Healing Through Play
While taking the Interactive Course on Early Childhood Attachment Stress and Trauma I gained insight on early childhood social and emotional development, on the importance of the child — parent relationship and on understanding children’s behavior through a trauma lens. My team and I are working with the NGO Clowns Without Borders (CWB) that provides play and laughter to displaced communities around the world. I found the training to be very informative in terms of approaching the work that the clowns do and in providing them with a toolkit that they can use to optimize their performances and their interactions with the communities they are visiting. Two elements of the training stood out for me in relation to our group’s conversations with Naomi: the effects of toxic stress and trauma, as well as the cultural considerations when working in early childhood mental health.
During our meetings, one of the issues that Naomi focused on was the clowns’ ability to recognize ACEs and trauma in children. One of the aspects she touched on was indentifying children that may be experiencing a traumatic trigger during play, based on their engagement with the play or the performance. Another aspect, was different ways to support the clowns in identifying trauma play behaviors, as the children are engaging with the clowns and with each other. The training gave me a great insight on how trauma affects the brain and especially on how the ongoing effects of complex trauma, which many of the communities are subjected to, rewire the children’s brains. One interesting part that I feel our partners could benefit from is how to identify trauma play in the children they work with, that can often be perceived as children being “difficult” or disruptive. A potential positive outcome could be that the clowns have the tools they need to identify trauma play and to provide a play space for children to safely express their fear or anger.
Another topic we discussed with Naomi during our meetings and one that continued to be a topic of conversation during our own team meetings was the cultural considerations when working with communities globally. Naomi brought to our attention past experiences were diversity informed practices have been pivotal in engaging with the communities as well as with the local partners that the clowns collaborate with. The concept of cultural humility stood out for me during the training. I feel that CWB could use tools related to the concept to shape their performances to be other — oriented, when it comes to addressing cultural identity. We do exist and operate within cultural contexts and we do learn to play within cultural contexts. Diversity informed play could start from the performers engaging in self awareness and reflexivity when interacting with familes. It could brunch out to recognizing and respecting non dominant ways of knowledge and to understanding the community and the family structures of the people they are working with. Finally, I found very helpful, especially in relation to the clowns’ performances that include symbolic gestures, imagery and words, the idea that language in the form of words or body language can be used to hurt or heal. Clowns could incorporate approaches in the language of their performances that create a healing space for the communities they are working with.
I found the training to be very helpful in terms of gaining insight on trauma informed approaches but also in terms of looking at the structure of the modules of such a training. I feel that my team and I could incorporate and adapt structural aspects of the training in order to format our own toolkit for CWB.
