A Hockey Puck to the Chin is Play?!
Marilyn Hahn, B.Ed., RCAT, DCiiAT
Surrey, BC
Marilyn Hahn is the creator of ARTeriorEdge Therapy, a creative framework that explores how understanding, strength, and transformation emerge through creativity, play, relationships, and materials. She designs and facilitates arts-based experiences for creatives, paraprofessionals, and seekers who value depth over polish and process over performance. Her work invites people to meet complexity with curiosity, courage, and imagination.
What’s an art therapist to do?! Prominent psychologist Donald Winnicott, referenced in art therapy scholarship and a core reason art therapists value play-like creative processes, declares that play is foundational to self-expression and authentic engagement–and therefore healing and wholeness. Clients, in their search for self and authenticity, are to play with materials, processes, self, and even the therapist.
But the definition of play is elusive. While I think thinking is play, a client once declared a hockey puck to the face was play. I’ve had clients say they’re playing when daydreaming, gouging cardboard with a knife to Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer, gleefully catching soap bubbles on red construction paper just to watch them bleed out in wet, thin circles, while trying to hide a scarred wrist. Some laugh; others weep or swear. Some paint while others generate AI collages. So then, with so many variations of play unfamiliar to my own sense of play, how am I to facilitate this healing play for each client?
Scott Eberle, Play Studies researcher, offered me a 6-part framework that helped make sense of play in my art therapy practice. Play requires anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise. From my almost 3,000 hours of direct client contact hours’ case notes, I offer you six directives that encouraged play to come out of hiding. Adapt and use as you see fit.
ANTICIPATION and Play
Anticipation is that instant that separates what has not yet been played from what will soon be played: the instant before opening a fresh pan of watercolours, or before laying down the first mark on an empty page. Attention narrows. Breath holds. Imagination waits… Before your client arrives, choose 5 images or small items and place separately into sealed envelopes.
Anticipation Process Prompt: The Unopened Envelope
After a check-in and warmup, with the envelopes within sight but unexplained, have the client recall a heightened, playful waiting-for-something-special moment, tuning into the feelings of wanting and waiting. Next, ask them to intentionally choose one envelope, and while holding the envelope have them reactivate those anticipatory, playful feelings. Then have the client lay the envelope beside their materials and tools, unopened, and begin to depict in art-making those feelings. When the process is complete or need not go further, invite them to re-engage anticipatory feelings while holding the envelope and looking at their process piece, then have them slowly open the envelope. Upon seeing the contents, they are to immediately notice any anticipatory feelings felt and, in response, add one final mark.
Process Reflection: Either journal or discuss, referring to the process piece.
How did the not-knowing invite playfulness? How did not knowing resist playfulness?
What comes up around the idea of anticipation and living life more playfully?
SURPRISE and Play
Charles Darwin observed that surprise occurs when a new or unexpected idea breaks through a habitual way of doing or thinking. Mix clay with soap, not water. Paint with smoke, not oils. Burn canvas to ashes, form ashes into outlines, then whoosh outlines around with a red tattered fan. Play is the unfamiliar. Surprise is the reward.
Surprise Process Prompt: The Keyhole
Invite clients to recall feelings around an unexpected but delightfully surprising event, then depict those feelings in art-making. When done, have the client tear a 1” square out of the center of an 8x10” sheet of black paper, then slide the paper across the process piece, stopping when something particularly surprising, startling, or galvanizing peeps back at them through the opening. Next, expand what they see in the 1x1” keyhole to completely fill another 7x7” canvas/piece of paper, adding whatever surprisingly and startlingly couldn’t be seen in the 1” square.
Process Reflection:
What was meaningful about playing with a squashed-but-coaxed-out-7” surprise?
What comes up around the idea of surprise and living life more playfully?
PLEASURE and Play
In any activity, sensation, or interaction that clients find delightful and supportive, there’s nothing gruelling or scary about it. They’re not working at art therapy; they’re clearly playing with it: loose, unforced, and organic even if challenging and deep. Play-full healing and authenticity emerge, something control can never coax out from hiding.
PLEASURE Process Prompt: Just Five More
Invite the client to choose materials and tools that feel pleasurable to each of the 5 senses, then have them depict the pleasure felt in artmaking, using those tools and materials. Ask them to stop exactly when the work feels the most pleasurable, satisfying, and complete. Then say, “Continue for just 5 more minutes. Don’t intensify the process. Don’t escalate it. Simply wander luxuriously. Notice how pleasure feels when you’re not chasing completion.”After five minutes, say: “End now and notice now how play shows up here, lingering and non-judgemental beyond what was already enough, what was already OK…”
Process Reflection:
When you first felt “it’s done,” what kind of pleasure lived in your body?
During the 5 extra minutes, how did play and pleasure show up once they were freed from the job of finishing or improving?
What comes up around the idea of pleasure and living life more playfully?
UNDERSTANDING and Play
Eberle writes that play generates understanding, not by explanation or insight-hunting, but by doing, testing, redoing, misrecognizing, and discovering. Therefore, art directives should allow for understanding where self-expression and authenticity emerge through play rather than as something imposed upon play, through exploration, not for exploration.
Process Prompt: Play Until You Know
Remind clients they are free to play without permission or restriction, and free to continue as they wish. Clients will choose 5-7 very unfamiliar materials and tools to play with, with nothing specific to do other than play. Say, “Don’t worry about planning or skill, just play. Continue playing until you notice That Moment when suddenly you just-ah-HA!-know-that-you-know something, then stop.”
Process Reflection:
What was play doing just before understanding suddenly made things make sense?
What did a play-oriented understanding allow you to know that effort could not?
What comes up around the idea of understanding and living life more playfully?
STRENGTHS and Play
Eberle suggests that from experimentation one learns the resilience, ingenuity, and lively engagement. Before the session, gather clay, as well as yarn, wire, and string, and items of different degrees of fragility (twigs, tissue, rice and crepe paper, anything that punctures, creases, or tears easily, dried plant materials, paper doilies, thin elastic band, onion skins, dryer lint, seaweed sheets, dried tea bags, etc.)
Process Prompt: Suspended Perspectives
Ask your client to identify 3-5 concepts, emotions, and pieces of knowledge they find difficult to live with (working poor, patience, Spanish verbs), then mould the clay to represent each one. Then say, “You’re to create a mobile by playfully suspending your heavy, serious clay bits using these delicate materials. The catch? You won’t know exactly how your fragile supports will behave–or how to work with them–until you play with them. Wrap, twist, tie, or layer, mess up, let tings snap or tear. Just know you are playing with certain ‘failure’ and experimenting with increasing strength.”
Process Reflection:
Where did strength show up in ways you didn’t expect?
How did play become an ally with “weakness” when seriousness would have been a foe?
What does this experience suggest about how strength can grow in your life?
POISE and Play
Eberle suggests that play refines poise–the capacity to remain elegant, cool-headed, responsive, and self-directed in the face of challenge, uncertainty, or tension. Before the session, gather a large variety of lightweight, unstable materials (paper strips, foil, thin cardboard, used coffee filters, dryer lint, pipe cleaners, tin foil strips, parchment paper, etc.)
Process Prompt: Almost Falling
Invite your client to build a freestanding structure with materials that almost certainly will collapse–the goal being to not create a stable structure but to count the times and ways they recover from instability. Ask, “How can you playfully adjust without starting over? Playfully rebuild when things fall? Playfully breathe when things break? Stop when you notice slower, more attentive, less reactive, more elegant and playfully poised movements?”
Process Reflection:
What invited the change to become slower, more deliberate, to move with poise?
What might this experience be teaching you about meeting uncertainty in your life with poise instead of reactivity?
So, what is an art therapist to do with play? Perhaps the answer is not to nail down a definition but to accommodate play more carefully. Play is not a technique to be deployed or a mood to be induced but a healing, integrating, relational state that arises when anticipation lingers, surprise is welcomed, pleasure is trusted and indulged in, understanding arrives without fear or force, strength is discovered through fragility, and poise is recoverability of elegance, not control. Play is not the materials used or directives given but the quality of an engagement where we discourage working at art-making and encourage playing with it.
This is our art therapy task: not to be curators of fun, enforcers of rules, or translators of meaning and theory, but facilitators of open conditions for play to emerge, recede, transform, or surprise entirely.
So, what’s a therapist to do? We begin by believing and accepting that meaningful play is unique to each client and ourselves, and it may be one of the most serious, courageous, individual, and humane capacities we invite into the art therapy space, nodding a tentative “yes” to an incoming hockey puck.