Dibs in Search of Self follows author and psychologist Dr. Virginia Axline’s work with a five-year-old boy named Dibs. Dibs begins the book as withdrawn, combative, and generally uncommunicative: his teachers aren’t sure if he is mentally disabled or emotionally challenged, which is why they enlist Axline’s help. But over time, Axline and Dibs’s weekly play therapy sessions allow Dibs to open up about his thoughts and feelings. Even when he express severe sadness or violence, Axline never judges or punishes him; instead, her empathetic responses help Dibs understand and cope with his own emotions rather than isolate himself from others out of fear or anger. Axline’s approach suggests that children (and people in general) can benefit from non-judgmental therapies, because being heard and understood by others enables them to understand and work through their own emotions rather than be tormented by suppressed feelings.
Axline establishes Dibs’s withdrawn tendencies to illustrate how his unempathetic home life has left him emotionally deprived, to the point where those around him even believe that he’s mentally disabled. When Axline interviews Dibs’s teachers for the first time, they hint at Dibs’s home life: his father never picks him up from school, and his mother often sends her chauffeur in to collect him, particularly when he is throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t want to go home. The teachers note that his mother seems embarrassed and fatigued by his outbursts. Because Dibs’s parents do not have a desire to engage with or empathize with Dibs’s feelings, he mistrusts those around him and withdraws from the teachers and students at school. When Axline visits the family’s home, Dibs’s mother seems resigned to the situation—she comments that she doubts Dibs can be helped. Instead, she hopes Axline’s work with him will further Axline’s understanding of human behavior and perhaps help other children in the future. In the same interview, Axline hears faint screams from Dibs shouting, “No lock door! No lock door!” in another room. The stoic, scientific way in which Dibs’s mother describes her son as a research specimen, coupled with her indifference to his screaming, reinforces his emotional deprivation. Without any attempt from his parents to understand him or support him, Dibs is left feeling alone and afraid.
Axline then illustrates how her approach with Dibs aims to create a non-judgmental environment, so that Dibs will be able to express emotions more freely and with a greater sense of safety. When Dibs begins his hour-long play therapy sessions, Axline tells him that he can choose what he wants to do with that time. At first, Dibs touches the objects in the room and names them. Axline makes placid comments like, “There are many different things in this room, aren’t there? And you have touched and named most of them.” When Dibs expresses a desire to take his hat and coat off and starts whimpering, Axline asks, “You would like to take them off, but you want me to help you? Is that it?” Rather than make judgements, she simply expresses an understanding of what Dibs is doing, conveys empathy for his feelings, and helps him recognize his emotions and desires. Later, Dibs starts to become more creative in his play, and he makes Axline a painting. She doesn’t say thank you or praise him for this, so that Dibs can “add more of his thoughts and feelings and not be abruptly cut off by [her] response and involvement and values or standards of behavior.” Through this method, Axline illustrates how even positive judgments can defeat her purpose: instead, she aims to help Dibs identify his feelings.
Gradually, Dibs’s play and Axline’s empathetic responses help Dibs express negative feelings about his family and move past them, illustrating the value of a non-judgmental environment. In one of Dibs’s sessions, he plays with a dollhouse.: he pretends that a fire breaks out and that the mother and father figures aren’t able to get out of the house because the doors are locked. Dibs begins to cry because he feels “The hurt of doors closed and locked,” and Axline puts her arm around him. After confronting these feelings, Dibs says that the boy doll goes to save the parents. Because Axline reacts empathetically and without criticizing Dibs for acting out his parents’ deaths, Dibs is able to resolve the issue internally. She notes that when Dibs leaves the playroom, he leaves behind “the sorrowful feelings that he had uprooted there.” Only through this compassionate and safe environment can he begin to heal from his painful experiences growing up. Dibs further confronts his feelings about his father when he plays with Axline’s tape recorder, saying explicitly that he hates his father. Dibs also builds a prison for the father doll, explaining that he’s punishing the father for all the things he did that made Dibs sad and unhappy. Then, Dibs brings the boy doll over and digs his father out of prison, and the father says that he is sorry and that he loves and needs Dibs. Through therapy, Dibs is able to express his emotions but also work through them and extend empathy to his father. Dibs has the same experience expressing feelings about his sister Dorothy: in a later session, he says that he is going to poison the sister doll because she is a “brat” who “screams and scratches and hurts [him].” However, he also says that his relationship with Dorothy has improved. When Axline prompts him again, saying, “so that is poison for the sister?” Dibs replies that he won’t give it to her yet. Again, being prompted to evaluate his thoughts and having a non-judgmental listener allows Dibs to identify the negative feelings about his family and move beyond them.
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Therapy, Empathy, and Non-Judgment Quotes in Dibs in Search of Self
He clasped his hands tightly together against his chest and said over and over again “No lock doors. No lock doors. No lock doors.” His voice took on a note of desperate urgency. “Dibs no like locked doors,” he said. There was a sob in his voice.
I said to him, “You don’t like the doors to be locked.”
Dibs seemed to crumple. His voice became a husky whisper. “Dibs no like closed doors. No like closed and locked doors. Dibs no like walls around him.”
Obviously he had had some unhappy experiences with closed and locked doors. I recognized the feelings he expressed.
I attempted to keep my comments in line with his activity, trying not to say anything that would indicate any desire on my part that he do any particular thing, but rather to communicate understandingly and simply, recognition in line with his frame of reference. I wanted him to lead the way. I would follow. […] I didn’t want to go overboard and exclaim about his ability to do all these things. Obviously he could do these things. When the initiative is left up to the individual, he will select the ground upon which he feels his greatest security.
“You want to give me that, do you?” I said, gesturing toward his painting. He nodded. The purpose of this response, rather than an expression of thank you’s and praise, was to keep our communication open and to slow it down. Then, if he wanted to, he could add more of his thoughts and feelings and not be abruptly cut off by my response and involvement and values or standards of behavior.
“Come on Dibs. Put your arms into your coat sleeves.” He did. “Now sit down while I put your boots on.”
He sat down muttering “No go home. No want to go home. No feel like going home.”
“I know how you feel,” I told him.
A child gets his feelings of security from predictable and consistent and realistic limitations. I had hoped to help Dibs differentiate between his feelings and his actions. He seemed to have achieved a bit of this.
“It is gone,” he said.
“And you feel angry and disappointed because of it don’t you?” I asked.
Dibs nodded in agreement. He looked at me. I looked at him. What would ultimately help Dibs the most was not the sand mountain, not the powerful little plastic duck, but the feeling of security and adequacy that they symbolized in the creation he had built last week. Now, faced with the disappearance of the concrete symbols I hoped that he could experience within himself confidence and adequacy as he coped now with his disappointment and with the realization that things outside ourselves change—and many times we have little control over those elements, but if we learn to utilize our inner resources, we carry our security around with us.
Her failure to relate to her child with love, respect and understanding was probably due to her own emotional deprivation. Who can love, respect, understand another person, if they have not had such basic experiences themselves? It seemed to me that it would be more helpful for her to have learned in this interview that she was respected and understood, even though that understanding was, of necessity, a more generalized concept which accepted the fact that she had reasons for what she did, that she had capacity to change, that changes must come from within herself, that all changes—hers, her husband’s, Dibs’—are motivated by many accumulative experiences.
“I keep that leaf,” he said. “It is very tired and very old. But I keep that leaf. I mounted it and framed it. And I imagine some of the things it must have seen, flying all around the world with the wind. And I read in my books about the countries it saw.”
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Stupid people make accidents!” He shouted. There were tears in his eyes. “The party is over. The children are all gone! There is no more party.” […] He kicked over a chair. He swept the cups from the shelf. “I didn’t want a party,” he shouted. “I didn’t want any other children around.”
“It makes you angry and unhappy when something like that happens,” I said.
Dibs came over to me. “Let’s go down to your office,” he said, “Let’s get out of here. I am not stupid.”
“No. You are not stupid.”
“Oh no, Dibs!” I exclaimed. “That’s scouring powder. Not good to taste!”
He turned and looked at me coldly. This sudden reaction of mine was inconsistent. “How can I tell how it tastes unless I taste?” he asked with dignity.
“I don’t know of any other way,” I told him. “But I don’t think you ought to swallow it. It isn’t good to taste.”
“Oh come, Dibs, fix them right,” he said lightly. “There is a correct way to do everything and you get them all in their proper order.”
“Do you think they should always be in a certain order?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said with a grin. “That is unless they all are mixed up.”
“Then either way is all right?”
“In here,” he said. “Remember, in here, it’s all right just to be.”
He came over to me and patted my hand. “You understand,” he said with a smile.
As Dibs stood before me now his head was up. He had a feeling of security deep inside himself. He was building a sense of responsibility for his feelings. His feelings of hate and revenge had been tempered with mercy. Dibs was building a concept of self as he groped through the tangled brambles of his mixed-up feelings. He could hate and he could love. He could condemn and he could pardon. He was learning through experience that feelings can twist and turn and lose their sharp edges. He was learning responsible control as well as expression of his feelings. Through this increasing self-knowledge, he would be free to use his capacities and emotions more constructively.
“At first the playroom seemed so very, very big. And the toys were not friendly. And I was so afraid.”
“You were afraid in there, Dibs?”
“Yes.”
“Why were you afraid?”
“I don’t know. I was frightened at first because I didn’t know what you would do and I didn’t know what I would do. But you just said ‘This is all yours, Dibs. Have fun. Nobody is going to hurt you in here.’”
“I said that?”
“Yes,” Dibs said decisively. “That is what you said to me. And gradually I came to believe you. And it was that way. You said for me to go fight my enemies until they cried out and said they were sorry they hurt me.”
