What's the Perfect Way to Help Children Heal in Play Therapy?
Cathi Spooner 
Attachment theory, neuroscience, and play therapy are key to help children thrive.
The ultimate goal for child and adolescent therapists using play therapy and expressive arts is to help your client overcome their difficulties and develop resiliency. To do that you need to figure out what’s going on with your clients so you can develop a plan.
Consider this – parents bring their children to your office with anxiety to get help for their children. In the course of working with your client you begin to believe there may be a disconnect between your client and his/her ability to use their parents for support. Or something seems to be missing to explain what’s contributing to your client’s limited progress. You ask yourself what’s going on that your client is so anxious. During one of your brief conversations with mother, you learn your client’s father is somewhat distant and gets angry easily so he’s a “yeller.”
How is this impacting your client? What do you do?
Is there a “best” way to do that?
There are a variety of theoretical models in the psychotherapy field. Play therapy is also grounded in theory and depending on the theoretical model you use will determine how you apply it to help your clients. Most play therapy models focus primarily on the child.
Is there a better way to help your young clients than using primarily individual counseling sessions?
Since children live within the context of their family relationships, using an attachment and neuroscience lens to help your clients heal allows you to integrate parents and even siblings so they can heal within the context of their most important relationships. That can be a little daunting to many child and adolescent therapists if you haven’t gotten good training and don’t have a framework to guide you through the treatment process.
Using an attachment and neuroscience focus provides you with an understanding about how relationships influence your client’s beliefs about self, others, and relationships and how these belief systems are likely contributing to your client’s presenting symptoms. The concept of mentalization provides you with a way to understand how your client views the world and themselves that may be contributing to and perpetuating your client’s mental health problems, including emotion regulation problems. Neuroscience and attachment theory also provide you with an understanding of emotion regulation and the importance of integrating parents into the play therapy process to teach them how to use co-regulation to help their child.
Since children and adolescents live within the context of their family, using a family systems “lens” allows you to identify family relationship and attachment patterns that form the basis of your client’s mentalizations, including sibling relationships that help them understand peer relationships. Family therapy sessions can help you identify the strengths and needs of your client’s family so you can reinforce their strengths and help parents to facilitate shifts where they’re needed to help your client heal. Family therapy sessions can facilitate healing for the whole family and create long-term successful outcomes for years to come.
But how can you engage family members with different ages and developmental stages?
How do you get all the family members in the room to engage in the activities to facilitate the change process?
This is the challenge for child and adolescent therapists. And I have the perfect solution – family play therapy using an attachment and neuroscience framework to guide you through the treatment process and accessing the therapeutic powers of play. Accessing the therapeutic powers of play provides a way for you to help all family members engage in the change process. Play therapy and expressive arts interventions allow you to meet the unique needs of children and adolescents in the treatment process.
Recap:
Identifying all the different things that contribute to your client’s mental health challenges is an important task to be accomplished in treatment
Using a neuroscience and attachment lens via the role of mentalization helps you figure out how beliefs systems may be contributing to your client’s difficulties so you can make sure you’re targeting the right things for change at a deep level
Using a family system and attachment lens helps you identify relationship patterns within the family so you can reinforce the family strengths and support parents as well as help family members make changes within the family to support resiliency and healthy development
Play therapy and expressive arts provides a way to engage the whole family regardless of developmental stage of family members in the healing process
Categories: : Attachment-Focused Family Play Therapy
