A few weeks ago I went to hear Shami Chakrabarti speak. She was funny, wise, humble and fallible, so when an audience member asked her: “What is the meaning of life?” – I sat forward in my seat, hoping that she would provide an insightful answer. And she did. She said:
“The meaning of life is other people.”
The last year has been an increasingly busy one at the Apple Tree Centre. As we expand our range of work, our team of therapists, and our client caseload, we are learning all the time about what parents need from us as an organisation, and what our therapists need to feel comfortable and confident in the work that they do.
As Non-Directive Play Therapists, we have always emphasised the role of parents in the therapeutic process, and the importance of a trusting relationship – a ‘therapeutic alliance’ – between therapist and parents. We endeavour to make parents and carers feel comfortable and welcome in the waiting room, and sometimes inside the therapy room itself; and we encourage them to attend regular progress reviews, where they can discuss the progress their child is making, the questions they have about the process of therapy or about managing their child’s behaviour, and make sure that the therapist and parents still have the same hopes, are working towards the same goals.
We have passed the half-way point in this term’s Child-Parent Relationship Therapy course. Our group of parents has been learning to spend half an hour every week in ‘special play time’, following their children’s lead and commenting on what they see.
A lot of our focus has been on reflecting the feelings which children express through and around their play.
Rosie and I recently attended the annual BAPT conference, which always brings me a wave of oxygen as I sit in a room of people who have the same training, the same professional ethos, the same experiences as me, and I know that for two days, I won’t need to explain the basis of my work or justify my approach. I attended training through Pink Therapy, where we discussed the intense sense of isolation often experienced by young people with gender dysphoria and the role of the internet and social media in lessening this isolation – as well as the risks which that brings. And now we are in the middle of festival season, when many people gather with their communities, find their ‘spiritual home’, and experience parts of themselves which they are often unable to express in their day-to-day lives.
A few weeks ago we held our first anniversary open evening at The Apple Tree Centre. As part of this event we had to think about all the work we have done over the past year. We had to break it down into specifics: numbers of families supported, professionals trained, parents taught in our group programme, children and young people supported through individual therapy as well as how many connections we had made, the time, thought and research we had put into our monitoring and evaluation measures and so on and so on and ….
We have recently recruited lots of new of counsellors and therapists to join our team – we’re gradually adding their details to our Associate Therapists page!
During this process, we learned some important things about how we see ourselves as an organisation and what we value in other therapists. We had a set of official recruitment criteria, to ensure that we provide a safe and robust service and that we cater to the diverse needs of our clients. We also discovered that the the successful applicants, the therapists who will be part of the Apple Tree Centre, shared some less tangible qualities which we had not known we were looking for, but which are essential to the relationships we want to have with our clients, their families, and the local community.
Yesterday’s workshop, “Using Puppets in Therapy”, was fully booked. I surrendered my own place, and was here in the capacity of receptionist and administrator.
I came back from the post office to find a hushed silence, the occasional murmur drifting down the stairs. Then a door opened, a flurry of footsteps, and a collective gasp of delight as the puppets were revealed for the first time.
We, The Apple Tree Centre, have launched ourselves excitedly into the arena of providing Continuing Professional Development! We have a programme of interesting and creative workshops for practitioners to come and learn and experience and play. My workshop: ‘Introduction to Play Therapy Skills and Principles’ took place in our training room with fifteen professionals a few weeks ago. It was a big step across my comfort boundary and I felt exposed. I had however, chosen this, I was in the lead, I had the clicker for the presentation and I was in control (of the clicker, at least).
I spent much of last Sunday preparing to make gluten-free cakes for our first CPD training event. My kitchen has never been so clean before.
I made a joke to my partner about focusing all my anxiety on this detail, but when he agreed too whole-heartedly, I realised how important this was to me. The cake, and the accompanying cleaning of the kitchen, are more than just an irrelevant detail, a magic spell to make the training a success. They represent important qualities in my work as a therapist, and in the Apple Tree Centre.
Several of my clients have recently made comments which seem to lead back to the same big questions: What do I know about them, and how do I understand what’s happening in counselling?
As a child, I lived and breathed Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” books. I loved the idea of setting out with a pile of sketched maps, a pencil and a bottle of ink, to explore uncharted waters.
