Play Therapy

no, not structured, real play therapy, but just playing with your kid

When kiddo first moved in in 2012, I didn't blog as much, we were in our bonding time and she was glued to me every waking moment almost.  Also, I had a tendency to just share random things and not get too deep. I had a journal for that at the time of things to update the sw on.

I was thinking about how we used to play with her dolls together.

It started playing as orphanage alot. Her first doll she bought while she was here was because she wanted to provide her with a home. Her box in the store was dusty and she'd been there for awhile, so she knew it was time she had a home.

We'd play with the dolls and she'd be an orphanage worker and we'd adopt the kids that we were playing with because we couldn't just leave them without a family.

Then we graduated to playing something along the lines of NCIS, where we were protecting somebody, trying to find the criminal and in the process finding the kids and saving them.

Later on, one of the teenagers would come in and say they were pregnant because somebody had raped them and we'd have to find the rapist.  The teen of course, was shown unconditional love and we constantly told her it wasn't her fault it happened.

We moved on to playing in the pool and the teen would end up raising her babies in the pool.  Once a sw came to get one of the babies because of a report of abuse and she started to drown the doll and said "If I can't have you, nobody can".  That was a moment of tears, because when kiddo was removed, her birth mom said she should just kill the girls because then she could visit them at the cemetary at least.

I had no idea her brain had heard any of that.

She worked through a ton of things with her baby dolls. I'm so proud of how far she came.  I'm also so proud that she's so protective of the babies and is good at demonstrating good, unconditional love. She took better care of those baby dolls than some parents do their real kids.

Our attachment therapist told us before she got to what happened in the pool with drowning the doll, that if she played out this the whole healing way, she eventually would have to abuse one of the dolls and not to be alarmed, that it was actually her finally dealing with it.

After that point, she was nothing but sweet with the dolls, but she also rarely had a need to really "play" dolls.  They're just there now.

I let her take the lead and she did a great job.

While I don't always realize how far she's come, sometimes something will happen and I'll realize she really has come a long way.