How to Help Your Child Heal w/ Stacy Schaffer, MA, LPC
That counseling is a gift you're giving your kids, not that there's something wrong with your child or your parenting.
Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.
Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get communicating.
Now let's get communicating with our guest joining us today from Colorado. Her name is Stacy Schaffer. She is the author of With Love From a Children's Therapist.
She is a licensed professional counselor with over 20 years of experience who's here to help us deal with grief and sick joy. And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show. Hi, Stacy.
Hi.
Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
Thank you for being here. I'm excited that you are as well.
Synergetic Play Therapy
Welcome. And we just want to know one thing. What is Synergetic Play Therapy?
Yes.
So Synergetic Play Therapy, it's also known as SPT, was invented by Lisa Dion, who is a play therapy educator. The idea between SPT, it blends things like attunement and authenticity and awareness.
The main principles are that we are communicating some things without even words, that mirror neurons are connecting.
And so the idea with SPT is that a child, a teen is going to come in to your office and they are going to, without intending to, try to get you to feel what they feel.
And so it is therefore really crucial to understand what's going on in your system.
A way that that translates is like if they were to do something in the sand, create a scene in the sand, you would check in with yourself and say, wow, that makes me feel a little stressed out. I wonder how you're feeling.
And 99% of the time kids like, yeah, that's exactly how I feel. And so it's really like being attuned to who's in front of you, because we know that how much language matters and non-verbal language is part of that. That's kind of the short version.
Right.
Thank you for summarizing that for us, because here's the thing. Every time we go to therapy, they always take us back to our childhood.
Oh yeah, right.
Why is that?
Well, you know, you hear a lot, kids are resilient. Yeah, yeah. But what are kids in therapy as adults talking about when they were a child?
Because so much happens, like in childhood. It's just really been in the last, I would say, 25, 30 years that we have more awareness that, oh, there are things that kids could talk about in therapy, or kids could experience.
You know, kind of going back to that, that's when some of our foundation began. Our issues with like attachment, different forms of abuse happen, all kinds of things across the spectrum, because we're all raised by humans. So humans are fallible.
There's usually something in there that has become a pattern, starting from back when you're really young. I know that that's true for me, like going backwards to help heal some of those wounds in order to go forward.
Therapistʼs Healing Path
And is that the reason that you chose to be specifically a child therapist, instead of being a therapist for someone my age?
Yeah, I would have a terrible childhood.
And so my childhood, you know, that I've written about is littered with trauma and neglect. And so I always say that who I am is who I needed when I was young. I'm exactly who I needed.
Absolutely for sure, a lot of my work is in wanting to heal younger Stacy and have other kids not have it as bad as I did, for sure.
Hmm. I'm glad that you said that because you know how sometimes they would say, if you wished for a certain type of mother and your mother wasn't that, be that mother to yourself now as a grown up.
How do you mother yourself in the way you wish you were mothered because your mom didn't play that role in the way that you at least deserved?
Yeah, so my mom died when I had just turned 22 of breast cancer. She had a really, really long battle with breast cancer. There was a lot of neglect like in there prior to her illness.
I think if I had had someone to like kind of come alongside and help me realize that wasn't about me, my mom would have parented whatever child was in front of her the same way.
I think awareness of that has helped, but doing tons of my own therapeutic work is key. I believe that healers should also have a path of their own healing. It is hard to be human.
Have you been out there? It's pretty rough. I think that the more honest I am with my own wounding, working to heal some of those things has just helped me to be able to take kids further, to own it, to say we all have significant challenges.
I think old school therapy was like you have to be non-issue-laden person that is just sitting up right in the chair and everything's fine. But like everything is never fine. That's not real.
That's what a lot of SBT is, is authenticity to name what's in the room, like feeling a certain way. It's important to have awareness of your own potential pitfalls.
Everything is certainly not fine. Then you wouldn't be in therapy in the first place.
No, no, right? That you're really connected to the person in front of you, and you can only really be connected to the person in front of you if you're connected to yourself.
You know, to like know what the noise is, what's going on, and make sure that you have your own outlets. Like it's challenging work, especially in today's day and age to be a therapist. You have to be solid in order to support other people.
Which begs the question.
So do therapists have their ongoing therapy sessions with other therapists?
I mean, I do. I always tell my clients they have a grand therapist, and apparently they have a great grand therapist too. You know, sometimes like, well, I had a kid say to me, you probably think I'm crazy because I'm in therapy.
And I was like, we were talking about, I'm a therapist too, and they're like, you do? And I'm like, yeah, life is hard. Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me? And there is nothing true about the idea of arrival. Like we've never arrived, you know, there are constant things that happen along the way in life.
And I think it's important to be communicating about your own woundedness. Does someone safe? Here's what I'm struggling with.
I need to guide in some this. And that helps you like guide the people that you're caring for in a better way. I would say that I would have a hard time trusting a clinician who wasn't doing their own work and whatever that looks like.
If that looked like, you know, making sure they're regularly checking in with a consultation group, seeing a therapist, going to group therapy, working through a book, you know, doing their own path of healing, because it's never it.
Pretending like it is not it.
Yeah. Well, we are still human. We haven't arrived, as you said.
And also because if you think about all the stories you listen to, all the trauma that your patients bring to you, you also need an outlet.
Yeah. There was a shooting in our area at a local high school in Evergreen. And I see people in the surrounding area.
It's horrific. And because, you know, in America, we have a gun problem. And it was important to me to check in with Melissa, my therapist, because I have my own feelings about it.
Of course I do. I'm in the community. There's tragedy that happens.
And if I were to pretend that I could just be a solid force without having my own reaction, that's not real.
And it's also not appropriate for me to fall apart with a kid, you know, and so I could hold space for these kids that have experienced the ridiculousness that just happened and because space was held for me.
And speaking of play therapy, do you find that it's challenging because you're a children's therapist to get the information out of a child? Is there a way to ask questions for them to feel comfortable enough to tell you what they're going through?
Well, so the line is that the language of kids is play because they don't always have the language. So what you're doing as a play therapist, a clinician for younger generations, is you're looking for themes, what they're presenting on the table.
I had a kid once, I referenced sand tray therapy, which is basically like I have this like big sandpit in my office. It looks like a coffee table. You can take the top off my friend Dave made for me.
It's lovely. And then it looks like I have every happy meal toy that exploded in my office and they're in little family groups. And so an idea of a sand tray is there's a million directives, but one is find a character to represent yourself.
Show me what it's like to be you. It's fascinating. I had a kid once in a high conflict divorce pick Darth Vader's dad and a tiny mouse's mom and was kind of like showing what that was like.
And knowing the family, I'm like that I can see why they would feel that way. And so you would say like whatever character they picked. What is this one feeling?
What does this one want to do? And so like maybe hide or try to communicate with the other one. So it's pretty fascinating because it's about the process of what they're getting out, not necessarily the analysis of what that means.
You know, it's like a 3D image of the brain. I've seen kids as young as three. There was a kid that it was years and years and years ago, but it was flooding that washed away houses like it was up in the mountains.
It was really bad. And so they used the sand to show the fear of what it was like for them, you know? And that's a way of not having it, say, trapped in the brain.
And so they were able to get it out. When you can get it out and when you name it, like, you can tame it. That's kind of a snippet.
Sand tray is probably one of the most common modalities to use with kids because they don't have the language at four to say, I'm feeling conflicted about this situation.
Yeah, they say the stats say verbal is about 7% of what we say, but a lot of it is the body language.
And even us grownups, I think sometimes even though we may have the vocabulary, but we don't have the expression to really make therapist Stacy understand what I'm going through.
If you find that that's the case, especially, you know how when some something is really upsetting to you is very traumatic. There's this thing on your chest that is heavy and you want to express.
And sometimes when it's too heavy, even the words don't come out.
Sure, sure. It's really important to me to stay connected to kid and teen culture because I use a lot of examples from like Bluey. There's a kid that had like a challenging sibling.
And I was like, is your sibling a little bit like Jack, who's a character in Bluey that they sort of frame as having like ADHD without saying it? And they're like, it's exactly like Jack. I'm like, what do you wish you could say to Jack?
The latest tween thing is like K-pop Demon Hunters animated movie. It's basically like a pop group fights the bad guys. And I, you know, it came up so much that I was like, I guess this is why I went to grad school.
I need to watch this on Netflix. It's good because it gives me insights. So I would say now this week, which one of the three main pop stars do you connect with?
Because they're very distinctive personalities. And we can talk from that point.
So that's how they express. I'm wondering, have you had some feedback from parents of the children that consult with you?
Have you heard them say things like, I don't see any progress or my child, are they expressing to, do they come to you and wonder if anything is being expressed by the child during your sessions with them?
So I'm in my intake, because I do an intake with just the parents before I meet the kid. And so I ask them in the intake, okay, what would look like progress to you? Like, what would you want to see more of?
And what would you want to see less of?
And like, because a lot of what happens in the therapeutic space, it gets hard to translate, because how confidentiality works is unless you tell me you're going to hurt yourself, you're going to hurt someone else if someone's hurting you, your words
don't get back to your parents, but your parents are going to want to know what's happening in here. So I'll tell them either something I said, something we did, a craft we created, that kind of thing. So that's how you keep everyone happy.
But we go back to the intake that they'll say, you know, I want them to have less anger outbursts at home.
And so I'll be like, let's get more specific than that, because we want to make sure it's really working, so that you can sit across from your friend at lunch, and your friend's like, your kid's in counseling, what's even changing?
And so they would say, if it got down to like two outbursts a week from the five that it was, that would look like progress to me. And so there's measurables that they have, so that they're like, yeah, they are less XYZ, more XYZ.
It's not always a measurable science, because like it's a lot of support, and kids feel heard and seen and valued in my office, but it's hard to measure those.
Right.
And so it all goes back to the intake in the very beginning, so that they can say, yeah, like I don't exactly get all the things all the time, but I know what I see at home.
So that you know what you're working towards.
Evolving Child Issues
Now you've been in this profession for over 20 years, and I'm wondering, since you mentioned a school shooting early, I'm really sorry about that. I cannot fathom what it does to the psyche of everyone involved.
Have you found that 20 years ago when children came to you for a therapy session, how are they different now because of what happens?
That is such a good question because I was talking about that with a friend yesterday. When I was in grad school, like a dual master's program, so I graduated in 2005, 2006. We weren't talking about social media challenges.
We weren't talking about school trees like Columbine, which is actually the same school district, unless the one that just happened. That was in 1999. It wasn't a repeated pattern.
It wasn't a topic of conversation in grad school. They're never like, here's how you support kids in a global pandemic. Social media, cyberbullying, school shootings.
I'm sure they are things covered now. But the back in my day was not, that was not topics of conversation. The most ethical violations are, how do you handle it when you see a kid in public?
That's what we just talked about in ethics. It is significantly different because, how do you support kids that have just witnessed what they witnessed? Like I heard stories yesterday that I'm like, you shouldn't have experienced that.
And so I have learned it's definitely not anything I say, it's how I show up in the room. There's nothing to say. I'm like, of course you're angry, of course you're scared.
You know, kids will tell me, and I wrote about this, that they have anxiety going to school. Of course you do. Of course you do.
A lot of treatment with anxiety in the past was like with irrational fears. There's a lot of rational ones going on right now. It is absolutely awful.
I think that sometimes we try to help kids by assuring them that they're safe. It's important to look for signs of safety, but there isn't that assurance, that it's validating that's a real fear. Here are things that we can do.
Here's how you can find support, but it's not invalidating that concern with like, oh, it probably won't happen at your school. It just happened. I have clients, friends, colleagues in that area that are impacted as of ChexWatch 48 hours ago.
It's a mess. It is a mess. There's not enough of us, I can tell you that, that are needed to support the world in which they live.
But yes, that is a different conversation than I was having as a new clinician, for sure.
It certainly has changed and they are dealing with a lot more than kids did 20 years ago.
For sure. Even the social media piece, there are so many components of that. Because if a kid is being bullied in 1988, they're like, stop it.
And then they go home and they at least have a break from a bully. In 2025, somebody bullies them on social media, and it gets posted over and over and over and over and over. There's not a break.
They get a message. I've had so many kids that have been cyberbullied, and they'll show me the messages they get. They can be constantly going.
And so that alone, I mean, it could go on forever about social media challenges forever. But that's like one of them, that wasn't something in school. They're like, here's how you support kids getting bullied on Snapchat.
There's no way they're not going over it now, but it wasn't when I went to school.
Technology and Children
But speaking of social media, would then parents maybe reduce the extent of the problem by saying, okay, you can only have a phone at this age, you can only be on social media when you're 18 and above.
I always wonder, I'm almost 50, so they were not even cell phones when I was growing up. I've always wondered if sometimes they are just exposed to too much too soon, and they are just kids.
I mean, I think so. I think the frontal lobe is not fully developed, so their ability to have supreme critical thinking is not online. My honorary niece is four, and so I tell her parents, we can hold out as long as possible.
You know, and they hear my stories, and they're like, yes, it's tricky because so many kids do have like Snapchat.
And then the kids that don't, like they'll come to me and say, I know that I'm missing out, but I also know I'm missing out on a lot of drama that's apparently happening. Monitoring is great, but if we can extend it as long as possible.
And now there's like technology where they can get a watch so that they can communicate with their parents or whatever.
And so that even if the parents say, I'm not going to buy a phone, the watch is going to do the exact same thing.
Yeah. Instead of having like ability to go online, if it's just a communication device, because that was the argument before of like, well, I want to be able to get a hold of my kid, vice versa.
So there are things now you don't have to resort to, like giving a kid an iPhone with full internet access. Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of perks with technology, but I've seen the dark side and I hear the dark side of it all the time.
And so I am under the belief of hold out as long as possible. But if you can't or don't want to, I think monitoring is key.
Yeah, especially nowadays. And speaking of bullying, I remember when I was teaching in South Korea, it's not even social media. So social media, that's where the bullying that we've spoken about comes from.
They were in, it's sort of like, I'd say a WhatsApp group because in South Africa we use WhatsApp a lot. But you know those group chats?
Yes.
So the girl who was bullied at the time, and this was middle school, these are teenagers. So the girl who was being bullied was first removed from the group chat so that they can gossip about her.
Exactly.
There are so many faces to this.
There's so many ways that they can hurt each other that way. Things like that will happen where they'll all get together on a TikTok and leave out the one person and they know the other person is watching. There's so many things like that.
It's just one after another that like if a kid were to bring that to a principal, they'd be like, there's a bunch of kids making TikTok. You know what I mean? Like you can't prove that they're leaving them out, but everybody knows what they're doing.
It's so hard. And again, they don't happily develop brains. And so we're giving them full access to the world in a phone at all times.
It makes it really tricky. And for parents, it can feel like a lose lose. Like I don't want my kid to feel left out, but I also don't want them to be exposed.
So it's a very tricky conversation that I think is dependent on the kid that is in front of you and not a blanket issue.
Certainly. And then when we spoke about divorce earlier, I remember some therapists have said that when they talk to the kids whose parents are getting divorced, usually they blame themselves.
So they think, Mommy doesn't love me, Daddy doesn't love me. I mean, you're a kid, what could you have possibly done for your parents to get divorced?
What's usually the reason that's the thought process when their parents announce that they're getting a divorce?
It's a good question. So I have a kid's book called, Was It the Chocolate Pudding?
And I read it to kids before and it's about these two little kids and then the parents are getting divorced, the kid ultimately has a meltdown and was like, are you guys getting divorced because of that time that you fought about me getting chocolate
pudding on the wall? Because it's so common of a thing, they've written books about it. And so the little parents are like, it has nothing to do with you, we love you, it's not the chocolate pudding.
And so that stems from a phenomenon that is studied called magical thinking. And so a kid would go internally with like, there's something wrong with me because it feels psychologically safer, the world is unsafe, my world is unsafe.
So they go there first because that's something I control, there's something wrong with me. It's important to have those conversations, just so you know, there's nothing you did or could have done or should have done, that it's a grown up issue.
It's a pretty common phenomenon that happens a lot.
And then one last thing, when you obviously, you know, you use play therapy and they tell you what they're feeling.
Do you find that words of encouragement or even saying to their parents, you know, when she's home, tell her she's doing great, motivate her, do those work.
Or back to the divorce example, they still want to tell themselves whatever they want to tell themselves.
Counseling: A Parental Gift
I have the utmost respect for parents who bring their kids to counseling.
I think that it is so brave to be like, I don't know what to do, please help this child that I love. It is a voluntary thing, I don't see any court mandated situations. So it's like they're choosing, they're opting in.
And so I already have a high level of respect. People across the spectrum are different, and so it's like some more willing than others to hear it.
But I think if they're already bringing their kid to counseling, they are looking for support and wisdom of like, hey, here's something that could be beneficial. So I found parents to be pretty responsive. Obviously not always.
So much of the time, they're just like, yeah, if that's something that would work, of course, I want to make it easier for them.
And so I try to frame it in a way all the time that counseling is a gift you're giving your kids, not that there's something wrong with your child or your parenting. You're a human, but it's this gift that you wish that you had when you were 10.
You're like, yeah, that would be great.
Because it didn't come with a manual, so we can all use the help we can get.
Like when we know better, we do better.
Right.
So I think so. Yeah. And then, you know, life happens, so people get busy and forget the thing.
But I would say, like, willingness and openness is something I experience pretty often.
That's awesome.
Book: "With Love"
Now tell us about your book, With Love from a Children's Therapist.
Yes. So I wrote this book. I'm really proud of it.
So it's called With Love from a Children's Therapist, hashtag lessons I've learned along the way. And so it is a combination of what I have seen on my side of the couch, for the past 20 years. I've been extracted lessons from that.
And part memoir of the things that I experienced as a child, like transmuted some of that pain into wisdom to help other people. So it's a combination of both of those things.
And I cover a wide variety of issues in an attempt to help people support the kids that they know and love even better.
And all the children, even if you're not a parent, all the children can use the love and support they can get right now, especially during these times.
Yes. Well, I have had friends who've read it, who don't intend to have kids, they don't have kids that have said to me, this was helpful to me personally and my inner child, let alone the kids I encounter.
So another line I've been saying is that it's for anyone who loves someone who is 11 or who was ever 11, because we're all working to reparent in areas of opportunity. I've heard so much in my time as a clinician than so many similar themes.
And so I wanted people who maybe will never have the chance to bring their kid to counseling or have a kid to get that wisdom as well.
Right. Even for me, I don't have kids, but Auntie Roberta, what do you think? And sometimes I find that my nieces and nephews feel more comfortable asking me questions about something versus going to their parents.
Yeah, you're the safe, cool aunt.
We all be the safe, cool, right?
So one of the empowered to tell them the right things.
Yes. Yeah, I think that you'd really like that. I have in there some good conversation starters, because people are like, I don't know how to talk to my kids.
So I have a whole big thing in there. But a lot of it is doing some of your own work so that you can be a better human, really. Because I think we can all stand to be a little better at all times.
Guest Information
Of course, thank you so much, Stacy Schaffer for being here today.
Yes. Our author of With Love From A Children's Therapist, who's been a children's therapist for over 20 years and is a licensed professional counselor. And before you go, would you like our listeners to reach you online and where can they find you?
Yes.
So my publishing company made me a website, authorstacyschaffer.com. So I would say it's stacyswithnoe, schafferwithacn2f.com. And you can get a link to a book.
It's on Amazon. I also did my own audio book. So it's on Audible, on Spotify, and on Barnes and Noble Online.
So there's a link on that website there, but there's also a way there's a contact me form. So if you wanted to reach out, you could reach out to me there. But there's links to all the ways to get the book, about the book, and how to get to me.
Author, Stacy Schaffer, I'll certainly put that on the show notes.
And we look forward to reading more from the book and healing ourselves. Thank you very much. This has been such a fun conversation.
Thank you for having me.
It was so fantastic.
Absolute pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.
