Kim Barthel on Merging Play, Polyvagal Theory & Sensory Processing

Photo by Ash Gerlach on Unsplash

Lisa Dion interviewed Kim Barthel on the topic of “Merging Play, Polyvagal Theory & Sensory Processing” in a recent podcast as part of the Synergetic Play Therapy Institute’s ‘Lessons from the Playroom’ series. Kim shares little things that can make a big difference in play therapy.

Kim Barthel is an award-winning Occupational Therapist, teacher and author.

The podcast looks at how to safely help a child be in their “vessel” and to access a more flexible, adaptable, socially connected, engaged, and playful response through the body.

The discussion starts by exploring a deeper understanding of the body: activation, what that looks like in the child, and how to read the body.

They discuss how regulation, polyvagal theory and states of arousal exist as a manifestation of movement in the body: these behavioural concepts exist as a manifestation of movement in the body which live in people’s actions, and that makes them observable.

Kim notes that when we are in a harmonious state of being, our muscle system has a beautiful balance of sympathetic and para-sympathetic influence that allows one to have enough energy in one’s body to participate, to direct your body in orientation to what you want to do, and to be flexible and adaptable in your play. However, when one is in an active state of stress, when there is a dominant fight or flight influence, or a dominant parasympathetic dorsal-vagal ‘collapse’ influence, this also shows up in the body. For a therapist, observation of what direction a client is moving towards in their body is key to therapeutic input.

In a therapeutic setting, she comments, as a client is working through an experience, emotion, memory, the body reflects the processes the client is going through in ways that are observable and assist the therapist in their assessment.

She notes that the convergence of inner and outer expression meets in the insula in the brain, where triggers or associative integration occur, and this is reflected in the client’s posture, eyes, breath, shoulders, hands and feet, spine, and face. The therapist can see the “Aha” moment occur, as the client’s body and face re-align. The process of change from the moment of recognition of the emotion to an authentic connection to the self which results in regulation is reflected in the body.

This helps understand that actions are not good or bad, but reflect a current emotional state. Kim says that behavioural change cannot be willed, it has to come through authentic recognition of self, of being able to recognize our emotion while still being connected with another person.

If someone says that they don’t know how to be aware of the activation in their own body, Lisa asks, then how can one proceed. Kim points out that our earliest point of reference is grounding, being connected to the ground. The gravitational pull is greater when we are on the ground and gives the brain more information about ourselves, when we have multiple connection points to the ground. The sense of self begins from these sensory systems. This grounding sense can be disrupted by trauma. An action as simple as lying on the ground can help the body re-connect. The experience of lying still on the ground can be very activating, because it is not something we normally do – lie still on the ground and feel into our own body – and at first it can be very hard to do.

Kim gives an example that a colleague had asked her to try: to put both hands out in a receiving position and then to shift her right hand by moving it into a ‘stop’ position (the Buddha position). She became aware that as soon as she did that, her left foot came back like she wanted to brace herself. She recognized that, as soon as she was both in reception and boundary, she was no longer grounded. So, when she put both feet flat in a grounded position, she stopped breathing. She realized that this was an example that her body didn’t actually know how to do this, and how intuitively our body expresses and communicates how connected we are to what we say, what we think, and how we want to be in the world.

If being grounded is so central to our self of self, of being rooted, of our sense of connection, then it is easy to see what a place of vulnerability lying down can be for a child, either in play or at the point of going to sleep.

Kim makes the point that, as a play therapist, it is necessary to engage in the practice of play yourself, and not to ask a child to do something you wouldn’t be prepared to do yourself. It is important to practice the techniques yourself that you would invite a child to participate in during a therapeutic session, to experience the shifts of motion as the child would, through the movement systems. Lying on the ground, rolling through a tube, diving into a ball pit, are all invitations to emotional shifts. Lisa mentions the experience she had of experimenting with crawling around her home and what a disorienting experience that was. Or of hearing your heartbeat in a different way when you are immersed in water.

Kim recommends easing into your own sense of self by going for a walk consciously, or standing in the shower consciously, etc. Adults often have reasons why they have distanced themselves from body consciousness, self-protective barriers they have created. A staged approach of leaning in to awareness, then moving away, then in again, can ease the discomfort in beginning this work.

At the end of the podcast, they briefly discuss the ‘freeze’ response: Kim doesn’t see these states as a stepladder or as boxes. She thinks we have combinations of all these states of arousal, and that these states are fluid and variable from moment to moment and from individual to individual. She sees the ‘freeze’ state as being rather like being in your driveway, in your car, with one foot on the gas, revving at full throttle, and the other on the brake, so that you energy is SO high and you are completely immobilized. The body is trying to save your life with a huge adrenaline boost, but the complexity of your brain/body experience and understanding is in play at the same time, creating an overload.

If we are alive, Kim notes, we are never fully disengaged from the body. This is true whenever we are conscious. We are in our bodies even during trauma or physical pain as long as we are conscious. Gentle invitations to self-touch are available to the therapist – e.g. playing with putting on a hat, can help a child move towards feeling safe in their bodily vessel and re-establish a relationship with their body.

Kim believes that embodied therapy can move people forward in ways that conceptualization alone can’t achieve.