Podcast season 4: Episode 11 – Going on a bear hunt: learning about Think, Feel, Do Sensory Bears

Please note that this transcript is auto-generated and therefore will contain some errors and natural pauses in conversation.

[00:00:00] TRAILER: Hello. This is a reminder that as well as listening to this show on a browser via the Creative Life Story Work website, you can also listen to it on your favorite audio app too. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, audible, Amazon Music, YouTube, music, and many others. Search Creative Life Story Work podcast.

DAWN: Welcome to the Creative Life Story Work podcast, where we explore how to make life story work better for all care experienced children and young people. Creative life story work is an approach which can improve children and young people’s lives and their relationships with others, both at home and at school. It’s based on the Rose model of therapeutic life story work.

[00:01:00] Every month we’ll explore a different aspect of creative life story work, and we’ll give insights into how you can use this approach to help care experienced children and young people make sense of their past and build a brighter future. Today we’re going on a very special kind of bear hunt – one that helps us think, feel, and do in powerful new ways.

And we’re joined by the brilliant minds behind the Think-Feel-Do Sensory Bears, Karen Vance and Amy Payne. Karen has been a dedicated therapeutic life story work practitioner since 2017, bringing her expertise to both government and not-for-profit sectors. She’s currently working with Settlement Services International in their multicultural foster care program.

Karen is exploring innovative ways to adapt therapeutic life story work for culturally diverse communities, ensuring this transformative work reaches those who need it most.

[00:02:00] Amy Payne is a psychologist with over 20 years of experience specializing in trauma. She’s the co-founder of Think-Feel-Do Sensory Bears and co-creator of the Therapeutic Life Story work practice pocket cards.

Amy blends creativity with practice and as an EMDR therapist trained in relational integrative E-M-D-R and a Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy practitioner, Amy integrates holistic trauma-informed methods into their work. A very warm welcome into the podcast studio, Amy and Karen. Lovely to see you both.

AMY: You too. Thank you. Lovely to meet you, Dawn. Lovely to see you all the way in Australia, in the Blue Mountains.

[00:03:00] DAWN: Oh, I wondered if you could take us right back to the beginning of the story and tell us about the first spark of inspiration for the Think-Feel-Do Sensory Bears.

KAREN: I guess I might step in there. So, Amy and I, we’ve known one another since 2016 or 17. About when Amy was my manager, and we were both working for the government here in New South Wales. We were both studied with Richard Rose for the diploma in Therapeutic Life story work and around that time I was working with a young woman in residential care and had started to do the, the work with her. She was very shut down in many ways and struggled to identify any emotions in herself. When I asked her, you know, to talk about emotions, she would say she knew about feeling happy. She knew about feeling frustrated, and she knew about feeling very frustrated.

[00:04:00] And when we would talk, often she would just go blank and stop talking. So I talked to Amy about how we could explore emotions with her, explore understanding herself a little bit more. And Amy had recently been, or the year before, been to the Australian Childhood Trauma Conference, which I should remember is also the International Childhood Trauma Conference. She had seen a presentation there about sensory bears. And so we talked about using sensory bears within the session that I had with this young girl as a way to talk about her experiences away from herself. Amy had also brought in the Kim Golding’s ideas about creating fairytales as a way of a child being able to understand their own story, which is not too confronting.

[00:05:00] And so I brought those ideas into the sessions with this young girl and she promptly named her bear after her superhero Thor. And it became Thor girl. And we used this bear to to fly through the skies and rescue kittens and do all sorts of adventurous things and then also to tell her story at the same time. Thor girl had a backpack in which she could keep her emotions, and so we, in the telling of her story, Thor girl would carry the emotions of the child.

[00:06:00] We use little kimo cheese as as to represent the emotions, and so this sensory bear became a vehicle for her to understand and tolerate the telling of her story, and she also began to bring the emotions that she thought the bear was feeling through the different parts of her story. And then I’ll leave it over to Amy. You can pick it up from there.

AMY:  So I’ll continue, but, oh yeah, sorry, go ahead.

DAWN: I was just, well, I was just going to say, because already just from that, the start from one single young woman, I’m just already seeing sparks of connection to some of the work that Richard Rose does in his work.

And I just, yeah, was hoping you were going to talk about that Amy, like the influence of that in the development of this bear, because it just feels so central to all of the Live Classrooms that Richard’s been doing.

AMY: Yeah. I think that once Karen had made this Thor Bear girl for this young person, I actually got a little bit jealous, and I wanted my own.

[00:07:00] So actually, because I was the manager and I could, I asked Karen to actually make sensory bears for each of the team members. And we had team building around this and we actually spoke to each other’s strengths. And we sort of made our own sensory bears and then because of the diploma, and this is where Richard comes in, because of the diploma, one of our colleagues and one of our co-founders, Natalia actually said, ‘Hey, that think, feel, do thing that we were talking about in the diploma. Maybe we could just actually want like a brain and a heart and hands or paws on my bear and that’s actually how it started.

[00:08:00] So the three of us combined, Karen making the bears, myself being a little bit jealous and also bringing that sensory aspect, to Natalia bringing the concepts from the diploma actually made the bear. And that’s how it started.

DAWN: Oh, wow. They’re so tactile and we’re talking about the thinking, feeling and doing – how is that represented on the bears when you make them?

KAREN: Well, it’s a little bear shape that is filled with rice for the weightedness. So you feel the heaviness and then sew a little colored brain on the top of the bear, a little heart in the center of the bear and little coloured paws so that when we’re talking with the bear with the child, we can say, you know, this is the brain of the bear, and, and that’s about what you’re thinking about. And this is the heart of the bear, this is what the bear is feeling, or what you are feeling. And so what are you feeling? Or what are you thinking about with the brain, and then with the paws, what can you do in this situation?

[00:09:00] And so it’s using those three questions and the three parts of the bear to talk through a situation.

AMY: And there’s some questions around why the bear doesn’t have a face, and that’s actually a really good question. A lot of children and adults more so pose that question to us. And the response we give is because if the bear is needing to voice that the child is sad, then we wouldn’t wanna have a smiling face. So we want to make sure that the bear can represent any sort of emotion. So no face for the bear.

DAWN: You mentioned that they’re filled with rice as well, and I remember one of the Live Classrooms that you were in, there was a whole load of questions about why you filled it with the rice, but you said it was about the weight of the bear.

[00:10:00] Because there was I think the same questions – could we put sand in it, could we put beads in it?

AMY: So we definitely have tried different things. So rice is great, and we’ve also used river pebbles – the fish pond pebbles are really good. It just needs to be a bit sewing reinforced.

We’ve also just recently tried kinetic sand in the bears which has been quite cool, but it is around the weight of them, and the nice feeling of it on your shoulder, the feeling of it being with you.

DAWN: Yes, I can see that. So, are you able to talk about some of the most surprising or creative ways you’ve seen the bears being used, either by practitioners, your team, or young people?

[00:11:00] AMY: I’ll probably start with the story of actually my son. I know that that sounds a little bit unusual, that, Karen actually made, two bears for my children from their baby blanket, so they’re sentimental as well.

So their bears are named Pinky and Rose because the blanket was a pink blanket.

DAWN: It’s completely personalized then?

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. Completely personalized. Yeah, and we were moving house, so my family was moving house and William is my son. He came to me to say Pinky the bear had a question for me. And Pinky asked, or said actually that they were really concerned about moving. They were really worried about moving and wanted to understand more. And so William obviously shared his / Pinky’s voice with me. And then I spoke to back to Pinky and explained like what the process was and because Pinky was quite worried that we wouldn’t be able to bring any of our stuff with us, that we moved house, but when we moved, we wouldn’t leave everything there.

[00:12:00] He was quite young at the time, so he is under five, and so we had a really good conversation with Pinky and at the end, Pinky said that they were okay to move, and that it was all fine and that if they had any other questions that they’d ask me. So that was probably a quite a personal story of like how the Bear’s voice is really useful for children to find their own voices as well, but through the Bears.

DAWN: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I love that they were made out of their baby blankets as well. It just adds to it, doesn’t it?

KAREN: It do because they are made of different types of fabrics. Because some people like the soft velvety feeling, some people don’t like that. Some people like a you know, like a denim-y fabric. And then also when you are making them personally, which is an indulgence, but that is how they are made. You know, you actually can select what color, you know, the heart might be shiny, or it might be a fluffy, so you can build in those different sensory parts to the bear.

DAWN: Yeah, and does that personalisation, does that deepen the impact of the bears when you’re using them in sessions?

KAREN: Well, I mean, sometimes the bears, the children become so attached to the bears that they convince us that they should hang onto them afterwards.

DAWN: I can see that.

KAREN: Or, and I know Amy has you know, well I’ll let Amy come in.

AMY: Yeah, so, in my work as a TLSW practitioner, I bring like a pack for the children I work with, and a bear is always part of that pack. And two children in particular, they adore their bears and they actually dress them up in baby’s clothes and they’ve actually put them to bed in like a baby’s cradle.

[00:14:00] And the sense of belonging and connection to their bears is incredible. They come to each session with them, and the work that I’m doing with them is actually around adoption. So as part of their therapeutic Life story workbook, I actually made an adoption certificate for the children to adopt their bears, so then they became an official part of their family. Oh, and that was quite, it gave me goosebumps to say that. It was quite a special moment for those children who are so wanting to be adopted by the family that they’re in and knowing that they can adopt their bears, it was quite a special thing.

DAWN: Who are bringing all those stories with the bears as well? Oh, I’ve got goosebumps now

AMY: And it’s actually with our conversation Karen, we were actually saying before when we were sort of talking about this podcast, we made a bit of a pun.

[00:15:00] It’s the bears come to each of the wallpaper times and sort of hold down the wallpaper. That’s one of their most functional purposes. But then we thought about it, it’s actually their bearing witness. Yes. And then we’re like, oh my God, it’s a pun of bearing, bearing, bearing witness. So the bears are bearing witness to the children’s stories and for each session. So it’s like really beautiful thing that the bears are always there. They’re present.

KAREN: Yeah. The children, as you pull out the wallpaper, they go to the into the bag and pull out, oh, where’s the bear? We need to use the bears. And they sit at each end. The anchor. They anchor it.

And it is interesting because like I don’t use the bears quite in the same way that Amy does.

I’ve not really found the Bear’s voice so successfully, but I certainly have a lot of, well, a number of particularly young men, sort of teenagers who can get quite robust with the bears because they are, they are weighted. So it’s not that they quite enjoy throwing them around and punching them and twisting them, and squeezing them and, and sometimes they’re watching to see my reaction.

[00:16:00] Am I going to tell them to stop? Am I going to say, you know, leave off. That’s my precious bear. And I did have one young fella who was interacting vigorously and it broke and so suddenly it was shedding rice and he quite sheepishly hands it back to me. ‘Oh, sorry.’ And I said, that’s okay. I can mend it. You know, the bear has been hurt and we all have hurts and we all get various damages and then we mend them and I will mend this and there’ll be a little scar on this bear and it will always remind me of you. It’ll always remember you now because of this scar.

And so this is the joy of, well, in part of therapeutic life story work because it is about telling stories and using whatever we are doing at any time to. To create a story for the child we are working with. And so the bears do that too.

[00:17:00] So in this case, you know, that is part of the story that I can create for this young boy.

DAWN: Let’s take a short break to hear more about our membership offer.

TRAILER: We want people to gain more of an understanding about what it’s like to be care experienced and to have a better understanding of what it actually means. Could creative life story work make a difference to the care experienced children and young people you work with? Maybe you are a social worker. I think we forget at our peril that actually telling a child the story of their early life is one of the most profound uses of social work power that we could ever operate. Perhaps you are a foster carer. You know, when they say it’s all about the child, it’s not, because our experiences. It’s about the carer and the child, and it just gives a new angle to our relationship because we’re learning about each other together.

[00:18:00] A Creative Life Story Work membership will give you or your whole team access to resources, including activities you can use in direct work with children and young people, training with life story work experts and lots more. And I think a lot of our children are looking for meaning, looking for, you know, well why is it I feel this way when my friends don’t. Why is it I get angry internally? And my friends don’t. The greatest thing we see is when we are able to say to young people, this is your story. This is about who you are.

And then children towards the end say, it’s not my fault that these things happened, but it is something that I can do something about. And once we have that, then we know we can move forward.

Find out about our membership for individuals and for organizations on our website, creative life story work.com.

[00:19:00] DAWN: You mentioned about older children using the bear, and I wondered about if there was any differences in various age groups, whether that’s younger children, adolescents, or even adults, and how they engage with the bear when you are using them.

AMY: Yeah I can probably answer that one. I have a few stories around that. Probably the initial use of the Bears was very much with the adults, practitioners, and using the Bears in group supervision. And I brought the Bears along to group supervision with my peers because like, I actually wanted to hold the bears and it was rare that I actually ended up holding them, because the other adults in the room took them. And it also allowed me to incorporate the think, feel do into the conversation because they were holding the bears.

They, I was then able to say, oh, I’m wondering like, what you think about that and what you’re feeling around that and like what have you done or what do you wanna do within that, within like this conversation that we are having. So it was a good way for me to then bring the bears in, but also in a comfortable way because they were holding this sensory toy really essentially with them.

[00:20:00] And another story, it was actually a recent story. A mum, carer and their son who’s, in care is nine. He is very energetic and he usually spends a whole of the therapeutic last work session sort of on a wobble board, like going left to right, sometimes makes me dizzy. And this particular time, the carer, the mum, was probably feeling a bit stressed. I noticed that she sort of wandered away out, like away to the chairs in my therapy room and she had two bears with her and I saw her with the bears just two on one on each shoulder. And she was just sitting back. She was still engaged and she was still talking with and being able to like be with her child and be with me. And was also actually regulating herself. Yeah. And it was clear that the bears were helping.

[00:21:00] So the bears are really helpful for regulation for adults as well.

KAREN: I’ve got another story there, just not, not quite the same, but I also recently was working with a mum and a small boy, and this boy, he’s only about six, but he’s had some major serious health problems. He won’t live a full life and he’s got an incredible carer who is just, she’s a pediatric nurse and so she’s very dedicated to him. And he had a medical crisis which involved ambulances, flashing lights, hospital, the whole caboodle, which we then were working through in a session afterwards. We had, Richard’s race course around the wallpaper. And he was recreating the journey to the hospital with all these little cars on the racetrack. But we also had the bear there and we were talking and, and it came up, um, his carer was talking about her reaction to this emergency, and she was saying how she just felt so overwhelmed by it all.

[00:22:00] She stopped being able to think. So her feeling was just so overwhelming that she stopped being able to think and couldn’t work out what to do, and then that becomes the beginning of the conversation about the sympathetic nervous system and how you know when your limbic system is in overdrive, your front brain just switches off and you can’t think properly. You don’t know what to do, and so it was a way for her to sort of talk about this with her son. And so it really worked for me that time.

DAWN: Thank you Karen, and my last question, I wondered about what you hope for the future of Think-Feel-Do Sensory Bears? Are there any new developments, versions, or collaborations coming?

[00:23:00] AMY: Well, yeah. So we have lots of plans for these bears, probably the biggest one is the continuing of our main goal for these bears was to help children and adults across the world have a voice. And we know that that’s happening. We know that from what started from a few bears with us as a team and now thousands of bears across the world. And we know that within Australia, UNICEF uses them, and they have used them to be part of the team for when we had the big bushfires recently, the children impacted by that – the bears helped the children have their voice heard around what the fires impact on them was. And we also know that there’s some Nanas in Cornwall who are making bears. We also know that the Country Women’s Association across Australia make bears for children in care and also other children.

[00:24:00] We know that they’re in the UK. We know that they’re in America. We know that they’re in South Africa, Portugal, there across the world and it’s amazing. And we know that partly that’s to do with Richard because he likes spreading the word of the bears. And probably what we would love to continue seeing is that the family tree of the bears continue growing. And that we all know that the uniqueness of the bears, that just as the children in care that we work with are unique and are part of families that may not look like them. The bears also join that family. They don’t look the same and they’re there and it’s a beautiful thing. There’s so many projects and that’s the main thing that we wanna see continued. Family tree, growing of bears for children and adults.

DAWN: Karen and Amy, thank you so much for taking us behind the scenes and shining a light on your Think-Feel-Do sensory bears.

[00:25:00] I think I’ll always remember the picture of them on the rolled out wallpaper, being the anchors, witnessing those stories.

Gorgeous. Fantastic. Thank you very, very much.

KAREN: Thank you. Thanks, Dawn.

DAWN: Whether you are a foster carer, someone who has experience with the care system, or you work with children and young people, we hope this episode has given you an insight into how we can make life story work better for young people and how you can use it in your own practice.

You can find out more about Creative Life Story, work on our website, creative life story work.com, and you can find us on LinkedIn and Blue Sky at Creative LSW. Please do get in touch there with any comments or questions as we’d really love to hear from you. And if your podcast app allows you to, please do leave us a review as it really helps others to find our show.

[00:26:00] So until next month, bye for now.