The Magic of Play Therapy
helping your child heal
The right play therapy is stabilizing and life-changing for children.
Inside each child is a dramatic landscape of love and pain, loss and victory. They grow up contending with an adult world in which they have little or no control. Children rapidly try to make sense of this strange world around them and act according to the meaning they make of it.
Lots can go wrong here. Too often tantrums begin and behavior becomes unmanageable. This can be incredibly stressful for parents. Rigorous behavior interventions are usually recommended and employed but fail in many cases.
That’s because many children don’t need these types of interventions.
Instead the child needs their confusing and chaotic inner world to be accessed, organized, and soothed. Play is the language and work of children and so the vehicle by which we can accomplish this kind of change.
Method of play
The form of therapy I used is called Non-Directive Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT). It’s a boring name but an incredible model. I’ve seen it help a child in as little as four sessions. For most children, it will take more time, but it undoubtedly brings about a tremendous amount of change for a child and his family.
The theory behind the method is simple: a child will naturally produce the very problems they need to work on in their play. They can’t help it; this is born out of them. Children have the benefit of being relatively undefended, not knowing that they are putting their precious interior on display.
A skilled therapist can create and mold an environment in which the child harnesses their own resources to work through and overcome the problem.
the stages of play
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Warming Up
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Anger and Control
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Nurturance and Closeness
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Self Mastery