Why adults say they don't know how to play

Time Stamps and more: https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/03/29/nadja/


Many of the people I work with are highly intelligent, analytically sharp, and deeply uncomfortable with the idea of play. The word itself can feel faintly embarrassing, associated with self-indulgence. Doing something with no measurable output, no goal, no justification, tends to produce anxiety more than relief.
Nadja Rolli is a child psychotherapist and author who has spent her career working with play as a clinical and developmental tool. She walks through a five-stage model of play development, sensory, attachment, constructive, fantasy, and competitive, and what becomes clear is that many adults, particularly high-functioning ones, were pushed into achievement-oriented, competitive modes long before the earlier stages were properly lived through. The things that follow from that, needing to justify rest, struggling to lose without it feeling like something larger, being uncomfortable with open-ended unproductive time, are not personality quirks. They have a developmental logic.
We also get into how play connects to trauma repair, what attachment play looks like across a lifetime, why some people genuinely do not know what they enjoy anymore and what that points to, the historical reasons play came to be seen as dangerous or morally suspect, and what gets lost developmentally when children are moved too quickly into screens and competitive gaming before the earlier stages are inhabited.
The question underneath all of this is not really about whether you should play more. It is about whether you have ever genuinely felt entitled to exist outside of what you produce, and what it would mean to recover that.
Nadja Rolli is a child and adolescent psychotherapist based in London and the author of Can We Play Now?

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