Feel Your Way Through the Play: Polyvagal Theory, Meaning-Making and Child Therapy

I was once approached by a supervisee who was seeking supervision to support their child centred play therapy practice. They felt confident with many of the micro-skills of play therapy, such as tracking, reflecting feelings and setting boundaries, but meaning-making felt different. Less concrete. Less certain.

The supervisee described themselves as a very black-and-white, logical thinker. 

In sessions with children, they would often find themselves wondering:

What does this play mean?

During one supervision session, they shared a story about a recent interaction with a child. The child had acted out a particular play theme, and the therapist had automatically connected it to an event that had recently happened within the child's family.

It seemed to make sense.

When the child didn't respond in the way the therapist expected, the therapist was left feeling stumped.

As we talked, we explored something important: children's play can hold many meanings. A play theme might connect with something that has happened in a child's life, but it may also represent a feeling, a fear, a relationship dynamic, a bodily experience, a developmental need, a wish, a rehearsal or something we haven't yet understood.

Sometimes, we simply don't know. Perhaps we're not always supposed to.

During that conversation, I offered the supervisee a piece of advice that has stayed with me:

Feel your way through the play.

This advice doesn't mean abandoning clinical thinking, assessment or curiosity or assuming that every feeling we have as therapists tells us something definitive about a child. Instead, it means becoming curious about what is happening in the room, in the relationship and within our own bodies.

It means asking:

What am I noticing?

What am I feeling?

What is happening between us?

What might the child's play be inviting me to experience alongside them?

For me, understanding nervous-system states has been transformational in developing this kind of curiosity in my own practice. This is what we’ll explore in this blog post.

How understanding the nervous system changed my practice

One of the turning points in my therapeutic practice with children came when I read Lisa Dion's Aggression in Play Therapy book and began exploring Stephen Porges' work on Polyvagal Theory and neuroception. Unfortunately, I haven’t been lucky enough to participate in Lisa Dion’s Synergenic Play Therapy training yet (if you have, so jealous!)

I started to think differently about what was happening in the playroom. I became more interested not only in the content of a child's play, but also in the energy of the room. I’d often ask myself questions like:

Was the child moving towards me or away from me?

Was the play fast, chaotic and explosive?

Was it repetitive and highly controlled?

Did the child seem frozen, disconnected or difficult to reach?

What was happening in my own nervous system as I sat alongside them?

Was my heart racing?

Did I feel the urge to move away?

Did I feel sleepy, flat or disconnected?

Was I holding my breath?

Did I feel playful, warm and connected?

These observations didn't give me a neat answer about what a child's play meant, but they offered another layer of information. These observations gave me something to become curious about.

A brief introduction to the Autonomic Nervous System and their states

Our brains and bodies are constantly taking in information from within us and from the world around us.

We notice facial expressions, tone of voice, movement, sound, touch, changes in our environment and sensations within our own bodies. Much of this happens outside our conscious awareness.

Our nervous system is continually responding to cues of safety, danger and overwhelm.

The autonomic nervous system plays an important role in regulating many of the processes that keep us alive, including heart rate, breathing and digestion. It also helps mobilise or conserve energy depending on what our brain and body perceive is happening around us.

For simplicity, I often think about three broad states:

Safety and connection

In this state, we may feel grounded, socially engaged and connected to ourselves and others. We can think more clearly, play, learn, explore and be curious.

Fight or flight

When our system detects threat or challenge, we may become mobilised. Energy increases. We might experience a racing heart, faster breathing, tension, anger, agitation or an urge to fight or escape.

Collapse or shutdown

When something feels too overwhelming or inescapable, the system may move towards conserving energy or disconnecting. A person might feel numb, distant, flat, frozen or withdrawn.

Of course, human nervous systems are far more complex than three neat categories. We can move between states, experience mixed states and respond differently depending on our histories, relationships and environments.

But this framework can give us a useful starting point for understanding what might be happening beneath behaviour.

It can also help us become curious about what is happening in the therapy room.

Our nervous systems don't exist in isolation

Something else that became increasingly important to me was recognising that our nervous systems are affected by other people.

You might have experienced this yourself.

Perhaps you've been sitting near someone who is highly stressed and noticed your own body becoming tense.

Maybe you’re near someone who becomes overwhelmed and, before you know it, you can feel yourself becoming overwhelmed too.

Or perhaps you've experienced the opposite: being alongside someone whose calm presence helps you breathe a little more deeply and feel safer.

As therapists, we are not detached observers of the therapeutic process.

We are in the room too.

Our bodies are there.

Our histories are there.

Our nervous systems are there.

The therapeutic relationship unfolds between two nervous systems, and sometimes what we notice within ourselves can offer valuable information about what is happening relationally.

It's important to hold this carefully.

Our bodily responses are information, not proof.

Feeling frightened doesn't necessarily mean a child is frightened.

Feeling rejected doesn't definitively mean a child is communicating rejection.

Our responses may relate to the child, the therapeutic relationship, our own history or some combination of these.

The task is not to turn our feelings into certainty.

The task is to notice them, remain curious and reflect.

Feeling my way through the play - terror and helplessness

You may have heard me speak before about a three-year-old child I once worked with.

There is one session I remember particularly clearly.

The room was in chaos.

Projectiles had been thrown and landed in their final resting places. Toys had been dumped and scattered across the floor. The child was playing out a scene filled with fear, terror and vulnerability.

The energy in the room was intense.

Everybody's nervous system was activated, including my own.

I remember feeling incredibly vulnerable.

Fear, terror and vulnerability are feelings I know something about personally. They are also feelings I can find difficult to sit with and experience in my own body.

I noticed watery eyes. A racing heart. Hypervigilance. A crack in my voice when I tried to speak and an urge to get away.

Instead of moving away from what was happening, I chose to stay present with it.

With watery eyes and a crack in my voice, I said:

"I'm feeling scared. I wonder if you're feeling scared too?"

The child looked at me and responded:

"I am scared."

I remember leaving that session feeling absolutely exhausted and floored. I cried on the way home.

More than anything, I wanted to be in the company of my partner. Not because I needed to analyse the session or talk through every detail, but because I needed to experience safety and co-regulation.

Understanding nervous-system states helped me make sense of what had happened in the room.

I want to be careful here.

My racing heart, watery eyes and urge to run did not, on their own, prove what the child's play meant. Instead, they helped me notice that something powerful was happening in the room. They invited me to slow down. To become curious. To remain alongside the child rather than rushing to interpret or escape.

In that particular moment, the child was able to tell me directly that they were scared. Often, children won't and sometimes, they can't.

That is why meaning-making requires humility.

We notice. We wonder. We hold hypotheses lightly.

Feeling my way through the play - risk and vulnerability

I remember another moment early in my therapeutic relationship with a different child.

The child shot me with a toy gun, and I played dead.

Every time I moved, they shot me again.

The message became very clear: I was to stay completely still.

So I lay as still as I could while positioning myself so I could continue to see what was happening in the room (because, you know, safety.)

The child then began placing objects on my body as I lay there.

I remember feeling incredibly vulnerable.

My heart was racing.

I felt unsure.

I didn't know exactly what the play meant.

All I could do was trust what the child was showing me and remain curious about my experience.

Later, reflecting on the session through the lens of Polyvagal Theory and the different states of the nervous system, helped me think about what might have been happening.

I knew this child had experienced rejection in many areas of their life. Trusting me as a therapist may have felt risky.

Perhaps the child needed to know:

Will you stay?

Can I control what happens here?

Are you safe when I am powerful?

Will you reject me too?

These were possibilities - not facts.

I didn't need to decide that I had discovered the one correct interpretation of the child's play.

Instead, I could hold these ideas gently and continue noticing patterns over time.

What happened before the play?

What happened after?

How did the child relate to me?

What repeated across sessions?

What changed as our relationship developed?

Meaning-making became less about cracking a code and more about staying in relationship.

Meaning-making isn't about getting the right answer

It can be so easy, particularly when you're early in your career, to become caught up in wanting to do play therapy the right way.

You might find yourself thinking:

What does this play mean?

Am I missing something?

Should I interpret this?

What should I say next?

What would a more experienced therapist notice here?

Sometimes, the search for the right answer can take us away from the very thing happening in front of us.

The child. The relationship. The moment. Our own embodied experience.

Meaning-making doesn't necessarily require us to find the perfect interpretation.

Sometimes, it asks us to slow down enough to notice.

To notice the child's play without rushing to impose an adult story upon it. To notice what shifts in the room. To notice our own bodies. To notice moments of connection, rupture, power, fear, joy, control, vulnerability, distance and repair. And then to become curious.

Perhaps the invitation is to step out of our heads, just a little, and feel our way through what's happening.

How supervision can support meaning-making in child therapy

Like the supervisee who first approached me wanting to expand their skills in meaning-making, many therapists reach a point where knowing the theory or mastering the micro-skills no longer feels like enough.

You may know how to track play, how to reflect feelings, how to set therapeutic limits and still find yourself leaving a session wondering:

What on earth just happened in there?

Supervision can offer a space to slow the work down. It can offer a space to revisit a moment that felt confusing, powerful or uncomfortable. A space to think about the child's play alongside the therapeutic relationship, developmental needs, trauma history, family and systemic context, patterns across sessions and the therapist's own internal experience.

It can also help us separate curiosity from certainty.

Rather than asking only:

What does this play mean?

We might begin asking:

What possibilities are emerging here?

What am I noticing in the child, in myself and between us?

What else could this be about?

What am I drawn to believe, and why?

What information supports my hypothesis, and what information challenges it?

What does the child need from me right now, even if I don't yet fully understand the play?

Sometimes, good therapeutic work isn't about having the answer. Sometimes, it is about having enough safety within ourselves to stay present in the uncertainty and to feel our way through the play, rather than always trying to think our way through it.

Until next time, take care.

Ashleigh