Mark Silverman is a social psychologist who lives in upstate New York and generates his electricty with wind power. 

I shadow the boy into the room. He looks around, sizing things up, picks up a stuffed dragon, looks it over and puts it down. He slowly circles, checking things out. He looks over his shoulder, sees that I’m down on the floor with him, and seems to relax. Then he spots an enemy lurking in the corner.

The inflated bop bag is bigger than him. I can remember a smiling Bozo the Clown from the past, but this bag doesn’t seem very happy. It resembles a man with a sneer painted on his face, with a body of smooth white vinyl striped in black, almost a referee uniform. The kid approaches with a determined look, and begins to punch, watching the bag go down and pop back up. The beating goes on, punctuated by kicks and slams and tosses while the victim remains completely passive, absorbing the punishment. The five year old leaps, wrestles, rolls across the rug until he pauses while pinned beneath this personal adversary. He breathes for a moment, as if to underline the power of his opponent, and perhaps anticipate an inevitable heroic victory. Now he’s back on the attack, up on his feet so he can hurl the bag against the wall, head first, then butt first, finally grabbing a styrofoam bat for more beating.

I watch, tracking the action almost like a sportscaster, reflecting the child’s excitement.

“You want to teach him a lesson.”

“You hit him really hard”

“It feels so good to hurt him.”

“You are proud to win this battle.”

But suddenly, he stops and looks at me, his eyes a little sad.

“You know my parents hate me.”

I inhale, before responding.

“You really want me to know that.”

The kid nods, almost smiles before hurling himself back onto his opponent as the battle continues.

* * *

This approach is called nondirective play therapy, and the child runs the session. I set up a space with a bunch of toys that allow for play talk, the language of young children. The introduction is always the same:

“This is a special place. You can do almost anything. If there’s something you can’t do I’ll tell you. And you can say anything.”

I become a passive encourager, reflective listener, an empathic someone who tracks the action and the feelings as they unfold. If necessary, I set a limit on hurting or destroying things. It’s a powerful way to help someone deal with the effects of abuse, and the outcomes of living with troubled grownups whose lives are peppered with rage.

Children will repeat the same scene each week, the same toys, the same reactions, the same role plays. They’re stuck somewhere and even their play can’t move. I have to figure out a way to overcome the inertia and help them build up to some new responses. Other children try everything in the room, randomly searching for security, staring at ghost people. Some will curl up in a corner and quietly work on a meticulously constructed picture with markers or crayon. There are variations, many styles and habits. One thing becomes clear: play can be hard work.

Most of the children I see each week live with grownups that don’t have the time or the energy or the interest, and so I become the bop bag, a kind of surrogate on the receiving end of all kinds of feelings. The children can explore, be aggressive, and sometimes regress to baby talk. Ideally, they can also move to a better emotional space and learn to communicate with a grownup who seems to care about them.

I have learned that most of these children live in the afterimage of physical or psychological violence, and in the playroom I can see that their days have been a meat grinder of such experiences. Some of the violence goes back to the beginning of their lives, explosions that don’t necessarily destroy, but leave wounds that must heal. Others are traumatized by more recent events. Somewhere along the developmental path, the striving for competence, the acquisition of skills needed for a child’s survival can become translated into aggression and violence. We pretend that such violence is an aberration, but nevertheless we train our children to use it in many situations, and reward them when there’re successful at it. In this context perhaps Carl Jung said it best when he suggested that we’re barely civilized.