People sometimes look at me sideways when I use the word play. I understand why. It sounds light, a bit silly, possibly something you grew out of. And therapy, especially when you've finally worked up the courage to be there, does not feel like the place for lightness.
So I want to tell you what I actually mean. Because when I talk about play, I'm not talking about games, jokes, or laughing together (although sometimes that happens too). I'm talking about a specific quality of presence that I watch for in sessions. A state. And when it arrives, it's the moment I know something real is about to happen.
What most of us bring into the room
Most people come to therapy and work hard at it. They think carefully before they speak. They arrive with a sense of what they want to cover. They explain themselves thoroughly, make sure I'm following along, check that what they're saying makes sense.
This is completely understandable. Being in a room with someone, talking about the parts of yourself you haven't fully sorted out, takes courage. Of course you manage how you come across. Most of us do, at least at the start.
What I notice, sitting with people, is the editing happening in real time. The slight pause before speaking, where something gets decided. The way a story gets tidied as it's told, the sharp edges smoothed before they reach the air.
There's nothing wrong with any of that. But there's a version of the session where everything is very coherent, very considered, and something essential keeps staying just out of reach. Not because the person isn't trying. Because trying, in a certain careful way, is exactly what's keeping the door closed.
What it looks like when it arrives
There's usually a moment, somewhere in a session, where something shifts. It's quiet. It doesn't announce itself.
Someone says something they clearly didn't plan to say. They pause afterwards, slightly surprised by themselves. The quality of the room changes. Something that was at a slight remove is suddenly right here.
Or someone follows a thread that has nothing obvious to do with what we were talking about. A memory from nowhere. An image that floated up. They follow it anyway, just to see, without needing it to arrive anywhere useful. And it does. It always does.
Or someone notices a part of themselves they've been quietly managing, the part that's furious, or frightened, or wanting something they've decided they're not allowed to want. And instead of explaining it away, they get curious about it. Just for a moment. Just enough.
That's play. That's exactly what I mean. The moment when you stop performing the session and start being in it. When something gets said before it gets edited. When you're following something real rather than presenting something prepared.
Why it's where everything changes
Here's what I notice, sitting with people in this work. Understanding yourself doesn't change you. Not on its own.
You can understand your patterns perfectly, trace them back to exactly where they started, articulate them to anyone who will listen, and still find yourself doing the same thing on a Tuesday afternoon when you're tired and the situation has just the right shape to it. Understanding is not nothing. But it lives in the head, and the head is not where patterns actually run.
What changes things is when something is felt rather than understood. When something slips through before you've managed it. When you're surprised by yourself, by what came out of your mouth, by what's suddenly present in the room. That's the moment of real contact with your own experience. And that's the moment things start to move.
The play state is where that becomes possible. Not because it's relaxed or easy, it often isn't. But because when you're genuinely present, when you've set down the clipboard for a moment, something true has room to surface. Something that your careful, responsible, highly capable self has been keeping very sensibly out of the room.
What gets in the way
The thing that makes this hard is that the habit of careful self-presentation usually developed for a good reason. In environments where being unguarded had consequences, where showing the wrong thing meant something, where getting it right mattered, you learned to manage. That was intelligent. It kept something protected.
What it costs, over time, is access to the felt experience underneath. You cannot be genuinely surprised by yourself while you are carefully managing how you come across. The two states don't coexist.
In therapy, we don't try to wrestle that habit away from you. We build, slowly and together, enough of a sense of ease that it becomes possible to set it down for a moment. That's when play becomes available. And when play becomes available, the things that felt just out of reach start to move.
What my role is in this
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.
Getting to the play state is not something you do alone, or something I instruct you toward. It's not a technique you practise and then arrive at. It's something that happens between two people when enough ease has built up that the editing becomes optional.
My job is to help create that ease. Not by being relentlessly warm or by asking the right questions at the right time, though both of those things matter. But by being genuinely curious about you, unhurried, not needing you to perform or progress or arrive anywhere in particular. When I'm not evaluating you, something in you starts to stop evaluating itself.
That's the shift. It's slow, sometimes. It takes however long it takes. But I'm watching for it in every session, and when it arrives, even briefly, I follow it. Because that's where you actually are. And that's where the work becomes real.
Sometimes we go beyond words entirely, if that opens up for you. A drawing that captures something language can't. An image. A feeling given a shape before it has a name. Not because it's required, but because sometimes it's the most direct route to something true.
Five ways to notice the play state
and begin to practise it between sessions.
Most of us edit before we talk. Not dramatically, just a small internal check: is this the right thing to say, does this make sense, will this land well. That's the managed state. The play state is what happens when something gets said before that check has finished running. You don't have to force it. Just start noticing when it happens, because it does happen, and that moment is worth paying attention to.
In one conversation this week, notice the edit happening before you speak. What are you deciding to leave out? Try saying just one thing you would normally have quietly removed.
What do I tend to keep out of conversations that matter? What do I imagine would happen if I said it?
A random memory. A song that keeps coming to mind. A feeling that surfaces while doing something completely unrelated. The managed version of us dismisses these quickly: that's not what I'm thinking about right now. But those threads are rarely irrelevant. They're usually the unconscious trying to say something the conscious mind has decided it's not ready to hear. The play state follows them anyway, without needing to know where they go.
When something catches your attention this week for no obvious reason, follow it for five minutes. Don't analyse it. Just let it be there and see what it does.
What have I been dismissing as irrelevant lately? What might happen if I stayed with it a little longer?
There's a particular kind of therapy where someone always has an explanation ready. A theory about why they are the way they are, tidy and rehearsed. That explanation isn't wrong, but it can become a way of staying in control of an experience rather than actually having it. The play state is willing to say I don't know why this is coming up and stay there, curious, rather than immediately reaching for the explanation that closes things back down.
The next time you catch yourself explaining something about yourself, pause before you finish. Try: I don't actually know why this is. I wonder. Hold the wondering for a moment before moving on.
What am I most certain about, in terms of why I am the way I am? What if I've been holding that certainty a little too tightly?
When your hands are busy, the part of you that monitors and edits gets quieter. Drawing, writing without a destination, making something that doesn't have to be good, these bypass the performance in a way that talking sometimes can't. This is why sessions sometimes move toward art or imagery or writing, not because the output matters, but because making is one of the fastest routes into the play state. Whatever comes out is information, especially if it surprises you.
Set a timer for ten minutes. Draw, write, or doodle with no intention for it to be good, finished, or meaningful. When the timer goes, look at what happened. What do you notice?
What would I make if I knew no one, including me, was going to evaluate it? What stops me from making that thing?
Most of us have parts of ourselves we've learned to manage rather than meet. The part that's quietly furious. The part that wants something we've decided we're not allowed to want. The part that's frightened underneath the functioning. The play state doesn't try to fix those parts or argue them into being reasonable. It just gets curious. What is this trying to do? What does it need? When did it learn this? That curiosity, warm and unhurried, is usually where the most important things in a session are waiting.
Think of a part of yourself you tend to push away, impatience, neediness, sadness, something else. Instead of managing it today, try asking it: what are you trying to do for me? You don't have to like the answer. Just listen.
Which part of me am I most reluctant to sit with? What do I imagine I would find if I stopped trying to manage it and just got curious?
One last thing, before you go.
If you've been in therapy before and something felt just out of reach, like you were working hard but the thing you actually came for kept not arriving, it might not have been that you weren't trying hard enough. It might have been that you were trying too carefully.
The play state is where you get to stop being a project. Where something can slip through that you didn't plan. Where the version of you that has been managing everything very competently gets to set that down for a moment, and something true gets to surface.
That's what I mean by play. And that's where we're heading.
The shift doesn't happen in the part of the session where you explain yourself perfectly. It happens in the pause just after, when something comes through that you didn't plan to say.
-- Mae
