Why Fun Isn’t a Distraction: It’s Therapy

Before we learn how to speak our feelings with language, we learn how to process them with play. Our bodies, our behaviors, and how we engage with the world around us, not only help us to communicate, but they connect us to ourselves and others. I have a big interest in a form of counseling called Play Therapy. Now I’m not certified in this work (yet), but I find it to be fascinating. Play therapists work mostly with children to help them do many of the same things that adults do in talk therapy: construct a narrative, identify themes, and heal through human connection. But impressively, they do it with less than half the words. I’ve been inspired by play therapists to stop relying on language as such a crutch in therapy with my adult clients. I mean, what’s the point of helping you differentiate whether the sensation you feel is more of an abandonment instead of a betrayal? If we’re caught in the weeds, then we’re just threading hairs with language, and some could say, we’re distracting ourselves from what’s really happening. Ultimately, something's not sitting right, and our bodies are designed to heal themselves through connection, not language. 

Adults suck at play, but I think it’s sort of like riding a bicycle. There’s not a great order of operations. I mean, you could try to break it down to parts of the movement like mounting, kickoff, pedal, stabilization, and maintenance, but real mastery comes from losing your mind so that you can find your body. Play takes us out of boxes and connects us to our humanity. I think our world has a mostly shared distaste for spreadsheets; they literally draw boxes all around every part of our lives. This gives us a lot of great things like organization and predictability, but if we get lost in them, we lose curiosity and adventure.When I was a kid, we had a park that was separated into four different boxes full of woodchips that held separate structures. We had a swing set, a jungle gym, monkey bars, and a slide. Between the boxes, there were sidewalks that bridged the structures from one another so the kids didn’t have to walk on the grass. But when I was racing Griffin Hendrix from the slide to the swingest, we didn’t follow a path laid out for us, we jumped over the dividers, we ran through the grass, and we swung over anything in our path. 

This is why fun is so therapeutic. It eliminates obstacles, and helps us to see our world as a playground and ourselves as a hero. I remember jumping off of many of these structures as a kid, and my mom would come over to me and remind me that I could hurt myself. She was wise because I’m pretty sure some kid fell off the slide and broke their arm, but I wish I had the wisdom at the time to let my mom know that play made me feel invincible.

Play is risky. You can get hurt. But it’s almost guaranteed that a life without play is guaranteed to hurt.

So if your mind keeps running in circles, you’re feeling stuck in boxes, and you’re looking for a therapist that's playful, keeps it real, and helps you feel like yourself again, feel free to reach out at TherapyChris.com, or keep following along as we discover how to be human together.