Play Therapy:  What is it?  Play Therapy is the process of treating children for social and emotional issues using creative, playful processes as a powerful mode for healing hurts.  Think about it.  We all, even as adults, love to play, and play is healing for us.  Children, on the other hand, need big quantities of play to develop socially, emotionally and cognitively and when they learn something new, they most often master it best through play.  So when there is a problem with a child, instead of using talk therapy, Child Therapists use a child’s natural language for communicating: Play.

You might wonder, but what is my child communicating?  Is this form of therapy really helping him or her?  Can you just teach my child some social skills or coping skills to help them to behave more appropriately?

In their play, a child is communicating on many levels, and is sometimes unaware him/herself of the deep work that they are doing to master something in their bodies, psyche or relationships. It is the job of the Play Therapist to decode what the child is saying, or needing, and to utilize interventions to help the child move through the problem.

Does play therapy work?  Absolutely!  Depending on so many factors, it does sometimes take time.  Just like with adults, for children, recreation and play happens best when we are not pressured by time and space.

Play Therapy engages the senses, and keeps children present to their psychological work in a way that would be too big and painful for them through the cognitive function of talking therapy.  By engaging in therapeutic symbolic play with children, we can use play as a powerful tool for helping a child to overcome what is challenging him or her. Play therapy is a powerful means of empowering children to solve problems organically, which means that we don’t have to force children to use overly mature cognitive functions that keep them from really connecting with what’s going on deep inside.

Play Therapy is a supportive process for the psychological development and movement of a child who has become stuck.  We can try to teach a child those tangible coping skills and social skills, but at the end of the day, kids hate being treated like robots or force fed information.  Children want to create, evolve, grow and decide for themselves how to respond to the direction of the wind in their sails.  Play allows them to do this.  Then, when appropriate, I can teach them those coping and social skills when they are ready to learn them.