S8 E12: The Role of Play Therapy and Transactional Analysis in Helping Children Express Their Inner World with Alina Comendant & Tatjana Gjurković

In this episode of The Transactional Analysis Podcast, hosts Matt and John welcome Alina Comendant (Provisional Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst in the field of Psychotherapy) and Tatjana Gjurković (Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst in the field of Psychotherapy)

Alina, based in the Netherlands, and Tatjana, working in Croatia, are highly experienced play therapists and trainers. They bring unique perspectives on how play therapy and Transactional Analysis can complement each other to support the emotional and psychological well-being of children and adolescents.

Throughout the conversation, we explore:

• How TA theory, with concepts like ego states and scripts, enhances play therapy, helping children express their inner worlds.

• Directive vs. Non-Directive Play Therapy:  the balance between following the child’s lead versus guiding with structured methods.

• Alina and Tatjana’s favourite TA models which they use to foster resilience and autonomy in young clients.

• Why empathy, acceptance, and collaboration with parents help children feel safe and open up in therapy

• The impact of family systems, cultural scripts, and school on a child’s mental health, and why addressing these is vital for sustainable change.

Get in touch with Alina and Tatjana:

Alina Comendant

Website: www.alinacomendant.com
LinkedIn: Alina Comendant
Instagram: @the_heart_of_practice

Tatjana Gjurković

Instagram: @ad_psychotherapy_institute
Website: AD Training Institute

Resources mentioned in the episode:

International Transactional Analysts for Childhood and Adolescence ( from Italy). 

Sponsors:

The International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA) is an individual membership organisation providing the TA Journal (TAJ) and the monthly Script newsletter with archives of both from the 1970s. 

For more information about the benefits of membership please click on the link below: 

www.itaaworld.org/itaa-membership-benefits 

The European Association for Transactional Analysis (EATA) has 44 member associations with more than 7550 members in 29 European countries. Its purpose is to promote knowledge and research on Transactional Analysis, to develop its theory, to ensure agreed standards of practice, and to promote cooperation in Europe in the field of Transactional Analysis. 

For more information please click on the link below: 

eatanews.org

Transcript

[Matt]

Alina, Tatjana, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Perhaps you could go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do.

[Alina]

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, John. Happy to be here with Tatjana. I'm Alina Comendant. I'm a PTST-P in the field of psychotherapy. I'm originally from Romania, but I live and work in the Netherlands with children, teenagers, and adults with a focus on developmental trauma and development.

[Tatjana]

Hello, Hello, Matt, John, Alina. Nice to be with you today. My name is Tatjana Gjurković . I live and work in Zagreb, Croatia. I'm a TSTA in the psychotherapy field and I also am A play therapist. So I combine these two fields. Along with that, I have my own institute where I run trainings for future psychotherapists. And I do supervision. And I'm also an author of several children's therapeutic books and one book for their parents. So many roles.

[Matt]

Great.

[John]

So this is going to be an episode about play therapy. And I guess to get us started, we'd like to hear a short response from each of you about how TA informs your play therapy practice. So maybe Alina, you could get us started.

[Alina]

That's a great question, John. How TA is informing my play therapy practice or how my play therapy practice is informing my TA approach. And I'm specifically playing a bit with the question because for me it was very difficult in the beginning to put these two together, these two approaches, play therapy and TA.

So I began with TA, almost more than 10 years ago. And I had such a good skeleton of structure of how we humans and children and teenagers, how we are built inside and how we function in relationships. And I found it great, a great approach. As I said, I've had the bone, I've had the articulations. And I didn't find this quite useful sometimes in the work with children because children are so spontaneous and it felt like the whole structure became chaotic. 

So this is the way in which I went to find more about play therapy. So I began to study Gestalt play therapy and for some years, around eight years, I practised these two separately. And I practised TA with adults and Gestalt play therapy with children and teenagers until my certification, when I decided to bring them together. now I see TA and play therapy having a role both in the way I'm thinking as a psychotherapist, but also at the identity level. 

So sometimes my colleagues are referring to me, Alina, you're doing something with the children or you're playing with the children, no? So I believe TA is informing a big chunk and It's my desire to develop more TA in this area of children and teenagers. So I'm bringing concepts, I'm bridging theories into TA and develop new ways of thinking. Yeah.

[John]

Great, wonderful. Thanks, Alina. Tatjana, what about you?

[Matt]

Fantastic.

[Tatjana] 

I first want to say that I love the way Alina was playfully combining these two. I completely agree with that. So how TA informs play therapy practice and vice versa, how play therapy informs the TA work. For me, the most straightforward answer to that would be that I use TA theory in order to understand the child, the child's inner dynamic and the family dynamic. So that would be the most straightforward answer I can give you at the moment.

[Matt]

Okay. Fantastic. So I am curious about this difficulty that you articulated, Alina, and Tatjana, you alluded to in regards to the TA theory, which sounds like it's easy for you to work with and apply with adults, grownups, and possibly less so with children and the gestalt play therapy and now you're kind of developing the ideas to combine them. 

It sounds like the two of you both have done a lot of work with integrating the idea of play therapy and TA. So I'm curious about what is this, what's the difficulty with those two?

[Tatjana]

Do you want to start?

[Alina]

I will talk about my journey and my difficulty in my journey. Imagine ten years ago, or more than ten years ago, in Romania, so we talk about East Europe, having less access to materials in English, or not to mention in Romanian.

And then not to mention the fact that in the TA world, there is less material, less clinical material on working with children and teenagers. I think there is plenty in the educational field, which is great. We can borrow a lot. So that was one of the challenges that I've encountered. And it took me, I think, five years until I discovered where the richness, where the gold is. And for me, the gold was in Italy. So that was the second challenge. Yeah, accessibility.

[Matt]

Okay. And when you say the gold is in Italy, what does that mean?

[Alina]

That means that in Italy they have a culture for developing TA psychotherapy with children and teenagers. They run congresses, they write books, articles in Italian. And sometimes this is or not so much accessible if you don't know Italian.

[Matt]

Okay, yeah, fantastic. Okay, thank you. Tatjana.

[Tatjana]

For me, the most problematic piece of integrating these two was TA, as I have been firstly introduced and trained, was very directive approach. So you would know what you're doing, why you are doing, contracting, all of that, et cetera, et cetera. In play therapy, there are different approaches. There are directive approaches, but, and there are also non-directive approaches. And my first main, I would say, approach was non-directive, which means you come, you follow the child's lead, you follow the child's play and throughout the play you understand or you're trying to understand what he or she is talking through the play.

But then how to translate these two, how to really translate the play into TA words and also how to integrate the idea of being in one session directive therapist or more directive and in another non-directive. So there were clashes in my own identity in a way.

And, and also the philosophy behind it, behind the non-directive approach is quite different than the philosophy behind the directive approach. So I would say that was the most hard part for me to find my own. And I think I actually am still finding session by session sometimes how to use both skills in a way.

[Matt]

Okay, so I'm gonna ask a question now, imagining I don't know anything about working with children in the field of counselling or psychotherapy at all. What is play therapy?

You don't have to define it, maybe describe it. What's your opinion on what play therapy is?

[Tatjana]

Maybe I can start and you can fill in. So how I would describe in my own words, I would say as a systemic approach that has a lots of different techniques expressive in their own nature that helps the child to through play mostly show themselves, their inner world. 

So the idea of play therapy is to use play as a medium instead of words as we do in TA and other verbal therapies to help the child to say what is happening inside through puppets, through sand tray work, through...

many other types of play because play is a natural way of communicating of the child and plus behavior. So play therapy is trying to use this natural side of the child and help the child to go through the trauma or stressful events without necessarily verbalize them as such, what happens or some situation or the relationship conflicts or something like that.

So if you're non-directive play therapy, sorry, you, you will not necessarily understand what is really going on in the process and the child will resolve the stuff and the child is happy again. And you don't really know, like, you know what you have been using, but not really, like how did we come to this point? So, yeah.

[Matt]

Okay, so play is the intervention as well as revealing what is going on in the child's world. Okay, fascinating. 

So you know when you're working as a psychotherapist, you're working with your client. As I work with adults, there's lots of ways in which I get feedback from them to be able to determine how they're doing, outcome measures, conversation, inquiry.

How do you figure out working with the child, helping them to progress through the work that they need to do? How does that all work? I'm really curious. This is fantastic.

Alina, I'm going to throw this on to you.

[Alina]

Yeah, I will take it over from Tatjana because I think she said it's so beautiful that play therapy is a language and sometimes we don't know. So we have to trust the process, the process of the child, our process, our inner process. How I like to track the changes is by playing with experiences and experiments and see what is happening. Just a trial and error.

And sometimes, like Tatjana said, you have no idea how the play changed something in the brain, wired the change neurobiologically. And other times you see the changes through play. So the child is playing differently. A superhero appears out of the sudden. You have no idea what is happening. Or we do a guided imaginary exercise and the child has the answer right in front. 

I think play therapy can look sometimes like a sort of miracle, although it is not. So that would be my experience with change.

[John]

I'm curious about this whole bit about TA and play therapy and also working with children and young people in general because of the idea that there might be some incompatibility with TA theory, particularly in the clinical field. What are your thoughts on that?

Is it because one TA was very much developed by a person working with adults. Therefore, his whole thought process was about adults and not about development at the time, but rather their development retrospectively once they've grown up. And second of all, because TA was never intended to be an individual therapy and was intended to be used in groups. 

Is this some of the challenge do you think that that arrives with integrating it with your approach?

[Tatjana]

Very good question.

[Alina]

Yeah, yeah, I would definitely say it's a myth that TA is used mostly with adults. I've encountered this often also in my certification or when talking about TA. I thought it was about Parent, Child and Adult for adult psychotherapy. So I think it's a myth and I'm very happy to be here and to bust this this myth out.

TA works with children and with teenagers, with young people as well.

[John]

So is that because it's been evolved? Because of course, Eric Berne's writings weren't about working with children and young people. Is it an evolution or is it just a perspective of how you look at the theory?

[Alina]

Well, if you ask me, one of the things that I love most about TA is the openness. So I see so many aspects from other pieces of theory incorporated into TA, and I think it's more because of the developmental face of TA. 

We have great clinicians who already did this work for me and Tatjana. I am very grateful, for example, to Keith Tudor or to Alessandra Pierini, who wrote in English, especially about all the challenges that we are facing.

Tatjana

[Tatjana]

Yeah, maybe I would say that TA is a verbal therapy by like basis of TA is it's a verbal therapy. And the primary goal for TA is autonomy, which means that a client becomes aware of what he or she is experiencing take his or her's own responsibility to that and all that stuff as we know. 

In working with children, it's quite different. So first, we cannot rely solely or in my opinion on verbal therapy. So therefore there is a play. And children do not necessarily need to understand everything that's going on for them and others on a high level of awareness. 

Of course, they need to know some information, it's good for them and there's their own story about themselves, but not in such a detailed way as adults need to take responsibility. So I see theoretically that there is a difference between how I understand working with Child, which I'm informed through play therapy. 

Unfortunately, I don't know Italian, so I did not read a lot of their work. I'm joking that my grandmother started to learn Italian when she was 82, something like that.

And I'm joking that I will start learning Italian, but now I'm more more close to the decision. Maybe I will do it 40 years later, earlier than she did, just so I can read stuff there, their writing. I'm sure there is some stuff I don't know about because this language barrier and the TA theory that I am, well, I'm talking about basic theory, TA theory.

So in a sense, I would agree with you, John. And I think other psychotherapy schools have similar problems which started as adult psychotherapy, like Gestalt. And so usually what would happen is some people in that certain psychotherapy school would be interested in applying, I don't know, Gestalt or whatever other school there is, how to work, how to apply it to work with children. 

So they would start from the adult general theory and then make it more usable for working with children and adolescents. And so in play therapy, we have also many, many different schools

Gestalt play therapy, Ericssonian play therapy, cognitive behavioural play therapy, Jungian play therapy, second analytical play therapy, child-centred play therapy, et cetera, et cetera. You get the point.

[Matt]

Yes. Okay, so I'm curious, are your favourite bits of TA theory that you use in your work with the young people, the children that you work with?

[Alina]

Your question is connected to what Tatjana was saying about autonomy. So one of my favourite pieces of theory is called The Real Ego of Maria Teresa Romanini from 1991. And she was an Italian author, one of the pioneers in working with children. 

And she draw differently the ego states. So we know three circles, one upon each other quite straight, they don't touch each other too much, they don't contaminate. Well, she placed the Child in the middle and the Parent and the Adult are askew, so aside. 

They are connected, but they are not on top of each other. And she was talking about the centrality of the Child ego state in childhood with playfulness, another language, a more symbolic language, vitality specific to the child. Taking over from what Tatiana said, I think autonomy in the case of children is just looking differently. 

And the emphasis is not placed so much on building up the Adult ego state. And what I am bringing to the table of TA with children is to develop this concept of strengthening the Child ego state when we are working with children, because the Child is the central ego state in childhood. Yeah.

[Matt]

When you say strengthening, what might you observe as that Child ego state is strengthened?

[Alina]

Well, if I would summarise it, I would say let's let children to be children. So let's not overgrow them, especially in today's era with having access to all sorts of information that is making you grow or making your Adult a bit stronger. And I know this and I know that. So I don't have to be a child. I don't have to play anymore.

So one of the things that I am looking for, it was at the base of my theory, was seeing children of eight playing or not playing anymore and acting like children of 12. 

Like, I don't want to play with this, this is boring. I don't want this game. Let's talk. What do you want to talk? Well, I don't know. And of course you can move on in the same direction. So it feels a bit of a confusion and with strengthening the Child ego state I'm looking at specific parts, for example the intellect or the body or the senses, just the contact that we have with parts of ourselves at different ages.

[Matt] 

Okay, so this kind of, you're aware of a developmental process and where that child might be in the developmental process, holding that in awareness as you work with them. Okay. 

[Alina]

Yes.

[John]

I'm really curious, sorry, just before you move on, because I'm really curious about this. Alina, when you think about the structural model of ego states, and you think of the second order structure, and you think about the P1, A1, C1, and you talk about strengthening the Child ego state.

Is there a particular aspect of the second order structure that you feel like you are strengthening when you're working with?

[Alina]

The particularity inside the C2, so inside the Child ego state, is the fluidity. So I'm looking at the coherence. I'm informed by Hargadan and Sills, I'm, let's say I'm placing an emphasis on flexibility upon the ego states. 

The emphasis is with what I call the good fairy, the P1 plus.

Which I think is quite particular in working with children and having a sense of support coming from the P1+ as opposed to the P1-. So that's something that I'm interested in as well as my other two approaches in therapy is clay therapy and brain spotting, which are working very good with what we call C1, so the somatic part.

I'm interested in all of them, everything that is in situ.

[Matt]

Okay, great. Thank you. Good answer. 

What about you, Tatjana, your favourite pieces of TA theory that you work with?

[Tatjana]

Yeah, I would say script in mind that it is script in development for young children, especially for the pre-schoolers. So I like to be mindful of how parents, but also other parental figures and also the culture influence their development. Because the way how I work, I work individual with child and also

I'm having a sacred education for parents and whenever it's possible, include and need it. I include also consultations for teachers, both in either in a kindergarten or school. So I'm very, very mindful how children are very vulnerable in this life stage and how all of us need to

find a way how to support them and get back them on trace to feel better inside of them. 

So I would say both a script matrix or even more co-creative script and also a record system, the script system, like thinking of how they live in a daily life.

[Matt]

Brilliant. And you brought in the P word, the parenting word. And we haven't touched on that. As a parent of two adult kids, who I now apologise to regularly for mistakes that I've made as a father, because they're very aware. Yeah, how do you, with the idea of play therapy, you're obviously contracting with the parents.

I've got a couple of questions. How do you have parents come to approach you? Do they approach you specifically for play therapy or do you just, do they know you as child therapists? And do you make that distinction? yeah, so I'm very curious about your role with the parents.

Alina, I'm going to ask you first.

[Alina]

I think your question is very interesting. I never thought of this question before. It will be the first time when I'm thinking together with you, Matt. I think parents are approaching me because they know that I work with children, teenagers and adults. So sometimes they are asking, do you work with small children? What is the age? So they don't ask specifically for play therapy or at least this is not my case. 

Sometimes or most of the times parents are coming with an urgency. So it's looking like whatever you do, I need my child to be good or I need to understand what is happening with the child. So then I contract on what are we doing? 

Because sometimes a child exiting the therapy room, the play therapy room is just exuberating and the mother or the father is asking, what did you do there? We played.

That was all? So we contract, I contract with the parent, what does it mean to work with a child in therapy? How the therapy looks like? What is play therapy? What is clay therapy, et cetera? That's what I do in terms of contracting.

[Matt]

And you just used the word clay therapy. So I'm assuming you're talking about moulding clay into objects to work with that in a process. Okay, thank you. What about you Tatjana in terms of working and contracting with parents? How does it work with you?

[Tatjana]

Here they usually ask us for, I would say more frequently for play therapy than for child psychotherapy. And it's because we are a center where we also offer for, we do clinical stuff and we also do training. So we are quite known, I would say, by play therapy. 

So they're asking specifically for that approach, although they do not really understand, most of them don't really understand and they would be only confused with this kind of question. Is it play therapy or child psychotherapy? Because all what they want really is help for their child. And they heard that play therapy helps. So that's the ending of their understanding of it.

[John]

Well, we're on the topic of parents. I'm curious because Alina, you've talked about working with the Child and strengthening the Child. What are both of your thoughts on the fact that you most likely end up as introjects in the child's Parent ego state? And how do you account for that in your work?

[Alina]

Yeah, tough one, John. Yeah, I think this is the challenge that we face most often and our supervisees as well. As Tatjana, I am working also with parents in groups, doing parenting workshops, but also individual therapy or psychoeducational therapy for parents.

So we take into account and we work. I regularly meet with parents when I'm working with a child and this is in the contract from the beginning. I normally start with the session only with the parents and then I see the child for a couple of sessions, three, four, and then I see the parents again for a feedback session. And regularly means once a month or once in three, four sessions or if needed more.

I also recommend to the parents of the children in therapy to follow a TA101 if this is happening in their area. And I have seen this to be very beneficial.

Matt (32:09.592)

Yeah, great. That's great. I heard you both talking about the importance of educating parents. My personal conviction now I understand TA is I think it would be really beneficial if all parents managed to get a little bit of a TA 101 before the child was born or conceived even.

Such as the the benefits I think of understanding the dynamics and the the influence I was curious around. 

What conditions are required, in order to enable play therapy to be effective? What are you providing in that space, that room, both with the parents, with the family, and also with the children? What is it that you attend to in terms of the conditions of what's going on when you're working with the children?

[Tatjana]

Well, I can start, I can say that being as primarily a trained as non-directive play therapist, I would say unconditional acceptance, think. Maybe. Yeah. So I see it as a main thing that help children to flourish. Not only that, so unconditional acceptance as the child is, of course, limits when necessary. 

And being in the child's emotional state as it is presented either in direct relationship with me or through play, for that we are using empathic reflections of emotions or behaviour or thoughts.

So what is interesting is that in 10 sessions based on mostly this, most children's symptoms reduces. And it's like, wow, from one side and at the same time, maybe even going back to your question, John, earlier, if we don't change the family system and or the school system where usually the problem is also presented and usually is the cause, the child will have a symptom again. So that's why it's so important to work in parallel with parents and sometimes with school as well.

And saying all that, in some sense, we can see ourselves as good introjects for the child. And it's also raised as an ethical question. Because if we see a script as the best adaptation for the child in the family and school system and the cultural system, and we change it, without changing the system, the child is in a problem. He will be hurt again. So I'm very, very aware of that and trying to find ways how to still help the child and, and yeah, not take his defences away the ones he needs if the system is not changed in some sense.

[Matt]

That's really helpful to hear that. So the unconditional acceptance of the child and their emotional expression and then the system, family, school. Excellent. Thanks. Alina, what came to mind for you?

[Alina]

Yeah, I really love what Tatjana said and it brings me to a favourite quote of mine from Alessandra Pierini saying that the therapist who is working with children is a hero under contract.

And I don't know if I'm a hero under contract. I know that for me a condition is to leave my agenda aside. So to be fully there and not to have expectations of the child, not to meet him in any other part than he actually is; developmentally, emotionally, etc. So working without an agenda can be quite challenging, especially if you like structure, like I like sometimes. 

Another part is to be able to have Child-to-Child transactions. So to be able to sit down on the floor while listening, maybe to your Parent ego-state in your mind saying, what are you doing now? You should do this or that, or this doesn't sound moving nowhere, no?

Let's push the things which is very much into accordance with the first one, work and leave a bit the agenda aside. And what I've learned across the years was to allow myself to be authentic the way I am. So a child will know exactly that in that day I have a headache and I cannot stay with my head down to play with lego. So we can do something else, but that's how I am in that session. 

Children don't like squishy sounds and they can immediately catch if there is something wrong with us. So I think these are some preconditions for me in working with children.

[Matt]

So am I hearing you saying that part of your process is just being fully you, fully in the present moment, as much as you can be aware and engaging with the child, similarly to what Tatjana was saying, with full acceptance and yeah.

[Alina]

Yeah, because children are modelling a lot of our behaviour, no? So it's a way of learning how to be.

[Matt]

Yeah, great. This is so interesting. I was going to ask, yeah, I was going to ask if you could give us an example of some work that you have done where say this is to some of our listeners who may be in the field of working with children, educationalists or psychotherapists and you were going to share with them the effectiveness of your work or an example of your work being effective. 

An anecdote, a story, obviously one that you could, you have permission to share. So I was just wondering if there was any example you could give.

It's one of the things that our listeners have often asked. They'd like to hear how TA is effective or how it has been with clients. And so, yeah, that'd be great if you've got something?

[Tatjana]

Okay. So here's an example. I was working at the time. It was now almost 10 years ago, with a little girl who was three and a half when her mother approached, it was a very serious divorce. Because actually custody battle and all, all nasty things between her mother and father and also maternal parents as well. were also part of it. 

And one of the symptoms she had was separation anxiety. Actually, the previous situation which triggered most part of her separation anxiety was her father took her for a week away and before that she never was without her mother and mother did not have time to prepare her. 

She supposed to be for a weekend with him and then she was for a week. And that was extremely hard for these three year old, showing some PTSD signs and many other symptoms and separation anxiety. And what I really enjoyed, well, as you can enjoy in that process. 

So she also experienced separation anxiety with me in the session. And then I talked with mother how we will help her to feel safe with me. And we slowly found a way for her to feel safe and to build on feeling of safety. And first mother was with us in the room and then mother would go out in the next session and come back in a few minutes. 

And so we were separated in that way. Finally, the mother was in the next room. The little girl could go there whenever she wanted. And the last stage of this work was, well, this part of the work was when she would use a play telephone. A telephone for play, and she would pick up and say, mom, and I would be mom. 

And then we would talk like, hello, how are you doing? I'm here. you can play, you can, you're safe. and she would then repeat as many times as she would. So this is an example, how you can think of, that is something resolved through play and through relationship as well. You could hear a lot of relationship segments.

[Matt]

Yeah, great. And I'm hearing that you work closely with mom as well in terms of the graded withdrawal. Yeah, okay, fantastic. Nice, thank you. It's great.

It's really lovely as well hearing about the playful telephone call where you're role playing her mother and she's imagining that you are and then that healing process for her. Yeah, excellent. Thank you. It's great.

Alina, have you?

[Alina]

I was thinking of some cases that were very similar. So I will not talk only about one, but using a technique with more children, a bit bigger, around nine, ten. I was working a lot with children who were doing exams. And as preparation for the exam, I used to do a technique called copio-nemone which means the script from an Italian author, Massimo del Monte, in which the child is doing some guided imagery. 

And I remember a particular child who drew a monster. And after you draw sort of a character that is existing, or you can just imagine, you have to ask some questions to this character, like, where are you coming from? What is your age? What do you do here? And then the child has to be the monster and has to respond just like he is the monster. 

And I remember one particular child who was saying that he is a monster, he's coming from another planet and his biggest worry is the stress. And he escaped from the planet, so he has no parents, he's alone. And at a certain point I felt like this script is so bad. Like, how do I change things? How do I intervene? Like, what is that agenda that I have to put aside?

So I breathe and I ask, okay, and how old is this monster? And he says, seven thousand. And I said, that means seven in our ears. And he said, yes. And I just ask him, what do you think this monster needs? And he looks at me and he said, time. He needs time.

And I looked at him, he was just before the exams. So it felt so obvious he needed time. And after that session, this child came again the next session without biting his nails for the first time. And he was relaxed, he sat on the couch, hands open, legs open. And just like Tajiana said, I had no idea what happened because he didn't have more time, but something shifted internally.

He gave himself the permission to breathe, to have some internal space.

[Matt]

Right. Isn't that interesting? There's such a lot of the work that I'm hearing is that in many ways you need to be very present yourself and let go of outcome and not be driven towards outcome.

And like you said before, trusting the process is, yeah, fascinating, fascinating work.

I wanted to ask, is there anything that you would like to add to this conversation before we close? Anything that you feel is particularly important in regards to play therapy and transactional analysis? Anything important that's on your mind before we close?

[Alina]

There is something that was circulated here around by Tatjana earlier and took over by you Matt and John about script that it was on my mind. I'm very grateful to have the fourth P when we work with children. So we have protection, have potency, we have permission, but we also have prevention. And this has been at the core of my work with children, working with prevention, preventing this bad script or this tragic script to happen. yeah, it was here a couple of times while we had the discussion. I wanted to mention that we have a fourth P.

[Matt]

Yeah. Great. Prevention. Yeah. So important. Tatjana?

[Tatjana]

Yeah, I think it's very important to work with children for prevention work. And not to repeat myself, one new thought came to my mind is that for me, working with children helped a lot for working with adults as well. It informed my practice hugely, and also helped me to move from verbal therapy only in working with adults. 

So I would say all those TA practitioners that are interested in working with children can also maybe add this information to it that working with children will also help them in working with adults as well with themselves, understanding themselves. 

Because when we work with children, we see developmentally what has been needed at the time when some fixations, trauma, kind of patterns happened, which we now in adulthood have in an adult client. So we can also adjust our work with adults as well. 

And in that sense, we also do some prevention because these adults will have children and or they will influence children. we are doing, yeah, a wide range of influence. Yes. Yes.

[John]

Yeah, and why should play therapy just be for children? Its creative approaches and therapy will be useful at all ages, I'm sure. Yeah.

[Matt]

Yeah. You've definitely inspired me to dust off my sand tray, which I do have a sand tray. And I do use it with adults actually sometimes. And my felt tip pens and the colouring. Yeah. And to get back into that playful side that therapy can be supported by. yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation. What comes to mind for me is I was listening to a podcast where there was an economist who was asked if you could spend any of your money in just one place, where would it be? 

And he said, no, no shadow of a doubt. said it would be supporting zero to four in terms of the children on the planet that would have the best outcomes in the long term, economically, criminal justice system, mental and emotional wellbeing, physical wellbeing. 

And I think that this subject is really important and I appreciate what I've learned from this today. There's lots that I want to go and explore myself personally and hopefully this will be very informative for other psychotherapists out there who have got an interest. So yeah, we will make sure that your contact details are in the show notes because you may well get a few inquiries about what could be done in terms of approaching these different techniques in play therapy. 

Thank you so much. I appreciate your time today. been really, really very inspiring, actually. Yeah, thank you.

[John]

Will you both be at the World Conference next year?

[Tatjana]

Yes, we will have a workshop together.

[Alina]

Yes

[Matt]

Brilliant. And what we'll try and do in the show notes as well is put in any of the organisations that you both mentioned, the Italian organisation, anything that you've got as well, Tatjana, where people can explore a little bit further. So, yeah, great. Really appreciate your time. Thank you.

[Alina]

Yeah, we are very happy that you've had us and I hope that more TA people are going to be interested about working with children and teenagers, young people. Thank you.

[Tatjana]

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your curiosity about these two fields. And I really felt very encouraged to say, to speak on my own experience and appreciate it. So thank you very, very much for generating this feeling. 

[Matt]

Pleasure, really enjoyed it.