PLAY
The Play emotional command system interacts with all the other emotional command systems, driving us to exercise response flexibility in relation to the changing intensities of visceral affect that are part of being alive in a body.
Response flexibility is our heart rate variability, which enhances our ability to participate with attuned decision-making, open receptivity, and responsiveness while experiencing our body's hormonal and nervous systems in motion.
PLAY exercises nervous system responses and heart rate variability in active sympathetic power and immobilised dorsal vagus surrender states
The range of these abilities informs the range of relationship dynamics we engage with, and each limits or expands our ability to participate fully in life and, therefore, our ability to learn.
Living in a narrow range of response flexibility is life-threatening for animals and is only possible for humans where access to comfort can be achieved without engaging in relationships. Retreats in isolation with home deliveries can be a joyful return to serenity if recovery from intensity is needed.
However, the comfort zone loses its elasticity and expansion for life when retreat is motivated by rigid self-limiting inner dialogue driven by generalised FEAR. Agoraphobia is an example of this withdrawal from life into a very small area where something resembling safety and comfort can be experienced. However, unlike the choice of a retreat, anything outside of this is painfully feared. This person is disabled from playing.
When baby mammals and humans play, we are rehearsing for life, increasing our range of hormonal and nervous system capacities in up-regulated states of arousal and power and down-regulated stages of immobility and surrender.
When playing with impact and being impacted, we also exercise our morality and care with our personal and role power, learning about the edges of our range of response flexibility and limits.
If we don't practice testing our power, we will never gain the skills to hunt and act to meet needs. If we don't test our power in taking action to meet our needs with people on whom our belonging depends, we will not learn about loving, being loved, sharing, and fair collaboration.
Without learning about our power and developing trusted learnt robustness while being impacted by another, we will likely avoid interactions where we might be impacted. This prevents us from participating fully in life.
Knowing our limits and learning about other people's limits creates relationship containers where we can all confidently exercise our power, knowing where, when and how not to go too far.
The PLAY system continues to drive us to meet and expand our capacities throughout life. In fact, research has suggested that if we don't get enough play, we have a "PLAY debt," which shows us that there is an optimum amount of play practice needed to participate effectively in life. Research has also shown that the PLAY drive has more dopamine reward than any of the other drives, which points to this being central to our thriving and surviving.
Play drives the impulse for creative self-expression, experiencing the joys of inhabiting our power potential. Play drives and excites creative strategies for meeting our needs in relationships with others and our environment with attunement. In this way, the PLAY system drives us to experiment with discovering the impact of our self-expression while getting our needs met.
Lions, for example, need to discover abilities to disable another animal efficiently and effectively so that they can survive when killing an antelope, for example, is necessary.
After witnessing wildlife predator-prey videos, I can see why this play practice is essential for survival in the real world.
In this rough-and-tumble role-playing, the lion learns about the limits of life that matter to them. It experiences the PANIC drive, signalling the pain of potential loss of relationship and belonging, alongside the CARE drive, repairing and nurturing any bruised edges.
As humans, we are also learning to play with our personal power, not to be too powerful or harm the ones we love. Through play, we learn to discover our limits and how to repair them when we have learned the hard way.
Unlike any other animal, we humans live in the reflection of life alongside its raw emergence. Sometimes, the raw emergence of living is outside of our awareness, and this is where all the other animals living in the raw emergence of life are our biggest teachers.
When we witness mammals playing, we can learn from the ways they practice discovering their confidence, knowing-
not to biting too hard and attuning to the other's resilient edges
Learning our 'enoughness' buttons - resilient edges and limits
not winning too much as playmates will be lost
the joys and pleasures of caring for each other and turn-taking that necessitates belonging
the joy and pleasure of self-expression
the gratitude of receiving another's self-expression
the joys and pleasure of penetrating and being penetrated either physically or energetically
Trusting acting on our intentions
learning safety and trust being at the affect of another's power through mirror neurons recognising loving intention
being trustworthy - learning to trust acting on our intentions through attuned tracking of impact
effective self-care of regulation by shaking it all off when the intensity of affect signals limits
the joys of winning
the knowing this is only round one in the losing
discover the pleasures of intimacy, care and love for each other in the pleasure of belonging
This is survival-thriving knowledge that drives us to experiment and explore our personal power potential. The PLAY drive facilitates our relational take-allow and serve-accept collaborations, which are recreational, creative, and fun. It is motivated by the dopamine-mediated pleasure of discovering our power and abilities to take action for our needs and experience the satiation of needs being met.
The PLAY drive activates endorphins, enhancing the feeling of relief after excitement and fears of surrender and being taken have not resulted in death, contributing to the reward of confidence being chased.
This relief is often expressed in laughter, transforming the tension of a grimace. Ramashndarin writes in his book "The Tell Tale Brain" about grimaces and bearing teeth preparing for active defence when being approached by another, with this transforming into laughter when we discover we are not going to die
Sometimes, PLAY, especially for humans, doesn't end fairly. When needs are not recognised, the RAGE drive is activated to drive self-expression to represent our limits.
The RAGE drive system has two branches:-
Protect what matters and represent limits
Revenge violation of boundaries and limits
Stage one excites confidence to represent limits. Stage two is exercising revenge - “bite back when bitten” strategies.
One of the main features of this second aspect of the RAGE drive is that anger, when representing limits being overstepped or needs not having been met, often inherently feels, regardless of what it is in reaction to like we are inhabiting legitimate use of power taking pleasurable agency for justice with assumed righteousness.
Revenge - RAGE has pleasure motivations for retribution that inflict pain.
This is very different to an animal killing another animal for food in the wild, where the motivation for causing pain is not intended.
Nature has designed a kind of pleasurable grace in killing and being killed that is enhanced by practised play.
Efficient, swift killing with the minimum amount of torture seems to be the preferred method.
In cultures living indigenously in the wild, prey animals are revered with immense gratitude and loved through ingestion. Loving and being loved is a version of this in play. Mammals have exquisite biology with systemic neural networks, nervous systems, and hormonal dynamics that disengage resistance, which offers relaxed, pain-free states of bliss in surrendering to the power potency of another. This is an immense blessing when being killed or penetrated. Play helps us practise blissful surrender with orgasms that enhance our trust in surrender in similar ways, preparing us for the time we die.
The grace of bliss is not enabled if the revenger wants to take their time playing with inflicting emotional/physical pain that plays with thresholds of consciousness with intensities of painful affect in it.
We can see that torture motivation is very different to the motivation to kill in the grace of ecosystem harmony.
When the RAGE-PLAY dynamic is mobilised, attunement to the other is likely to be lost, and harm can be done with the drive for justice or sadism, preferencing CARE for the other. In these dynamics, humans can lose our pleasurable grace and belonging.
RAGE-PLAY might be expressed as physical or emotionally aggressive acts in this drive for retaliation or revenge. Judgements or blame with assumed pleasurable righteousness for justice can often harm others. This is where domination and misuse of power can repeat in cycles perpetuating harm.
Moralistic motivation to revenge turns the rough-and-tumble play of power over and power under into a fight devoid of kind attunement to the other's limits. Driven by revenge, the person symbolically or physically rolls over on top of the one who they are subjectively experiencing has impacted them and dominates the relationship with "play-back—pay-back—bit
This ”
This PLAY-RAGE Revenge dynamic can also exist in some people acting out anti-social use of power out of awareness. What's out of awareness can't be cared for, resulting in ruthlessness. The origins of the word ruth means "friend or friendship."
The degree to which there is an absence of awareness might correlate to a time when pain was suffered without recognition. This can be understood to be a kind of encapsulated loneliness contributing to the generation of this encapsulated circuitry, which, although functions independently from CARE, is still by default connected with the brainstem and the reticular activating system, which necessitates life. This means that drives for power and agency exist independent of CARE and provide pleasure with power without attuned compassion.
This kind of ruthlessness is mostly cast out by people who stop playing when their needs and limits are not honoured, except for people bound to unconscious circuitry that's repeating lack of care.
There is also another tragedy in this dynamic: Despite being ruthless, this kind of wiring is not necessarily immune to the distress of the PANIC system, which activates pain when loss of power and position that secures belonging occurs.
The tears and misery of being cast out (from positions where misuse of power has been enacted) spring from the distress of the roots of consciousness being denied the valency for pleasure and agency. Loss of agency belonging in nature is life-threatening and feels like it when belonging is lost, even if there is no physical danger.
However much distress and trauma there is in this loss of power, this does not mean they care. Our compassion might be naturally activated in response to distress, but beware that we are feeling our resonances with their sadness and distress that if we examined this closely, we might notice their tears are only self-referential in response to loss of power, role and belonging and have an absence of insight with compassion for others.
There have been many times in my professional life that I have been with a weeping psychopath who has been exiled, with my breasts ready to nurture (symbolically!).
My jury has in the past been mostly out as I have in me a deep longing for regret to be realised, and this perhaps has motivated me with more earnest enquiry and chance-giving than others would until I receive the heart-hardening evidence inside the catacombs of close questioning that there is not sufficient care to make them safe to play with.
People with intentions of experiencing the pleasure of agency disconnected from compassion or care are potentially dangerous to play with.
We can see here the RAGE-PLAY dynamic, which takes relationships into arenas where emotional and/or physical safety is potentially lost.
We can see how fears of loss of belonging mediated by the PANIC system, fears of interaction mediated by the FEAR system, and revenge for the loss of recognition of needs mediated by the RAGE system can drastically impact our ability to play and participate in life.
These inhibit PLAY, and simultaneously, PLAY can also be the antidote.
When we lose our humour, this is a sign that we are really in trouble.
Finding ways to laugh and joke about tragedies can be a route back into participating again. Humour requires playing with life-and-death scenarios and learning that we didn't die, but if there has not been enough PLAY without injury historically, laughing might be a long way off.
Sometimes, the simulation of play viscerally felt in our mirror neurons can awaken circuitry to learn vicariously if it hasn't had an opportunity for interpersonal relations. Actors can act out play scenarios for us in films, and writers can take us into experiencing a regulatable visceral affect in books, encountering thrills that are close to limits. This can make it pleasurable while expanding our resilient edges of resistance vicariously, and comedians also do their best to make us laugh at the edges where we remember falling off or simulate vicarious experiences where we might fall off.
We can viscerally experience the thrills of a film drama and witness actors playing with emotional and physical limits, but nothing can fully replace discovering our resilient edges in real life.
When humour and curiosity allude us while RAGE, in the service of representing hurt aspects of the self, is mobilised, PLAY and collaboration are lost and, understandably, revenge in the form of moral, ethical blame will naturally impact others somatically in intended similar ways to how that impact was experienced initially. This passes the impact of the pain that has not been regulated for the other to feel for us somatically.
This is a reactive response perpetuating what we see all over the planet, with hurt leading to reactive revenge with people gathering allies to enhance the power and impact of their position.
However, we each have aspects of ourselves nursing timeless raw raging wounds from times in the past when:-
our limits and needs were not recognised
retaliation was not permitted without impacting our belongings needs
These feelings are timeless until they have been differentiated through recognition and acceptance. The needs and the wounds of these not being met remain unconsciously unmet, and drives are being mobilised to integrate these with recognition. This is where the LUST System powers the PLAY system to play with experiences where we lost agency and the ability to participate.
"Troublesome turn-ons" and magnetic attraction to potentially harmful situations, where we might do this again," "I'm in this situation again," or "I've been attracted to this type of relationship” are examples of the type of prediction errors we make when these are driven by unrecognised aspects of the self that are seeking recognition.
When these are recognised and embodied symbolically, we are likely to be less affected by the mobilising drives for integration. Less mobilisation towards dramatic role-play enactments offers more inner peace, and only from a place of safety do curiosity and receptivity open.
This serenity facilitates the emergent potential for learning new ways of being. Inhabiting repeated experiences of new ways of being with fewer prediction errors contributes to the myelination of new neural networks in pleasurable cycles, replacing the ones that caused pain. This is enhanced by:-
affectively feeling and noticing needs
recognising them with symbolic awareness
taking action to meet them
Unmet needs that have not been recognised symbolically can arise in any relational field and embody the people and the environment of the here and now - out of context from there and then and feel like it is all about what is happening now.
From the very first moments we are born out of the symbiotic oneness of the womb, the discomfort of needs living in a human body begins to be recognised. These viscerally-felt discomforts are felt as affect.
This affect does not yet have language symbols to bridge our inner worlds with one another, but these needs activate instinctual drives for self-expression with physical and vocal gestures that become recognisable inside the caregiver's body through the earliest form of communication of needs called Projective identification.
We are born helpless and dependent, and so very early on, we are driven to practise our self-expression and to learn about its impact on navigating the acutely felt panic and fear of suffocation or abandonment and the pleasure of exploration and satiation of belonging.
As we grow, we discover explicitly shared reality through symbolic self-expression learned from the ways our caregivers use symbols within the range of attention our caregivers share with us.
Any needs outside the range of our caregivers' attention will inevitably be frustrated and unmet. We will discover the limits of the other by testing our impact with requests to meet these needs. When these needs are not met, internal dialogue that communicates that "these aspects of me are too much or I am too much" can become attributed and coupled to them.
The early developmental ways we express our needs are gestures, facial expressions, and voice. These needs are felt as the raw data of discomfort and pain without symbols to contain them.
The caregiver is our container for these and feels them through a process called projective identification. This is where the caregiver emotionally identifies with the projected cries of discomfort that literally resonate in their body. As infants, these are our first experiences of personal power in communicating our needs, impacting another with them, and receiving a response without symbols.
Viscerally-felt affect in the infant literally resonates in the caregiver's body and their (hopefully) more developed heart rate variability/response flexibility is motivated by CARE to take action to regulate the intensity of this.
Symbols in the form of language bridge our worlds and represent our feelings and needs. We learn the symbolic representation of our needs each time the caregiver translates the raw data into recognisable strategies. We learn to reference these as they are named and acted upon.
The more attuned responses the infant and growing child experience with needs being met congruently, the easier it is for symbol formation and language to develop as caregiver and infant gradually share more and more of the same niche of attention, categorising shared reality.
The baby cries, expressing discomfort. The caregiver feels the discomfort in the baby's body and recognises this, coupled with the distress in gesture and vocal expression.
The caregiver searches for strategies to regulate the discomfort
"Are you hungry? Too full? Too hot? Too cold? Thirsty? Tired? needing a cuddle? "etc
When the caregiver "gets it right", the infant feels understood, and the raw data of visceral affect begins to be attributed to “when I feel x, my caregiver does y, and I feel better”.
When our self-expression is met with acceptance, this contributes to our lifelong generous exhibitionism with predicted accepting kind voyeurism essential to our erotic self-expression and intimacy skill development
Any needs that have not been congruently met remain uncategorised and remain timelessly unconsciously unmet. Needs that are not symbolically represented in this way continue to use the preverbal means of communication called projective identification and projection.
When they are not met effectively and not attuned to with congruency, the pleasure of effective personal power to meet a need will be frustrated.
Unacknowledged aspects of the self that have not got words yet cannot participate in adult relationships as they cannot represent themselves symbolically in language agreements that contribute to co-creating a shared reality, but their unmet needs will be ‘affectively’ felt by all.
The relationship agreement can be understood as a fence around a skyscraper roof, where we can see the possibility of sudden death that we simultaneously know is not going to happen because of the agreed relational rules of conduct. Unrecognised aspects of ourselves are in danger of falling off and getting hurt when they are not participating symbolically.
It is a lifetime process of developing symbols and language that represent us with enough depth and granularity to be attuned congruently to our needs.
Learning symbolic representations for pre-verbal strategies from non-declarative memory and developing conceptual, symbolic, and metaphorical ways of regulating the intensity of affect that are recognisable and can be recalled and referenced to support the next time a similar intensity is felt can be understood as the central ingredients of learning. This is what learning is.
PLAY brings alive exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive awareness in relation to mental concepts and associations to support co-creating shared symbolic reality
Reactive upset from unconscious exiled aspects of the self that have not been attuned with, that are fearful, raging, or deferring power to others, will likely communicate using unconscious projective identification, as was age-appropriate.
We are born with assumed entitlement for CARE, an intrinsic drive facilitating nurture and being nurtured.
An adult raging from an inner aspect of the self where CARE failed might assume objective absolutes (e.g. rationalised data that demonstrates evidence of CARE failing) to reinforce the legitimacy of the pain of the unmet need.
Hurt, angry and frightened aspects of the self can painfully impact others by assuming they are responsible for meeting these needs.
We can understand this outcry as nurture is an intrinsic absolute for life.
Role-playing with acting out child-adult dynamics using another to support symbolic representation and sequenced referencable memory development can offer empowered acting out retaliation sequencing without harming another and a sense of completion of justice.
Part of this is that once the revenge sequencing has been acknowledged and is survivable, kindness has the potential to "peek out of the blanket of the fold to cry "Hold Hold" (Shakespeare - Macbeth)
Embodying these role-play dynamics can teach us not only the joys of being alive after being muffled in toxic limbo, frozen, or on fire with rage. After sequencing through, there is the possibility for receptivity to flow again with the gratitude of another surviving our revenge now that justice is transformed into being just.
Role play facilitates this resequencing and creates symbolic, referencable understanding. This naturally updates identity versions of self that can be more attuned for participation in relationships.
PLAY supports integration and empowering disempowered aspects of the self
Forgiveness and radical acceptance of being with the "just is" support us in playing again informed with an embodied rather than retaliative ethical understanding from our experiences of being impacted.
Being a responsible adult requires:-
Playing with inhabiting personal power in an adult’s body, taking care of our children within and without
Driving our cars and ensuring our inner children are safely in their seats and taking action to meet their needs at appropriate service stations
Recognising when one of these children is in the driver’s seat speaking through our adult voice and continuing to drive on the road responsibly, ensuring they are on our lap and we have got the wheel until there is a space to attend to their upset and discover from them which kind of service station do they need from the road we are on
Welcoming the ones from the boot of our cars, too, when they jump in to drive and take responsibility to see a therapist to help navigate this service station route
The inherent absolutes for life
We are born with felt affect, which powers our drives to meet our needs in our relationships with each other and our environments.
Felt affect originates in an area in the brain stem called the Peri Aquaductal Gray, which is the core of the Reticular Activate system.
This powered source of affective awareness influences all the systemic neural networks and drives in the brain. The PAG can be understood as the centre of our sentient sense of life. We are biochemically driven to take action to avoid pain and achieve the pleasure of having our needs met.
All the sensory processing systems are experientially blind without our affective relationship to them.
Research has demonstrated that when an electrode touches one side of this ecstatic pleasure, arousal and excitement are affectively felt. When the other side is touched by an electrode, hideous, intolerable pain, terror, and fear are affectively felt.
This part of the brain was once understood to be the power supply for the brain, but subsequently, it has been understood to be the roots of consciousness (Marc Solms—The Springs of Consciousness). In his talk, Marc Solms shares that if even a matchstick-size part of this system is damaged, we lose consciousness and die.
The PLAY, CARE, LUST, PANIC, RAGE, FEAR, and SEEKING systems are activated by the release of dopamine in an area deep in the root of the brain stem called the Sunstancia Niagra. This area looks like a pigmented collar around the Peri-Aqueductal Gray.
The Substaigra releases dopamine pleasure motivation for seeking and recognising danger as well as for seeking and recognising pleasure.
It produces visceral, acutely felt, cortisol-generated pain in response to fears of losing our essential ability to forage for what we need and endorphin-generated pleasure for these needs, which are satiated with our empowered abilities to participate and take effective action to meet our needs.
All meaning for life stems from the ‘affect’ generated by this root in our being in the brain stem. Naturally, we are designed to recognise when we are pleasurably alive and take effective action to meet our needs, enhanced by the pleasure of dopamine release.
Recognising danger can be pleasurable, and if death is feared, the PANIC response activates. The Habenular is an area in the brain that recognises danger. I imagine this must be part of the PLAY system, as recognising the tiger in the grass and playing peek-a-boo to develop response flexibility with surprise is pleasurable.
There is joy in discovering the tiger in the grass in time before it is eaten. Hide-and-seek play develops response flexibility with the intensity of affect in response to prediction errors, pattern interrupts, and surprises
We need to know when there is pain and to take appropriate action for CARE. Taking action and caring for needs feels pleasurable, and this pleasure springs from recognising this.
Sometimes, recognition of a need is all that is needed as this enables successful symbolic representation, which in itself is action being taken internally.
The two primary ways of potentially dying that the PANIC activates awareness of are:-
drowning or suffocation
losing our belonging and being on our own
SEEKING system frustrations when the suffocation response is active and not sufficiently buffered by endogenous opioids might feel like:-
we are being denied our curious exploration, adventure, excitement, and discovery needs for novelty in the emergence of living. This might feel like death by boredom, stuck and trapped, held back and suffocated by overwhelming stillness and sameness. Down-regulated states of relaxation might feel like being drowned by the senses opening. The RAGE system will likely be activated to energise ways out of drowning in these swimming feelings and regain personal power for action and stimulation.
SEEKING system frustrations when the abandonment response is active and not sufficiently buffered by endogenous opioids might feel like:-
We can't hold a reliable internalised sense of being loved and feel utterly alone and bereft. We might experience excruciating longing for closeness with fears of being alone. We might feel unlovable, want to hide and be affected by shame and shyness. Stimulated senses might blow our fuses with intensity, magnifying dysregulation. Light and colours might be abhorrent, brightness might feel like being a rabbit in spotlights, music might sound like deafening noise, smells and tastes might make us want to vomit, and requests might feel invasive. Our hearts can ache being denied what feels like life or death needs for closeness, safety, and belonging. The distress of feeling abandoned with alarming prediction errors that our environment and people are not reliably there to care for us in the ways we feel entitled to be cared for can drive us deeper into PANIC, FEAR, RAGE and blame.
Our ability to participate without fear inhibiting our trust in playing is mediated by The CARE drive being activated in both parties that supports trusting that:
the other cares for our well-being
we, too, care for their well-being
we are attuned to knowing and communicating our limits
we have sufficient response flexibility and choice with what is happening when experiencing the intensity of affect
The universal play system will play with us if we stand too long on podiums!
Our unconscious will attune with the collective consciousness in service in similar ways all rivers flow to the lowest ground to join the collective sea of consciousness.
The biggest teachings in life are when another gets it wrong for some aspects of us rather than teaching us how to care for our needs in conceptual examples.
All the self-help books in the world cannot teach the pain and physical injury of being impacted by somebody who, for unconscious reasons, was not attuned to what we needed.
Nobody can be attuned to participants who are in the unconscious boots or the undeclared passengers in our cars, and teachers and practitioners or anybody holding a duty of care in service will inadvertently teach about the wrong service stations for these aspects of self. This teaches us to discover the right service stations and represent these aspects of self towards enhancing adult personal power and confidence, developing attuned relationship agreements. It can take us by surprise when we learn what not to do and why with a fall from the grace of our intentions. This can be a dilemma for humans inhabiting positions of power and influencing teaching from a moral high ground.
In my experience, every time we inhabit a position of moral authority, the universal play system will, at some point, take us down
Someone who has not yet learned how to create relationship agreements representing all of their passengers will show us how to compassionately recognise and join them and update the rules of engagement to accommodate them. This requires humility as we are re-enacting possibly pre-verbal vulnerable aspects of the self that were originally not attuned to.
Response flexibility to inhabit up-power roles of agency alongside accompanying down-power humility is an essential skill to inhabit simultaneously. Playing with power and humility and learning to inhabit pole positions in up-power and down-power roles are necessary skills to support other people to participate with their personal power effectively. If we are inhabiting too much in either, we will sometimes be invited through humiliation to expand our awareness and compassion into humility.
PLAY supports us in developing abilities to repair if we want to play again and learning through humility and self-acceptance when impact mismatched intentions
Our society’s treatment model expectations for those in up-power roles of service providers, with service users assuming an entitlement to be given a service that treats and meets our needs, can be understood as a replay of the early infant-caregiver relationship. In this replay, the strategies are often outdated, but these might be the only reference points for responding to a need.
While we provide a service as practitioners, we are facilitating experiences that support the client in discovering new niches of attention and making decisions and choices with fewer prediction errors.
This involves inviting a client to experiment and play with new ways of being, updating their awareness of what is calling for change. This can then support more congruent strategies being experimented with to meet this need.
As people experiment with new ways of being, they are likely to meet their learning edges and response flexibility capacities.
Responses to the emergence of the unknown vary, and each person demonstrates a unique range of response flexibility and placement of attention agency. We can support this expansion of response flexibility by trusting the self-organising intelligence of another to mobilise with our accepting attention.
Peek-a-boo aspects of the self in hiding might have more courage to come out and play if they experience acceptance. We offer radical acceptance for these implicit, noisy, and silent passengers attuning to their self-expression that will play out in projective identification and projections. This might feel like being compelled to make something better or to soothe. Past predictions might play out as they test our capacities to accept them, which might confirm that they are not welcome or too much. As much as we can bear to witness and accept, it will resonate with others, and they can hitch a ride with our response flexibility, which offers an opportunity to come out of loneliness.
Strategies for comfort through commodified acts of service (e.g., menu requests in the treatment model approach) might only serve to pacify a client but not necessarily empower the agency, as they may repeat old, outdated strategies, resulting in prediction errors. Getting needs met might feel empowering, but our discernment in not reactively acting on these is paramount so as not to repeat cycles of non-declarative memory repeating prediction errors.
It might be helpful to be aware that once the power dyad (customer/service provider) has been assumed, entitlement expectation that others “should” provide an experience that solves the problem supports your self-regulation, like pacifying an upset child.
We, as practitioners, are inevitably likely to encounter 'Entitlement rage,' and in these moments, healing and integration can occur. These moments are necessary as they unearth vulnerable aspects of self, seeking justice for when the duty of care failed, and they are still suffering beneath these entitlement blames.
This is sometimes a painful, humbling, necessary skill for us as practitioners to learn about intention and impact mismatch, especially when we facilitate a repeat of what has failed them before. This will likely happen if we explore meeting unmet needs while learning to represent themselves. We inevitably will fail them until we have understood what failed them. Becoming robust in receiving difficult feedback and facilitating the 5-step repair process can be life-changing (if we can bear being responsible in our up-power role for the repeat of failure). Our sincere acknowledgement, understanding, regret and repair support both our learning and justice can be done with the repair questions
'What didn't happen that you wanted to have happened?'
' What did you want to have happened?'
and 'What repair is needed here now with what you want to have happen next?'
This can transform unmet needs into a confident representation attuned to a relationship. It is possible for a person to learn agency to confidently represent themselves congruently, and these requests, 'Will you...?' or 'May I ...?', are relational rather than coming from entitled rage from times when they were not responded to with attuned accuracy. Playing and attuning with each other can soothe old stories of 'being too much', which can liberate these from continuing to repeat ruptures where attunement is lost.
Giving gifts is only of service when the gifts are wanted and receiving opens genuine feelings of gratitude and satiation
The gift of appreciation toward the gift bearer is a secondary gain confirming its digestibility and gratitude rather than the primary intention to enhance role power.
Overall, PLAY facilitates us knowing
learning ways of participating in life, loving and being loved in win-win co-creation with attuned belonging as part of the chorus of the ecosystem of life