Playfulness Matters!
Daniel J. Wiener, PhD, RDT-BCT
November, 2024
Over the past 30 years or so, the broader field of psychotherapy has shifted markedly toward an emphasis on trauma as a central human problem. It appears to me that this change of emphasis is not a response to any discernible change in the ratio of manifest human happiness/unhappiness within the general population, or even within the population of therapy-goers, but for two chief reasons: advances in neurobiology (more on this later); and a cultural shift toward privileging the identification of personal problems as rooted in societal and familial oppression. Lest I be misunderstood on this point, I am not saying that such oppression does not exist or that its identification and confrontation are unimportant. Nor am I disparaging the valuable research and applied contributions of trauma-focused professionals. Rather, I observe that psychotherapists are (as are we all) affected by a change in the Zeitgeist, the culturally pervasive intellectual and emotional climate. A result of this shift is the proliferation of trauma-informed approaches and a concurrent de-emphasis from earlier trends such as adjustment-focused counseling, positive psychology, and the humanistic/transpersonal/human potential approaches.
I choose to write on this topic at this time out of a concern that the RfG Approach may appear to some clinicians as less relevant to current clinical practice than it might have seemed at an earlier time. RfG has always been presented as an adjunctive, rather than a complete Approach, one which works well in conjunction with nearly all other therapy Approaches. However, practitioners who anchor their work upon such other Approaches frequently are unaware of or overlook the distinctive conceptual framework informing RfG that centers on playfulness as a precondition for adventuring and discovery.
In RfG, playfulness is not assumed to be accessible at the onset of clinical work—it must be developed and activated. To use a gardening analogy, the soil is fertilized by the therapist’s fostering psychological safety in the therapeutic encounter; the seed of change is planted by the therapist’s setting a personal example of caring and respect for venturing into the unknown; the sprouting seed is protected by the therapist’s weeding out unwanted doubts and fears that proliferate out of clients’ habitual clinging to Survival Mind thinking; the growing plant is supported by the climbing stakes of encouragement for venturing via enactment into the “risky aliveness” of Adventure Mind; and the fruits of growth are harvested during the Post-Enactment Processing, when the client looks back on their recently-completed enacted adventure, more fully realizing the felt experiences of change and self-discovery.
To refer again to applied neurobiology, playful interaction that does not rely exclusively on verbal communication is an effective therapeutic tool, consistent with the works of Porges (2011), Levine (2015) and van der Kolk (2014) on the centrality of embodied techniques in reaching and healing psychological/emotional trauma. Virginia Satir, the pioneering family therapist, is said to have noted that most people prefer familiar misery to the misery of the unfamiliar. It takes courage to encounter the unfamiliar, though this encounter also contains the seed for transformative change.
RfG therapeutic progress, not limited to overcoming trauma, lies in the integration of embodied, novel experiences with cognitive awareness of, and appreciation for, triumphing over the confining limitations of entrenched habit patterns. RfG uses theater improvisation to facilitate active engagement in the Playspace, an imaginal realm consciously set off from the real world by tacit or explicit agreement by all present participants, in which all meaning may differ from that of conventional social reality. Playful enacting accomplishes two things at once: (1) it lowers the apparent, feared consequences for engaging in novel activity by framing its actions as pretenses; and (2) it offers enjoyable, rather than dreaded, encounters as a pathway to change. RfG methods, then, counter the widely-held belief in “no pain, no gain,” or, as I sometimes characterize conventional psychotherapy, “mental dentistry.” In sum, playfulness need not be taken as an avoidance of earnest work but can be harnessed as an effective means of personal growth and liberation.
