Play Therapy is a developmentally appropriate psychological intervention for children. Children often find it difficult to talk about their feelings, thoughts, concerns, or worries because their expressive language skills are still maturing. What they struggle (or are unable) to express in words is often communicated through their behaviour. Children naturally use play to explore and navigate the world around them and understand their experiences in it. Play is a dynamic process through which children naturally express themselves and explore issues/dilemmas in many creative ways. In play therapy, the power of play is used therapeutically to help children release distress, process implicit and explicit trauma, explore and resolve difficult issues, re-dress anxiety and master fears, make sense of life experiences and gain insight into their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The playroom offers a range of carefully selected toys and art materials that invite a child to play.

 

Within this space, the play therapist recognises the underlying symbolic function of everything a child plays. Toys represent words and how a child plays becomes their language to effectively express anxieties, fears, worries, experiences, thoughts, needs and feelings (Landreth and Bratton 1999). This enables children to comfortably explore and process difficult thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences without becoming distressed or overwhelmed. The play therapy process is child led (trusting a child’s developmental capacity to gain emotional resilience and achieve greater well-being) and supported/contained by the therapist. The play therapist uses core, person centred skills and PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy) to engage a child in the process of play therapy and help them feel safe and ready to authentically express themselves.

 

The play therapist validates a child’s thoughts and feelings by reflectively responding to what the child is saying, doing, and sharing about themselves and their lived experiences. This process helps the child to gain insight into his/her patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving. During this process of self discovery, the play therapist helps the child to discover new ways of mastering tricky thoughts/feelings and resolving difficult issues that have previously felt too overwhelming.