Play, Art, and Healing: Unlocking Kids’ Emotions in Therapy with Katie Lear: Ep. 24

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic
  In this episode of Mastering Counseling, we embark on a journey into the world of child therapy through the insightful experiences of Katie Lear, an inventive counselor who seamlessly blends traditional and tech-driven methods to aid in child therapy. Here, our host Becky Coplen delves into the evolution of Katie’s career, from an unconventional theater and French major to becoming a counseling entrepreneur with a unique vision.
• Lessons You’ll Learn
  Katie’s captivating journey, from an unconventional theater and French background to a thriving counseling entrepreneur, offers valuable insights. Her ability to thrive during challenges, like the pandemic, highlights the importance of counseling innovation. Discover how she used online gaming, particularly Dungeons and Dragons, to empower children creatively. Her book on managing childhood grief provides essential guidance in child therapy. Ultimately, Katie’s journey inspires aspiring counselors to explore diverse avenues and remain adaptable in their pursuit of success.
• About Our Guest
  Katie Lear, a formerly anxious kid now anxiety conqueror, is on a mission to empower young minds. Specializing in helping kids aged 8-13, she uses creative methods to provide child therapy and teach essential CBT skills for anxiety and OCD, available both in person and online across New York, North Carolina, and Florida. She’s also the author of “A Parent’s Guide to Managing Childhood Grief” a valuable resource for families navigating loss, available at Simonandschuster.com. Katie runs a coaching business called “Young Dragonslayers” where she uses the game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) to help kids aged 11-16 make friends and feel they belong. The space allows kids to play D&D together and have fun which also helps them with any worries or social anxieties. Katie’s passion makes her a real superhero for kids who feel nervous or anxious.
• Topics Covered
  Explore Katie’s adaptation to online therapy during the pandemic and her innovative use of Dungeons and Dragons for online gaming therapy. Learn about the value of online education in counseling and gain insights into managing childhood grief through open communication and play-based activities. The effectiveness of play and art-based healing techniques in helping children process emotions. Katie’s journey encourages aspiring counselors to embrace innovation and adaptability in their careers, emphasizing their transformative impact on children and families in challenging times.

Episode Transcript

Katie Lear: I don’t think that online therapy or these online activities are ever going to be a complete replacement for in-person stuff, nor should they be. I think a lot about when they used to do the cereal commercials where they would say that it was like part of a balanced breakfast. I think online interaction is part of a balanced, social, emotional breakfast.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner, from interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services. If it impacts counseling, we cover it on Mastering Counseling.

Welcome to another episode of Mastering Counseling, where we discuss the business side of counseling. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. Today, it’s an absolute pleasure to have Katie Lear with us, an innovative counselor dedicated to assisting children through both traditional and tech-driven methods. Katie, it’s so exciting to see you today and I researched your book and was reading some of your blog posts, and I know there’s so many things to share, so I look forward to all the things I’m going to learn and everyone else will learn out of this. Let’s get right to the questions, Okay. Share with us the evolution of your journey from a counselor to an entrepreneur. What inspired you to start not just one, but two unique businesses?

Katie Lear: That is an awesome question. I was thinking about this before I hopped on today because honestly, I was not one of these people who entered undergrad or even entered the field with this laser focus on exactly what I wanted to do. My undergrad degree is a dual degree in theater and French, so did not study psychology in undergrad. I was an acting major. I went into that field, I think because of the mental health benefits that it had for me in my life. So something that’s really guided me in my work, probably the biggest driving factor for me is that I really see a lot of myself in my clients. I still feel very close to that experience. Theater, for me, was a space where I felt like I was good at something, like I belonged, like I had something to offer like I could express my feelings safely. And I think a lot of my work as an adult has been trying to recreate experiences like that for other kids, but came out of undergrad, worked for a couple of years, did a lot of weird downtown theater that, you know, will never see the light of day and eventually realized that the place that I was having the most fun and really the only place that I was having fun anymore was working with a drama therapeutic company in mental health settings and really started to consider going back to school. So that eventually led me to a Master’s in Counseling. I attended Brooklyn College in Flatbush in New York, came out, still was not convinced that private practice was something that I was up to, but worked in agencies for a little while, decided to make it on my own. And really, I think the two big life events that have shaped my career, I’m sure this is the case for many people were the pandemic and the birth of my son. Both of those things really forced me to reevaluate how I was working, reevaluate what kids needed, and to think about the work-life balance that I was going to need in my own life to make this career sustainable for myself.

Becky Coplen: I love that story. We connect in a couple ways because I have of my own kids and that work-life balance is huge. And way long ago, when I was first a teacher, I taught drama, middle school drama, and I didn’t even have that theater degree. But that’s so fun how your story changed and where we are at now. So that’s amazing. Tell us some about with opening your private practice. What are some of the challenges or triumphs that you’ve experienced to make this happen?

Katie Lear: I would say the scariest moment for me in my private practice was right at the beginning of the pandemic, right around, goodness, probably January or February 2020. As soon as we started seeing cases in New York, I had moved from New York City to North Carolina, opened up a small practice there. A solo practice, had really built it up over the last about two years and was hearing from my friends in New York City how bad it was there. And really, as soon as we started to see cases in New York, I accurately predicted that we were in for a really serious experience across the country. I knew it was coming to Charlotte where I lived. I was accurate in that part of it but inaccurate and how it would affect my practice. I was terrified that I was going to lose this business that I had worked so hard to build, like, Oh my gosh, we’re all going to have to stay home. Who on earth is going to want to do online therapy? Who on earth is going to want to put their child in online therapy? I only see kids. What are we going to do? Like no one’s going to be prioritizing their mental health in the middle of this crisis situation that we’re going to be in. I’m going to lose all of this stuff and what am I going to do? So that was really frightening to me.

And then as we moved into quarantine, realizing that there was this unprecedented wave of depression amongst the kids in my practice, I’m primarily an anxiety therapist, but suddenly everybody was coming in with really significant depressive symptoms because everything that they cared about in life had been indefinitely paused or removed. And so feeling like there was this huge need at a time that I was less equipped to deal with, it was really hard. And also thinking about the possible business and financial aspects of it in retrospect. Now, obviously, I wouldn’t wish the pandemic on anyone, but I think those early days of the pandemic were probably some of my best therapeutic work because it was like being a new clinician again in a way like there was no status quo, there was no set way of doing things. I was crouching behind my, you know, office chair doing puppet shows on Zoom. It was lots of doctor play and talking about vaccines and all of this stuff. It really forced me to be innovative again in a way that maybe I had fallen into like a rut in the last few years and had not done so. I would say that was a big success for me is realizing that there was a viable way to do therapy online for kids that was meaningful and effective and could be fun.

Becky Coplen: I love how you reinvented yourself and the craziest time we’ve lived through for sure. That’s so awesome. Can you elaborate a little how you do a lot of focus in technology, especially using your platform of Dungeons and Dragons? How does this reach out to children who oftentimes could be left behind?

Katie Lear: So the D&D groups that we run are a direct response to that early pandemic-era depression that I was seeing in my caseload. I had not set out to start a second business. This was not the plan originally, but I was sitting around seeing all of these kids come in doing these Zoom sessions every week. I’m primarily a CPT therapist and do some play and drama therapy as well, and I felt like there was only so much that I could do in individual therapy for these children whose primary struggle was that they were socially isolated from their peers. Like that was what I was seeing over and over, is that middle schoolers in particular were at a time where their peer group is like a second family. It is a support system for them and especially for kids who were not rock solid with that peer group. As we started lockdown, they were so stranded and had so little support to rely on9999999 if they didn’t have the group chat that was really active, if they didn’t have the best friends that they could FaceTime every day. I felt like I had so many kids in my practice who had been getting ready for that new school year like, This is going to be my year.

This is the year I’m going to find my people. And then all of a sudden they’re cut off. And I had started joking with my husband and my friends like, I should just start prescribing D&D to people because online D&D had started to become something that I’d been using as a resource for myself to get through that isolation. So I decided to try it. I called up a friend who ended up becoming my first employee in the company and we co-facilitated a six-week group for middle school-aged girls using Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) housed in my therapy practice. And the idea was that it would be a very closed time, limited group to just get us through quarantine. And at the end of it, the girls asked to continue playing and we were like, we don’t have anything going on. Like we’re not leaving our house. We’ll play as long as you want to play. And several of those girls are still with us three years later in that group. And we’ve expanded now from one group to thirteen a week with five facilitators. So it really grew organically into a very separate business because I’m finding that that need for social connection and for online connection has not really gone away as we’ve come back out of the pandemic.

I think to your point, online groups are accessible for kids in a way that in-person groups are not. When you are reliant on somebody else to drive you, they’re reliant on needing a parent who’s home in the afternoon and can take time off of work or be at home with you to get you there. You don’t need a lot of materials or equipment for these online groups, and we have a growing number of kids with us who are living with chronic illness or a disability that makes it difficult for them to get out of the house. So for some of these kids, the Covid era was wonderful because it connected them to their peers in a way that met their needs and met them where they were at. And now that we’re back out into in-person interaction, they’re feeling very left behind. So love these kids who may be either in geographically remote areas or who are physically having a hard time getting out of the house to meet people and evens the playing field for them.

Becky Coplen: That is so fascinating. I love how such a specific niche like reached out to kids probably all over and that is so cool. And from one to thirteen groups, that’s pretty amazing in that line of thinking and thinking about other people getting a Master’s in Counseling, would you recommend them pursuing a Master’s in Counseling online? And why or why not?

Katie Lear: I would absolutely recommend an online Master’s program. I would recommend hybrid and low residency Master’s programs to folks if it is accessible to you or in your budget. I attended a public university that was a great option, But something that I love about the field of therapy is that if you are a second career counselor like me, if you are a nontraditional student, if you are somebody coming to the field later in life, all of that previous lived experience is so valid and so usable in your practice, you are going to be drawing on that and it’s going to inform your work in a way that it’s not like you’ve lost any time or missed out by not maybe getting that undergrad degree and. Psychology, you’re going to have to pick up those clinical skills. But you’ve picked up so many other skills in the process of living and think online programs, just like online groups are accessible to kids in a lot of different life circumstances. Online learning is accessible for parents, for people in remote areas who may not have a university nearby. For the chronically ill. My degree was in person, but a lot of my post-grad training was online and it allowed me to specialize in some very niche specific forms of therapy that I loved that would not have been accessible to me in person where I live. So, yeah, I’m all for it.

Becky Coplen: Can you just talk a little bit more about D&D and some very specific ways that you’ve seen kids have healing or you said you use it? Can you go a little more specific into the connections and healing of that?

Katie Lear: So on a base level, when I first started these groups, what I was thinking about most was behavior activation, which, you know, in CBT is a big intervention for kids with depression. We’re looking to help people with depression get out and engage with the world and do things that are social and creative and rewarding and bring about a sense of accomplishment. And in the pandemic, that was kind of hard to do, and think D&D really checks off all of those boxes. For many kids, it’s a socially connecting collaborative activity that gives you a lot of creative expression. And the leveling up and acquiring of skills is really built into the game.

My main goal was just creating a socially supportive, positive experience where kids were set up for success with their peers. Since starting, I have also really become aware of how therapeutic the game can be for kids with anxiety. I’m a play therapist and a drama therapist and think D&D is sort of like the baby of those two fields. In a way, it’s game-based with a lot of creative expression and performance. So kids are creating characters that allow them to explore aspects of identity that they might be interested in growing into. It’s a way of safely trying out new behaviors and new skill sets where the emotions feel very real. But the stakes are actually quite low. You know, if you all die in the game, nobody dies in real life. If you don’t save the princess in the tower, it’s fine, right? We’ll try again tomorrow. And so I think from an anxiety standpoint, when we think about exposure in CBT, you’re getting both, you know, real-life exposure in that you are interacting with peers, being vulnerable, with peers, trying out new behaviors, with peers, but also the imaginal exposure of in the safety and the remove of this fantasy world, getting to experiment with new ways of being or maybe face things that would be scary for you in real life but are not so scary because you’re playing this character.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by Mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a Master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit Mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. Can you share a little successes or challenges in shifting into the game-based coaching and how it might have differed from your traditional therapy practice? Possibly before 2020.

Katie Lear: Yeah, something that I was not prepared for when I started this more public-facing non-therapeutic business was that when you’re opening yourself up to a larger audience, you’re also opening yourself up to opinions and critique and commentary in a way that most private practice therapists do not get. You know, hang up my little shingle in my town and it’s fine. And I’m fairly anonymous and I could enjoy that, you know, relative anonymity. But as soon as you boost a post on Facebook, you now have a much larger audience of people who can comment on your posts. And we’re very small and my social media presence is small. So it’s not like I’m getting boatloads of hate mail like some people are. But, you know, even though I can like count the negative comments, probably on one hand, at the beginning, it was so horrifying to me that I contemplated like crawling into like a hobbit hole and never returning was like, I can’t handle this. Like, I can’t handle people critiquing the price or people saying they would rather buy other stuff for their kids, or one time we had somebody suggest that maybe online activities for kids were predatory and unsafe, and I was very freaked out by that. Once I was able to lower my defensiveness to that a little bit, I have found there’s often really good things for me to learn in those comments, like, Hey, we’ve had some feedback about price.

I bet there are people who wish they could join these games, but they’re not accessible. So we have a pay-what-you-can program now on a limited basis to make our games more accessible for more kids. There were some concerns about safety. Hey, what can I do about that? We background check our facilitators now twice a year. In addition to the interviewing process that I go through to try and improve safety. So I find sometimes there’s a grain of truth in there that’s usable. As far as success, I think my favorite thing in these groups has been when I’ve heard kids reference their characters in connection with skills that they’re using outside. Like we had a group that was playing a lot of very charismatic characters that were constantly asking other people out in game, like very charming, confident people. And that group has developed a shorthand where they talk about like, you know, channeling their inner Frederick or whatever, when they ask somebody out in real life now. And I think that they rehearsed that skill with their peers in a supportive environment. And think about it all the time.

Becky Coplen: What would you say specifically in dealing with children with anxiety, which is your primary focus or OCD? What are some of the transformative effects of using D&D or even other games or technology? How is that helped those kids?

Katie Lear: I would say I can speak generally about anxiety because we’re not specifically diagnosing and treating kids. It’s a little harder for me to speak to specific diagnoses in these coaching groups, but I think the in-person and imaginal exposure, like I’ve touched on a little bit, is definitely part of it. If we get a lot of kids who have some amount of social anxiety joining these groups, it’s scary for them to, you know, be watched by peers to do things that might seem silly or vulnerable in front of their peers and to take risks. And I think joining an online group that is small, where you have a structured activity, is really, really helpful in lowering the barrier to trying out those new social skills and being around peers.

It’s not as scary as being in a group of real kids and you’re not just sitting there trying to have an open-ended conversation with no guidance. Everybody is there with predictable rules and set rules and you’ve got a goal to work on together, which I find almost makes friendship like a inevitable side effect of the game. You tend to bond with these people because you’re working on something together. And my hope is that that can be scaffolding. That then helps it be easier for kids to have these positive social experiences outside of group. I also think that the structure and predictability is wonderful for anxiety, certainly helpful for OCD, for kids who have any form of neurodivergence that it feels a lot safer to be creative and take risks and try out things when you know that you’ve got some boundaries protecting you. Like, Paradoxically, the more rules that you have, often the more creative you can be. And so I think that that structure of the game really helps kids who crave that kind of predictability to feel more comfortable trying out new stuff.

Becky Coplen: You kind of touched on this already, but the integration of technology into therapy, is there anything else that you’d want to add in shifting from the more traditional ways into what you’re doing and many other therapists? Yeah.

Katie Lear: You know, I don’t think that online therapy or these online activities are ever going to be a complete replacement for in-person stuff, nor should they be. You know, I think a lot about the like when they used to do the cereal commercials where they would say that it was like part of a balanced breakfast, right? I think online interaction is part of a balanced social, emotional breakfast. But it. Can be a really important piece, especially if you have a really niche interest or a really specific therapeutic need. If you are a kid who has these really geeky interests and feels like you’re not connecting with your peers at school and you can get into an online program like this and if you live in the Midwest, you’re now connected to a kid in Vancouver and New Zealand who are your age going through the same stuff, who care about the same things that can be so validating and empowering in addition to continuing to make friends at school and do all that good stuff and think in therapy as well, it connects you to therapists who might have a lived experience that you’re looking for or a modality that you can’t find locally.

So in my practice, I do a lot of CBT for kids and then specifically ERP, which is OCD treatment, and there are many kids who live in parts of my state where there are not ERP certified therapists near them, or if they’re there, they don’t see kids. And so having access to pediatric ERP has been really helpful online. Even if we can’t do quite as much exposure. You get somebody who has the training you’re looking for, which I think is great. And then I also feel like sometimes we neglect to talk about the benefits for clinicians like it prevents burnout. For me, I’m a mom, I’m chronically ill, and having a hybrid practice means I can see more people in a sustainable way myself. And you know, we’ve got so much burnout in the field. I think anything we can do to help people stay here longer in a healthy way is really important.

Becky Coplen: Let’s go ahead and shift a little bit into talking about your book. We know you’ve written a book, “A Parent’s Guide to Managing Childhood Grief”. How did that idea come about and what was the writing process for you?

Katie Lear: So this book, maybe this is a theme in my life. This book came about kind of serendipitously, and it was not something that I had originally planned to do. I think if you had asked me five years ago if I was interested in writing it all, I would have had a long laugh about that and said no. Writing was one of the hardest things for me in school as an anxious person, as somebody who has OCD myself, open-ended writing assignments were like the bane of my existence. But when I got into counseling, I realized that blogging was probably my best bet for marketing. It was something I could do on my own. I didn’t need to have money to do it. I could do it at night or on weekends and kind of made sense to me intuitively. And I told myself that if I just started blogging once a week, nobody would ever see it. And so it was fine, right? And that really allowed me to start blogging, just saying like, you know, no one’s ever going to find this. So this is a good chance for me to practice. And that lowered the stakes enough for me to do it. And what ended up happening is I blogged every week for a year or 18 months. At the end of that 18 months, my website had gotten beefy enough that I was being found by a lot of people, and I was approached by an editor who worked for a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster about writing the book based on some blog posts that I had written on grief and childhood grief. So I thought about it and had a six-month-old at the time and was a little bit nervous about it, but decided to say yes to that opportunity when it came up.

Becky Coplen: Can you give us a glimpse of kind of the essential takeaways from the book, especially maybe for those who didn’t hear the interview on how to talk to kids about anything?

Katie Lear: Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway that I came away with after researching and writing and talking to families is that culturally we have such a hard time talking about death at all. It is so hard for us to talk about death in this country and probably in Western culture that I think many parents worry that talking about grief and death and loss will somehow make it worse for their kid, that if their child is not proactively bringing it up, oh my gosh, I shouldn’t do it because what if I retraumatize them? What if I bring up something that they were trying to forget? What if I say something that’s awkward or incorrect? And all of the research tells us that this is just not the case, that talking about it is never going to make it worse. That it is okay to say words like dead and died and not use euphemisms. It is okay to reference the loss and let kids know that you’re remembering it too, and that actually modeling your own grief process for kids and letting them know that you have not forgotten this person that has died and making those connections is one of the most helpful things we can do to let kids know that it is okay for them to talk about it too, if and when they want to, and that you will have so many chances to have this conversation that it is okay if every one of them is not an A-plus-plus perfectly worded chat.

This is an ongoing conversation that will span months or years. I also think kids tend to grieve in different ways than adults and that it is very piecemeal and they kind of jump in and out of their grief. So it can be confusing to see a child be really intensely crying one minute and then later in the day playing as if nothing has happened and then seemingly setting aside the grief for a while and then coming back to it when something reminds them. But kids have a capacity for emotions that’s different than adults, and it takes them a long time to integrate and process all of this stuff. So with kids, you can expect to see this kind of one foot in, one foot out process for a long time and that you’ll also see children re-grieve as they grow because the more we advance developmentally, the more we understand what death means on a deeper level and how permanent it is and how much it will affect our lives moving forward. So it’s common to see kids re grieve at big life milestones or as they reach new levels of understanding. And it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong or that you’ve done something wrong as a caregiver. It’s just a part of the process.

Becky Coplen: With grief being such a profound emotion, especially in children. Are there any other strategies that you didn’t already mentioned that you would give to parents who are actually walking this road or other therapists that you would say, these would be the things I would do maybe in the day-to-day?

Katie Lear: Yeah, you’re right that these feelings are huge and that oftentimes, even as adults, it’s hard to find language to put these feelings into words all of the time. And for kids, it’s extra hard because their vocabulary is different and they’re feeling these emotions. Maybe for the first time. And so I think we can really lean on play and art-based, expressive activities for these kids. And I know for some of my non-clinical friends, when I said I was writing a book of like play and art activities that had to do with grief, it felt very jarring to them. But really that is how kids process big things in life, and especially when feelings are too big for words. Naturally, we’re all of us go. So I would encourage people to consider body-based, play-based, art-based activities that give space to process these things in a different way. That could be drawing pictures, that could be playing things out with dolls, that could be writing stories. I’ve found a lot of the kids in my office are really into writing stories about other children who’ve experienced loss or writing stories that have themes of loss, that may have parallels to their own lives, but allow them to get those feelings out indirectly without having to claim all those feelings right away. Any of that stuff I think is really great. I have found letter writing as well to be really useful and healing for a lot of the kids that I’ve worked with before.

Becky Coplen: We kind of wrap up, is there anything else that you wanted to share with us that we didn’t get to cover, or you wanted to address something a little more in detail?

Katie Lear: I think you did a pretty excellent job of spanning the gamut. I think if there are new clinicians or students considering entering the field who listen to this podcast, I would really encourage people to go for it. I evangelize about the field a lot to my friends, about joining the profession and also leaving yourself open to pursuing aspects of the career that maybe you initially thought you were not up to, didn’t have the training for, or were too niche to be successful in that. I think there are so many places you can go in counseling that are really rewarding and exciting. If you allow yourself to give it a try and know that you don’t have to commit to anything. For an entire lifetime. Yeah, I just think it’s been great to kind of see that for myself.

Becky Coplen: I’m going to kind of close this out here. We’ve delved deep into the world of therapy, understanding how innovation and a touch of entrepreneurial spirit can revolutionize traditional practices. And a really big, huge thank you to Katie Lear for her enlightening insights for those who are eager to explore more about Katie’s work or you want to dive into her book, we’ll have those links posted for you. We urge our listeners to subscribe, share your feedback, and keep the conversation buzzing online. Stay tuned for our next episode that promises more revelations in the world of counseling. Signing off with gratitude. Till next time, keep Mastering the art of counseling and the business side as well. Thanks so much. You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by Mastersincounseling.org.

Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.