00:11:02] Okay, here's what I think. I think that I did not hear her speak in my office. Or if I did, possibly a whisper. I think that I heard her voice in the hallway with her parents as she was leaving. So I think that it was to them that she spoke, and that at some point they felt like she was speaking enough. That treatment ended the language. You know, I that wasn't the sign of health, was not that she could come in and talk to me. I was a stranger. And this office in Bellevue was pretty far away from her regular life. Mhm. She was speaking enough in the school with them, with other members of their community. I didn't need her to speak with me. She could play with me and she did.
Eileen: [00:11:59] And I was just going to say. And you, you were listening I guess.
Sarah: [00:12:03] Listening in a different way. Right. Like listening through the play. Anything that she would say or show me, I would respond to, but not from someone outside witnessing, but more from her level on the floor with the blocks. That was a big bang kind of thing. Oh my goodness, everything crashed down. Look at that.
Eileen: [00:12:28] You were like narrating, right?
Sarah: [00:12:30] I would say, and there's this child, there's somebody watching. These people are watching. They're getting so scared. I would engage and see what was allowed. You know, if a child allows you to get right into the play, then you do because they're allowing you to enter that world and think about it with them. That doesn't always happen, right? A child I'm working with now, when she draws and narrates and tells me things. I'm not allowed in. I'm watching, I'm listening. I'm making myself as quiet as possible to hear what her story is. But it's the cues that go back and forth that either allow you to join or tell you stay where you are. Be really quiet and let this movement happen. It's it's a dance, you know, a dance in this other, other level of listening that is no longer exactly in the here and now, but but in the room, in the relationship in between two people.
Eileen: [00:13:43] Sarah says it's so poetically. Play is another way to listen deeply. It requires that same care, attention to detail and focus the same being and being. With that, a conversation offers every movement and expression is a call and a response. It's a way of connecting that goes on building moment after moment. In this way, Sarah's experience shows us that play is a means of communication. It's an outlet where children and adults can come together on equal footing. When we don't yet have the words. Play transcends our limitations. It offers a new language to express ourselves. A new passage even between our inner and outer worlds. You know, I remember someone saying that the the childhood is work. You know, that play isn't just play. Play. Play is serious business and use of the imagination or a real connection to the internal world. I wonder if you could say more about how play is crucial in a psychoanalytic setting.
Sarah: [00:15:08] Play frees us. It frees us from the here and now. It frees us from the patterns of the way that we behave, the way that we think, the way that we move around a room. If you're playful, you get to move in different ways to do things differently. And so it frees the mind to think differently. And when you're sitting with a patient and there's, you know, that flow back and forth, a little bit of free association on both sides. That's play. That's that's two play worlds overlapping. And that's the space in which you can discover, discover which way the mind works. What happens next? You can say things that you wouldn't typically say. What was that that just flashed across your face? Right. That's that's not play. But it's not really real talk either. Where did your mind go, Jess? Then those are comments that do incorporate what I mean by play, which is a little bit of freedom, a little bit of freedom to explore more deeply that.
Eileen: [00:16:26] So go back and let me ask you to like we hear that childhood is the most impressionable time in our lives, that we lay the foundation for the rest of our experience and challenge, and the rest of our lifetime. How does childhood have a major effect on our development from your point of view?
Sarah: [00:16:46] Well, it is the beginning of life, right? So there's there's that everything that happens is happening. Newly emotions are less defended against. So they're they're right there on the surface. Defenses haven't been formed to protect one. So there's sort of a rawness to the experience. Families are just being formed. So it's not just the child is being the baby. The child is being formed, but also families are being formed. Parents are learning how to parent, siblings are learning how to live together. Everything is just just beginning to happen. And so the the emotional echoes of that time are what we live with, right? The, the I mean, the fact that at this point in my age, I can still recall some of the somatic experiences of playing on the floor of my parents house with these little people, and that I feel nostalgic for that, because really, if I tried to do that now, it would be boring. I wouldn't know what to what to do with these little people. But it's the feeling of that that I can connect back with. And when you talk to adults, even in, you know, later in years, they can remember profound experiences from childhood. It's it's the beginning. Also, when when you are with young children, they're right in the here and now. They're not thinking about grocery lists or what happens next or the election. They're right in the here and now.
Eileen: [00:18:41] I mean, I I'm sure that we could go through, you know, every chronological number of age and, and think about what makes it so. I mean, seriously, like when you think about a six year old, was it Winnicott?
Sarah: [00:18:54] It was somebody who said, there's no such thing as a baby, there's only a baby. And the mom at that time now, we would say baby in the family, baby and the parent. So I do think of it as the whole system changing, not just the individual. And I'm thinking about very young children I have right now in my practice who are trying to find their way into first grade, not being terribly successful in some ways, which is why I get to spend time with them. But trying to figure out how to walk in the world without their mom or dad being right there with them, interpreting everything you know, helping them along, sort of scaffolding them in that way. And it's it's this. I do see childhood as the dance between parents and teachers, family members scaffolding the child as they sort of slowly leave the nest. And then there's these bumps along the way, you know, this year is going well, but then six months later, for whatever reason, right? Because of learning, because of socialization, because of the anxiety around them in the world, there's bumps, and the family has to figure out how to be there to hold them. And it's a complex interplay with both parents figuring out how to let go while also supporting, and children learning how to walk on their own. And it's never quite perfect. We're looking for good enough. We're looking for enough support, enough grace, enough holding and letting go. The timing has to work, right? The temperaments have to align well enough to be able to pick up the cues. And six years old is just the beginning of that. You're done with preschool. You're done with kindergarten, and you have to control your little self enough to sit down and do worksheets and raise your hand and walk in a line. And it's just the beginning of figuring out. Who you are and controlling that little self and getting what you need from the adults around you.
Eileen: [00:21:18] As I listen to Sarah here, I can't help but think there is just so much to the process of growing up, right? So often we view childhood as a simpler part of our lives, a carefree time without responsibility. But when we're born into the world, all we can do is take it in. Everything. All at once. Welcome to your life. That is anything but simple. Childhood is an incredibly raw state of being. It's a starting point. Not just for us, but for our families, too. As young as we might be, we're already learning to interact with the personalities of our family unit and to discover our own voice to. Clay helps us with that process in the same way that a laugh relieves a burden. Play lightens overwhelming realizations. It allows us not to control what happens around us, but to claim our own narrative, our perspective. You know, it reminds me you've written a book as well that you might be rewriting.
Sarah: [00:22:39] So I wrote a book. I co-authored a book called Calming Stormy Feelings A Child's Introduction to Psychotherapy. And in it, we were trying to make psychotherapy more understandable for children and families. And we wanted the book to be. Representational of children and family in today's world with different abilities, different types of families two moms, two dads or heterosexual couple to talk about the role of the parent in play therapy and that child therapists do meet with parents and aren't doing the work to raise the child themselves, but are doing the work to help successfully be part of that family. So that that was one thing that felt very important to highlight, is that parents kind of form a team to support the child. Um, so that the child can be able to communicate more directly with with the parent. So you're both working with parents on how to listen and understand, while you're also working with children on how to express and feel and and be. But I am toying with the idea of redoing this book because we wrote it ten years ago. So much has happened in the last ten years and life is scary for families. I mean, it's scary for all of us, right? But it's it's scarier for families. It's a hard time to be raising children. It's a hard time to feel like, you know, what the future's going to bring. And by that, I don't just mean the election. Although we do have in the US this looming election, and it's making many of us very, very frightened. But there's also climate change that is being talked about and thought about. The pandemic really shifted things. Parents these days are more frightened and not about earthquakes, but about school shootings and people and people. Yeah, yeah.
Eileen: [00:25:02] And how we live together in our society, no question about it. And I appreciate that. You make it simple and a plain statement about that. And, you know, just touching it, not making any more of it or less of it, frankly, it's just the reality that we're living in now and what we've got, you know, tell me about how do you think about attachment as a child analyst who works with adults as well? Is that a concept that still primarily defines how you think in a theoretical way, or is there another way?
Sarah: [00:25:34] I mean, I tend to think it's all about attachment, you know, and to say that means it's not all about attachment and not about other things too. But I do think through a lens of attachment often.
Eileen: [00:25:51] What is attachment?
Sarah: [00:25:53] Well, the beginning, the interplay between a baby and the primary parent being there steadily enough that the baby can still feel secure even when there are those insults to the security, even when the food doesn't come fast enough, or. The discomfort is not shifted as quickly as as the baby might want. And you know, the the nice thing about using this theory is that it doesn't have to be perfect. We are actually quite forgiving as people, and so parents have to be good enough. They don't have to be perfect. And what attachment theory has shown is that when parents mess up, if there can be a repair, that relationship is then stronger. You know, it's like, have you ever broken a bone where you where the break happens? If that is repaired, you don't tend to break there again in the real concrete world, right. So in relationships, if a parent doesn't get something quite right and says, you know, I missed what you were saying, I'm sorry, tell me again, it's that understanding that repair that actually strengthens the relationship. So it's a willingness to come to the table on both sides, so to speak. Right. To say, tell me again, I'm trying to understand. I think I did mess up and a reworking of the empathic connection that really strengthens a bond. And children who don't get that, or don't get it enough, or get an attachment in a haphazard way, a way that they're never quite able to relax into it, that has lasting effects. That's when we start to talk about anxious attachment or insecure attachment. And as regular, functioning adults, we can all go back into those different types of attachments at different times. You know, when you're under too much stress from from life, you can start to feel anxiously attached to your partner.
Eileen: [00:28:18] So this sounds like a natural segue into how you think about work with adults. We were all children, and what the nature of that original attachment experience actually was is something you're saying that becomes the work.
Sarah: [00:28:33] Right? It becomes the work between the analyst and the patient. Right. What's happening in the room? What happened that you felt that I couldn't understand you or didn't want to understand you, or didn't want to see you, that layer in the here and now of the relationship, but also in thinking about that person on your couch, their relationship with all the different players in their lives. When does it start to feel reminiscent of the parent who didn't quite understand you? What are you now attributing that to? They didn't want to understand you. You weren't good enough, interesting enough. How are you seeing that pattern?
Eileen: [00:29:20] So as analyst, you're straddling being very serious about attending to the real story, but at the same time listening for the play with your patient. Where can they play with you?
Sarah: [00:29:35] Play being a freedom of expression, of freedom, of being in the here and now, a freedom of showing oneself in all their different sides because that's what comes out naturally in play. Right. I when my sister and I were on the floor playing with our little people, we weren't checking. Is it okay if I have this person be angry now? We just did. That's what you're trying to. That's what I'm trying to allow people to do in the therapy so that we can understand.
Eileen: [00:30:18] The innocence of youth is an open breach. In it we pour love and support or what we know of it. Sometimes it means fear can seep through and leave a trail that follows us our entire lives. Those who look after us feel the weight of that responsibility. Filling our minds and hearts with the right kind of care is no easy thing. Parenting is a journey of learning and growth, and as Sarah reminds us, perfection is not the goal. Even when patterns of behavior feel set in stone, there is always an opportunity to change, to correct ourselves, react to ourselves, and reshape what we've always known to emerge stronger than before. Together. Here's what I really want to want to ask you is like when you stand back, when you pause, when you think in the name of work and play and and play and work, what have you learned?
Sarah: [00:31:31] I'm trying to write about some of this just for my own self. And what I've come up with is this idea of looking for the spark, looking for the moment of joy, and continuously looking for it. And maybe I'm a reluctant adult because I see adulthood as inherently full of more boring times. So I've been thinking about, you know, what is it that makes me want to do this work? And it's those moments of joy. It's those moments of connection, of finding a way to think and dance and move together. And I, you know, I do my work sitting in a chair. It's not like I'm moving around very much, but it is that moment of change. So can I tell two quick stories, please? So first one was pretty quickly my first job out of social work school, and I was working in a program for emotionally disturbed kids and trying to engage this little boy into work with me. And every time I came to his classroom, he would bang his head on a hard surface. And it was heartbreaking. I was there to help him, to work with him, to be his therapist, and he could not tolerate it. He'd had way too many losses and at some point I said to his teacher, what does he even like? And she said, you know, he's really into comic books.
Sarah: [00:33:06] So I got a comic book and I this took weeks in my mind. It took months, but I'm pretty sure it took weeks of coming in, edging closer. But he'd see me and he'd start to bang his head and I would leave. Finally, one day I went in with my comic book in hand, reading the comic book myself. He glanced over, and it was that glance that allowed me the entry, and I popped the comic book between his head and the desk that he was about to bang on, and it was a softcover comic book. And he softened. He softened. I wasn't stopping him. Right, but I, I found some way in, and it was a it was a beautiful piece of work that we did. We wrote a poem together at the end about our work. It was, you know, it didn't last that long. It was the school I worked at just for a couple of years. But it was it was such a thrilling moment of, okay, we're going to do it.
Eileen: [00:34:08] Yes. Genuine contact with him. You being a fellow human being, an adult human being, another human being. The desk is hard. The desk doesn't talk back. The desk doesn't say you put your shirt on backwards today. So that's a beautiful story. And there's another story you want to tell.
Sarah: [00:34:27] Yeah. Okay. So here's my other story is, um, years after that, I was working at a clinic and I was trying to engage this time a teenage girl, and she refused to talk to me. Absolutely refused. So she'd sit there as teens can do, and cross her arms and cross her legs and would not make eye contact. Nothing would happen. And this went on and on and on. And I just got bored. I got really bored, and I started to talk about how amazing it was that inside my office there was some kind of a force that overtook her, and she couldn't talk and she couldn't move. And I just started to kind of fabricate this story. And a little tiny smile appeared on the side of her mouth and her leg. Her foot just moved a tiny bit. It just kind of flicked. And so I took that movement, and I built a little tower of blocks next to her. Her foot and her foot did that little move and it knocked it over. And so without talking, I built another one a little bit further away, and she reached her leg a little further away and knocked it over. So this went on and on until I was building towers on the far side of my office. She was running over there, knocking them down. I was building them on the other side and we were running around and eventually it moved to talking. Huh. But it's those moments of play. And you get them in adult work too, where you say, hang on a sec, tell me what you mean by that. I don't get it. Show me, tell me. And you make contact. Right? And then that is playful. That is fun, right? I mean, I know we're therapists and we deal with suffering and we deal with sadness and pain, but there's no reason why we can't have fun too. And if we can't have fun too, then why do the work?
Eileen: [00:36:33] But it's true. I'm almost thinking, like the word contact really feels almost synonymous with the word play in the way that I understand how you've lived it and learned to work with it, and that in your freedom, you're allowing yourself to test the limits or color outside of the lines or whatever it takes to make that contact where they are.
Sarah: [00:36:58] And with adults, you get you can ask for permission. You know, there can be the back and forth, the sort of meeting of the minds. Is it okay? I saw you pause right then. Can we just stop there and see? Is there something more you want to talk about there? But with children it's much more in the action.
Eileen: [00:37:20] So I'm just thinking to myself, like when I asked you, you know, how are you? What have you learned? You know, how are you different now? And maybe the answer is already in here, but I'm still kind of wondering, like, what do you know now?
Sarah: [00:37:36] All right, well, here's the thing is that if we're doing this work, we're learning so much about ourselves at the same time. Right. And that is part of the joy of of. Doing this work because you have to sit there and you have to be prepared to sit there. You have to know how to sit. So I know that I need to move a lot to be able to sit. I mean, settling your entire self into one space and time and so settling your attention, settling your body, settling your emotional self to really just be in that moment, right? That this moment that kids come to, they come to with all, all their stuff right there. But we have to leave the laundry list outside when we come into our office to sit and listen and receive. So what do I know? I know more about who I am, sort of what my reluctance is, are what I need. How do I need to be fed in order to sit, to show up in that way?
Eileen: [00:38:48] The children we once were will always stay with us. They're the essence of ourselves. The lightness of heart, the wonder, the silliness, the questions and the delicate sensitivity. It's still there, never ending. And when our work can feel heavy and challenging. Our disposition to play is a beacon of joy, infusing therapeutic moments with renewed energy. The stories that punctuate Sarah's career reveal the power of play to connect us to ourselves and to each other. Regardless of specific strategies. Sarah's approach has always been to reach that spark of joy. A fleeting glance. A smirk tugging at the lips. A shy laugh when it happens. We close the space between speaker and listener. Worlds apart, collapse into one, and we meet our patients exactly where they are. As they are. What transpires from our conversation with Sarah today is that play lives at the heart of us, perhaps even. It is the heart of us. So when we return to it, we reconcile with the person we have been underneath the layers. In this way, play forges a space where both patients and therapists can explore, heal, and grow together. I want to thank Sarah Abel for playing with us today. Her stories, her youthfulness and her gentle understanding are such a pleasure for me. I bet you found her point of view refreshing as well. Her joie de vivre is a reminder to hold on to our childlike curiosity and wonder at every stage of our lives. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the show. So if you have a minute, leave us a review and let us know what you think. We want to capture what you feel as you listen. It helps us find out how we can keep bringing you new conversations. We'll see you the next time.