If the Right Hemisphere was an Elevator

(Enjoy the audio if you prefer)

Gary Landreth, known as the grandfather of play therapy famously said, “Toys are used like words by children, and play is their language.” We have likely all seen this quote, or variations of it, traveling through play therapy trainings and across social media. He first wrote this in 1991 in his book Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship.

What he is saying beneath the poetry of that quote, is something that is very well supported through neuroscience. Play therapy is not a talking therapy that happens to involve toys. It is a completely different method of communication. It is a whole different language.

Play therapy is a right-hemisphere modality.

That may be a sentence that we have heard many times also. But what does it actually mean? How does the right hemisphere communicate? How do I speak right hemisphere to a child while in session?

The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of language, logic, and linear narrative. It organizes information sequentially. It takes one step, then the next, then the next. It likes cause and effect. It wants to understand. It moves horizontally through time, constructing a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The right hemisphere is something different altogether. It does not move through time in a line. It processes emotion, imagery, metaphor, tone of voice, facial expression, body sensation, and relational experiences. It is holistic. It is implicit. It is the hemisphere that comes online first, in the early years of life, when the infant is learning what is most important, not through words, but through the felt experience of being held, seen, attuned to, and kept safe.

The left hemisphere tells the story. The right hemisphere lives it.

Recently, I have come to think of the difference between hemispheres in a new way and this is my own clinical metaphor, not a citation from any literature, though the neuroscience definitely supports its spirit.

The left hemisphere is like an apartment on the top floor. It is organized up there. Tidy. You can look out the window and see the garden below, but you are not in the garden. You can think about the soil but you cannot feel it. You can describe the rain but you cannot get wet. You can walk around in the apartment, from room to room, but it is all on one level and it is at the top, looking out.

The right hemisphere is like an elevator. It goes down into the body, the basement of felt experience, the breath, the belly, the ancient brainstem hum of being alive. It goes up into imagination, symbol, image, the world of story and metaphor. It can stop in the middle at emotions and nonverbal communication. It also goes out into nature, into relationship, into the resonant presence of another person.

Many children who arrive in the playroom have been spending a lot of time in that top-floor apartment. Perhaps they did not receive the kind of attuned care during infancy needed to build a steady right hemisphere. That type of caregiving can only come from a person that has a developed right hemisphere of their own. This is deeply affected by attachment patterns which, we know, are often multigenerational.

The child can be pulled up into the left by adults who are cognitively dominant themselves. Or, they may have parents that consistently urge the child to explain, justify, and make logical sense of behaviours. Some children retreat to that top floor apartment because the floors below feel dangerous or overwhelming. After experiencing trauma, feeling anxiety or fear, living with insecure attachment, which all create dysregulation and discomfort in the body, the upper left hemisphere can feel like a reprieve. It can feel like a place to escape the discomfort of strong emotions and overwhelming sensation. It’s a place to think what feels out of control, into control.

The way that I facilitate play therapy is to meet the child in the apartment. I share through my own embodiment, a felt sense of safety, and continued co-regulation, gently, over time: there is an elevator over here. We can carefully get in, look at the light-up buttons, move at your pace. Eventually, we may try going up and down.

When I say the right hemisphere’s language moves vertically, I mean that it reaches in two directions. Down and up.

Downward, into the body. Into sensation. Into the nervous system’s moment-to-moment experience of threat or safety. This is where somatic therapy lives. And this is also where play therapy lives, even when it looks nothing like what we typically imagine as body-based work. When I am present in my own body, tracking sensations, attuning to the child’s nervous system state, noticing how their physical body shifts, I am working in the lower right hemisphere.

Upward, into imagination. Into symbol. Into the language of metaphor and image that the right hemisphere uses to express what needs to be said/known/processed through images. When a child builds a fortress in the sand and places the small soldier at the gate, they are not making a decorative choice. They are communicating something true from their inner world. I feel on guard. It is not safe. I need someone to look out for me. There are threats coming.

The right hemisphere is speaking through image and symbol, the only language available to implicit memory.

After many years of studying and practicing Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy I have come to know that play therapy can be, in fact, somatic therapy for children. The territory is the same though the vehicle is sometimes different.

And in the most alive sessions, the body and the imagination seem to speak the same thing at once. The child’s breath quickens as the dragon enters the sandtray. He makes a roaring growl noise. The little figure surprised by the dragon trembles and so does the child’s hand. The toys and symbols can express what the child’s inner landscape is experiencing. The upper and lower right hemispheres are in conversation with each other and the attuned therapist can feel both.

Play therapy training often does not directly teach how to work from the right hemisphere, and to stay present in it. We learn theory. We may read about right-brain-to-right-brain communication, about implicit relational knowing, about the neuroscience of attunement. We come to understand it with our left hemisphere.

And then we might walk into the playroom and try to apply it.

But working from the right hemisphere is not something you apply. It is something you inhabit. Embody. It is something you be, not something you do.

In practice, it looks like this:

Your breath is slower and rhythmic. Your gaze is soft. You are present without being intense. You are following, not leading. You are not thinking about what to say next. You are noticing what is happening now. You are tracking the child’s face, their body, the rhythm of their movement, the narrative, the emotional temperature in the room.

You are comfortable with silence. You are comfortable not knowing. You are not trying to figure anything out.

You are, in the truest sense, completely present.

It feels different from ordinary conversation. There is a quality of receptivity to it. Attuned, resonant reciprocity. A willingness to be moved by what is moving. A kind of open attention that does not grasp or direct, but follows and witnesses. Holds compassionate, curious space.

Porges would call this ventral vagal presence. It is the state in which the social engagement system is online, the face is expressive and warm, the voice has prosody, and the nervous system is broadcasting safety. It is not a technique. It is a state of being. And it is contagious, in the best possible way.

The pull toward the left hemisphere in session can come from the child. If they are in the apartment, door locked, that is where they need to be met. And, when the therapist is working to offer a regulated, embodied presence from the right they are inevitably going to feel themselves slipping up there, pretty consistently.

The pull toward the left hemisphere in session can also be about the therapist.

When we ask a questions like “Why did you put him there?” “How does that make you feel?” “What do you think is going to happen next?” “Did you see Sue at school today?”, we are not following the child. We are looking for clarity, for certainty, and, quite possibly, to settle our own discomfort with the not knowing. Our anxiety creeps up about doing something in session, about finding certainty. It wants to go into the apartment where things are labled and all in their right place.

Questions pull the child up and to the left. Into explanation. Into justification. Into the story-telling left hemisphere that organizes experience into something reportable. The elevator doors close. The child is back in the apartment, explaining themselves to another adult.

And the moment they go there, the meaningful, transformative play becomes unavailable.

Interpretation does the same thing. When we offer a meaning like “I wonder if that dragon is like your dad”, even if we are correct, we have collapsed the metaphor. It is like calling out the floor before they were ready to stop. The doors open too soon, into territory that isn’t safe yet. The right hemisphere communicates through symbol precisely because direct, literal expression is too much to hold. Too exposing. Too tender. The metaphor is not just a container. It is protection. It is how the healing happens safely. Implicitly.

Teaching, psychoeducation, and skill-building tend to orient us toward the left hemisphere. They have an important place in the therapy process. But that place is not in the middle of a child’s symbolic play. They move us out of relationship and into instruction. They signal, however gently, that what is happening is not quite enough and that the child needs to learn something rather than experience something.

Sometimes a child arrives in session and only wants to talk, to share about their week, their friends, the game they played. In those moments, I gently follow them. I am still working relationally. I shift over to my right hemisphere as an invitation to the child client as I listen.

But I am always noticing. And when a child is in their left, chatting on the surface, my first quiet goal is always to find a way over to the elevator. How can we touch down into the body? Into the imagination. Into the right hemispheric processing.

Writing about this seems simple and also so challenging.

How do we stay in the right hemisphere? How do we return when we inevitably drift away to the left?

We begin with ourselves.

The therapist’s nervous system state is not incidental to the work. It is the work. A regulated therapist, one who is ventral vagal, embodied, and present, creates the conditions in which a child’s nervous system can begin to soften. Porges’ neuroception describes how our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety or threat. The child is scanning the therapist. Always. The question their nervous system is asking is not “What technique will you use?” or “How are you going to explain what we are doing to my parents?” It is: “Are you safe? Are you here with me? Can I trust what I feel in your presence?”

This means that before we can help a child find their elevator, we have to be familiar with our own. We have to be able to ride down into our body, out into the garden, swim in emotions, ride the flying dragon symbol up into imagination.

In session, returning to the right hemisphere can look like taking a breath and dropping into the body before you speak, letting go of the question and simply witnessing, noticing what you feel in your own body and trusting that information. Softening your gaze. Slowing your voice. Matching the pace of the child’s inner world.

Staying in the metaphor. Trusting the metaphor. Letting the dragon be a dragon.

This is not passive. It is one of the most active and demanding things a play therapist can do, to stay present and regulated in the face of a child’s overwhelm, to resist the impulse to fix, explain, or redirect, and to simply remain. Available. Warm. Here.

When a therapist stays in the right hemisphere, regulated, embodied, present, following, something happens in the room that theory can point toward but cannot fully contain.

The child’s play deepens. The symbols become richer. The sand tray that began as chaotic, scattered, and fast paced with sand flying up, over time, organizes itself into something that is slower, more circular, and coherent. The child who arrived defended and watchful begins, slowly, to soften. To feel their body. To imagine. To play.

Neuroscience tells us that the right hemisphere reorganizes through new relational experience. The autonomic nervous system becomes more flexible through repeated experiences of safety. Neural pathways that have been organized around threat and survival begin to include new possibilities. And, in therapy, feeling into those new possibilities is key to healing.

And then there are those moments that feel like something more than neuroscience. I call them magic.

The moment a child’s face softens and brightens at the same time. Cheeks flush. The sparkle that arrives in their eyes that tells you they are connected to something true in themselves. Something is transforming. The moment the little skeleton figure discovers that the haunted house was never actually haunted at all and begins, finally, to transform into what he always wanted to be. A real boy.

These moments cannot be manufactured. They cannot be planned or prompted, asked or guided into being. They arrive in the spaciousness that the right hemisphere connection creates. In the slow, present following and witnessing, in the attuned and patient presence of a therapist who trusts the process and stays with it.

That is what it means to work from the right hemisphere.

To know the elevator is available.

To ride it willingly.

And to wait, with patience and warmth, while the child decides if and when they are ready to step in.

Thank you for reading,

Warmly,

Rachael.

Post essay notes:

It is not as simple as this explanation. In reality, both hemispheres work in tandem and their roles overlap more than what I discuss here, but I write in generalizations for a therapeutic understanding, not an accurate scientific one.

Also, I am a big fan of the right and the work in the right. But, I don’t want that to mean that I disrespect the left and the left centred therapeutic work. The left hemisphere is an invaluable companion to the right. We all use both and we need all therapy styles.