Stop Processing Your Hardest Play Therapy Sessions Alone

Discover why play therapy consultation is more than support—and how community can strengthen your clinical decisions and confidence.

Why play therapy consultation and community are clinical tools that can help you think more clearly, make intentional decisions, and better support your clients

Have you ever walked a play therapy client back out to their caregiver, returned to your playroom, sat down, and thought:

What just happened in there?

Maybe you replay the session in your head.

You think about something the child did that you weren't expecting. You wonder whether you missed something. You question whether you responded the right way or what you should do when they come back next week.

And there's nobody around you who really understands play therapy that you can talk it through with.

So you sit there and process it by yourself.

I've been there.

And I want to challenge something I think a lot of play therapists have come to believe:

Community isn't just emotional support.

It's not simply a nice place to vent, connect with other therapists, or feel less alone.

Those things matter. But when you're working with children and adolescents, having access to other professionals who understand play therapy can actually be a clinical tool.

Because when you have somewhere to take the difficult sessions, confusing cases, and moments when you genuinely don't know what to do next, it changes how you think clinically.

And when your clinical thinking changes, the work you do with your clients changes too.

The Isolation of Being a Play Therapist

Play therapists occupy a unique space within the larger mental health field.

Many graduate programs focus heavily on adult psychotherapy. Many therapists enter the field learning adult theoretical models and continue using those frameworks throughout their careers.

So when you specialize in children and adolescents—and particularly when you're using play therapy—you may find yourself being the only person in your agency or practice who does what you do.

I hear this all the time.

“I'm the only play therapist in my building.”

You may have wonderful colleagues.

You may have people you trust and respect.

But if they primarily work with adults and don't really understand play therapy, they may not be able to help you think through a case from a play therapy perspective.

They may not understand that play isn't simply something we use to get a child comfortable enough to talk.

Play is the vehicle.

And that distinction matters when you're trying to figure out what happened in a session, what the child's play might be communicating, what stage of the therapeutic process you're in, or how you're going to explain the work to a parent.

If the people around you don't understand the clinical process you're using, there's only so far they can go in helping you think through it.

So you aren't simply experiencing loneliness.

You're carrying the responsibility for complicated clinical decision-making largely by yourself.

Community Is More Than a Place to Vent

When we hear the word community, it's easy to think about emotional support.

A Facebook group.

A group of colleagues.

A place to say, This week was hard.

And emotional support absolutely matters.

But that's only part of what happens when you're surrounded by other play therapists.

Imagine bringing a challenging case to a group of professionals who actually speak the same clinical language you do.

You explain what you've been seeing.

Someone asks a question you hadn't thought to ask.

Another therapist notices something you hadn't noticed.

Someone else says, I've worked with something similar. Here's what helped me.

Suddenly, you're seeing the client through a broader lens.

That's one of my favorite things to watch happen when we're staffing cases.

You don't just receive validation.

You gain clinical perspective.

You can only think about what you already know, and you can only see what you can currently see.

When other clinicians join the conversation, they bring their experiences, perspectives, questions, and theoretical lenses with them.

And sometimes one question or observation is exactly what you needed to get unstuck.

You Go Back Into the Playroom Differently

This is where community becomes a clinical tool rather than simply emotional support.

After you've talked through the case, you are different when you walk into your next session.

Your thinking is sharper.

Your direction is clearer.

Your interventions become more intentional.

Maybe you suddenly recognize what you should be watching for in the child's play.

Maybe you understand why an intervention wasn't working.

Maybe you realize you've been conceptualizing the problem from the wrong angle.

Or maybe you finally have a clear Plan A—and a Plan B, C, and D if Plan A doesn't land.

Instead of spending the next several weeks trying to figure it out by yourself, you have somewhere to go when you're stuck.

That's the clinical outcome of practicing in community.

It's not simply:

“I feel better because somebody listened to me.”

It's:

“I understand this case differently, and now I know what I'm going to do next.”

Consultation Helps You Trust Your Own Clinical Thinking

Something else happens when you regularly process cases with other play therapists.

You start becoming more confident in your own clinical decision-making.

You learn what to pay attention to.

You begin trusting your clinical intuition.

And, just as importantly, you have somewhere safe to test that intuition.

Sometimes we pick up on something in a session and wonder:

Is this my own stuff coming up, or am I noticing something clinically important?

That's a difficult question to answer entirely by yourself.

When you have other play therapists around you, you can bring that observation into the conversation.

You can examine it.

You can hear different perspectives.

Then you can decide what the information means and, most importantly, what you're going to do with it.

Because insight without application only gets us so far.

We need to be able to take what we've learned and turn it into something useful in the playroom.

This Is Why I Created Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE

One of the reasons I created Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE (PTEC) was because I kept meeting isolated play therapists.

Therapists doing incredibly important work with children and families but trying to figure out all the complicated pieces by themselves.

I wanted to create a place where play therapists could bring those questions and work through them with people who understand the work.

At the heart of PTEC is our Monthly Circle Mastermind consultation call.

This is where you can bring your cases, your questions, and those I genuinely don't know what to do next moments.

And we work through them together.

This isn't generic advice.

We look at the root of what's happening.

We consider your play therapy model.

We look at what stage of the play therapy process your client may be in.

We talk about what you've already tried and what has or hasn't worked.

Then we identify strategies you can actually take back into your sessions.

And I don't want you walking away with just one idea.

I want you to have options.

If Plan A doesn't work, what is Plan B?

What about Plan C?

Or Plan D?

That's how we make our clinical work more intentional instead of going into the next session hoping something works.

Learning Doesn't End When the Training Ends

Another reason community matters is because learning something and integrating it into your clinical work are two different things.

You can attend an incredible play therapy training and leave with pages of notes and new ideas.

Then a month later, a client walks into your playroom and you're trying to remember:

Wait. What did they say about this in that training?

Now you have to figure out how to apply what you learned to this specific child, with this specific presenting problem, in this specific stage of treatment.

That's one of the reasons I include 60 days of Play Therapy Elevation Circle with my trainings.

I want you to have somewhere to process what you learned after the training is over.

Because that's when the real-world questions begin.

Turning New Information Into Better Clinical Decisions

We also have a Monthly Book Club inside PTEC.

But the goal isn't simply to read something together.

We want to take play therapy-specific information, discuss it, digest it, and then ask:

What do we do with this?

How does this apply to the child sitting in front of me?

How might it change what I'm watching for in the playroom?

How could it influence the way I work with parents?

For example, we've been spending time discussing play therapy themes because themes can be one of the more complicated things for play therapists to master.

It's rarely as simple as:

The child did this, so it means that.

There are multiple factors to consider.

We need to think about how to recognize a meaningful theme, what it might tell us, and what we do with that information once we've identified it.

Having a community gives us somewhere to work through those layers instead of trying to connect all the dots alone.

Seeing a Case Through More Than One Theoretical Lens

Beginning in September, we're also adding quarterly roundtable discussions to Play Therapy Elevation Circle.

We'll bring together play therapy professionals from different theoretical perspectives and look at the same clinical topic or case.

For example, our September roundtable will focus on anxiety and emotional dysregulation.

We'll use a case study and ask clinicians working from different theoretical lenses:

How would you conceptualize what's happening?

What do you believe is at the root of the problem?

How does your play therapy model influence your thinking?

And based on that model, what would you actually do?

I think this is particularly helpful because many play therapists attend trainings from different theoretical perspectives and then struggle to figure out how all of that information fits together.

I'm a firm believer that you need a play therapy model to operate from.

Even if you consider yourself integrative, you're still integrating theoretical models.

Your framework should guide your clinical thinking rather than leaving you with a collection of interventions that you're trying to piece together on the fly.

Getting Out of the Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Cycle

When we don't have that framework—and don't have people around us to help us think through it—this is often when the second-guessing starts.

Nothing seems to be working.

Imposter syndrome kicks in.

And suddenly we're searching for the magical play therapy activity that will finally move the needle.

I've called this the spaghetti-against-the-wall method.

You start throwing interventions at the problem to see what sticks.

But without a clinical framework behind those decisions, you can end up trying everything and becoming even more frustrated when nothing seems to work.

This is exactly where consultation can help.

Sometimes you don't need another activity.

You need another perspective.

You need someone to think alongside you so you can better understand what's happening and make an intentional decision about what comes next.

What Does Waiting Actually Cost?

I know there are therapists who hear all of this and think:

That sounds great. Maybe I'll join next time.

And sometimes now genuinely isn't the right time.

But I also want you to think about what waiting can cost.

It's another week of processing a complex case by yourself.

Another week of second-guessing a decision you might have been able to make confidently with the right support.

Another week carrying the emotional and clinical weight of the work alone.

I've watched what can happen when we staff one case together for 30 minutes.

Something a therapist may have spent weeks turning over in their mind can suddenly become clearer because another person saw something they couldn't see.

I've experienced that myself.

Sometimes my brain gets stuck.

I can't think about the case differently because I can't even conceptualize that there is another way to think about it.

Then somebody shares an insight.

And that's the key that unlocks it.

We are not meant to do this work alone.

You Can Be the Only Play Therapist in Your Building Without Practicing Alone

You may still be the only play therapist at your agency.

You may be the only child therapist in your private practice.

You may not have another person down the hall who understands why what happened with the dollhouse or sand tray today was clinically significant.

But that doesn't mean you have to process every difficult session alone.

You can have people around you who speak the same clinical language.

People who can help you ask better questions.

People who can offer another perspective when you're stuck.

People who understand that play isn't something we do around the therapy.

Play is the therapy.

That's what I want Play Therapy Elevation Circle to provide.

Not simply another membership to consume.

A place to show up, participate, bring your cases, ask your questions, and strengthen the way you think clinically.

Because that's where the real value of community happens.

Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE Is Open Now

If you're ready to stop trying to figure out every difficult case by yourself, I'd love to welcome you inside Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE.

Inside PTEC, you'll have access to our Monthly Circle Mastermind consultation calls, Monthly Book Club, weekly play therapy tips, quarterly roundtable discussions, resources, and spaces where you can connect and get support between meetings.

There is no long-term commitment. You stay as long as PTEC continues to support the work you're doing.

But enrollment is only open for a limited time.

Enrollment closes Saturday, August 29 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Once enrollment closes, you'll have to wait until the next time PTEC opens to join.

I hope I'll see you inside.

Categories: : Community, Consultation, Isolation, Play Therapy Academy, Play Therapy Elevation Circle, Play Therapy Model, Podcast, Supervision