When psychologist and author Dr. Virginia Axline meets five-year-old Dibs, she notes Dibs’s hostility toward those around him. She consequently recognizes the importance of cultivating mutual trust and security between herself and Dibs, so that Dibs can feel more relaxed and open in his life. Axline makes sure that Dibs understands their sessions’ parameters (one hour a week in which Dibs can determine what he wants to do) and tries to communicate her confidence in his abilities. Through his trust in Axline, Dibs also finds security within himself as he comes to understand that he can handle changes and emotions rather than depending on others to provide him with security. While children’s security in their environments and the adults in their lives are crucial for their development, Dibs’s journey suggests that it’s even more important for children to feel secure in themselves.
In Dibs’s initial sessions, Axline establishes how Dibs’s mistrust of his environment and the people around him causes him emotional distress. In Dibs’s first play therapy session with Axline at his school, he barely looks at her, instead focusing on the objects in the room. Axline describes how Dibs averts his eyes if their glances meet. This distrustful instinct plays out in Dibs’s other relationships, as he lashes out at other children and cuts himself off from his teachers and parents. Axline demonstrates that when any new experience is instantly met with distrust, children rarely feel safe. Also in their first hour, Dibs says, “No lock doors,” over and over again—and Axline notes that he says this with “a sob in his voice.” Dibs’s inability to control the locked doors in his life—both figurative and literal—has led him to be cut off from others, adding to his distrust of unknown people and situations. Without personal freedom, Dibs feels insecure, which causes emotional distress.
Axline then illustrates how building up mutual trust and security between herself and Dibs helps Dibs overcome his hostility and uncertainty. Axline first demonstrates her trust in Dibs—not only by allowing him to pick his own activities during their play sessions, but by giving him greater responsibility. In her initial visit to Dibs’s school, she sees that the teachers have to hold Dibs’s hand to bring him into the classroom. But when Axline brings Dibs back from the playroom, she only walks him halfway to the classroom and then asks if he can make it the rest of the way on his own. She notes that when Dibs walks alone, he seems proud of what he accomplished when he reaches the door. This illustrates how Axline’s trust in Dibs helps ease his insecurity on the whole. Axline also notices that Dibs throws tantrums at school when he has to leave for the day. To counter this, Axline explains to Dibs that he only has an hour to spend with her in their play sessions; she helps him accept this reality by telling him when he has five minutes left. She notes, “A child gets his feelings of security from predictable and consistent and realistic limitations.” Consequently, for the first time, Dibs doesn’t put up a fuss with his mother when he has to leave for his session, affirming how these boundaries give Dibs greater security and help him counter his distress.
Dibs consequently learns to find security not just in his environment or his relationship with Axline, but in himself—and Axline suggests that this kind of security is even more important, because it allows Dibs to be independent and responsible for his own emotions. In Dibs’s third therapy session, he doesn’t need Axline’s help to put on his clothes or walk to the lobby, nor does he need any prompting about leaving at the end of the session. As Axline notes, “responsible freedom grows and develops from inside the person,” and she sees that Dibs is fostering that “responsible freedom.” This enables him to act independently and gain confidence in himself. Later, during Dibs’s fourth session, he discovers that his toys were moved, even though he asked Axline not to move them. He grows upset, but Axline tells him that she did not promise that they would not be moved. She helps Dibs understand his anger and sadness and also allows him to realize that the outside world is always changing—and that, often, people have little control over these elements. While Dibs found security in the toys, Axline hopes to help him “utilize [his] inner resources” and “carry [his] security around with [him].” Sure enough, Dibs learns to cope with that disappointment and continues to play rather than letting his emotions get the better of him. In their final two sessions, Axline observes that Dibs has a “feeling of deep security inside himself” and takes responsibility for his feelings. And with this confidence and security, Axline finds, Dibs is “no longer afraid to be himself.” Only by developing security and confidence within himself is he able to use his intellect and emotions appropriately, rather than shut himself off as he had done at the beginning of his sessions.
When Dibs and Axline meet two years after they have finished their sessions, Dibs is happy, confident, and sociable. He confesses that he was frightened when he started the play therapy sessions, but he recalls that Axline said, “This is all yours, Dibs. Have fun. Nobody is going to hurt you in here.” Axline never, in fact, said these things to Dibs, but his recounting of these words illustrates how she nonverbally communicated that feeling to him. Through his trust in Axline and a safe environment, Dibs was consequently able to find security in himself and carry that new confidence throughout the rest of his life.
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Trust and Security Quotes in Dibs in Search of Self
At one time he seemed to be extremely retarded mentally. Another time he would quickly and quietly do something that indicated he might even have superior intelligence. If he thought anyone was watching him, he quickly withdrew into his shell. Most of the time he crawled around the edge of the room, lurking under tables, rocking back and forth, chewing on the side of his hand, sucking his thumb, lying prone and rigid on the floor when any of the teachers or children tried to involve him in some activity. He was a lone child in what must have seemed to him to be a cold, unfriendly world.
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 did this because I hoped Dibs would gradually become more and more self-sufficient and responsible. I wanted to communicate to him my confidence in his ability to measure up to my expectations. I believed he could do it. […] I would have gone all the way to the door of his room with him, if he had seemed to need that much support. But he went by himself. I said, “Goodbye, Dibs!”
He said, “That’s right!” […] He looked surprised—almost pleased. He walked into his room and closed the door firmly behind him. It was the first time Dibs had ever gone any place alone.
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.
If I could get across to Dibs my confidence in him as a person who had good reasons for everything he did, and if I could convey the concept that there were no hidden answers for him to guess, no concealed standards of behavior or expression that were not openly stated, no pressure for him to read my mind and come up with a solution that I had already decided upon, no rush to do everything today—then, perhaps, Dibs would catch more and more of a feeling of security and of the rightness of his own reactions so he could clarify, understand, and accept them.
He twisted his hands together and turned around toward me, looking very miserable and unhappy. “Miss A say it paint one picture of a house and then it leave you,” he said huskily. I noted how confused his language had become. Here was a child very capable of great intellectual achievement, whose abilities were dominated by his emotional disturbance.
“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.
“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.”
