What IS Play Therapy?

“Play therapy is to children what counseling is to adults. Play therapy utilizes play, children’s natural medium of expression, to help them express their feelings more easily through toys instead of words[1].”
 
Children use play, as it is their primary and most natural form of communication, just as adults use language. Here are some examples to illustrate the power and importance of play for a child’s complete ability to communicate in therapy.

• A ten-year-old boy has a parent in prison but is silent in front of his mother. When she leaves the room he walks to the dollhouse, takes the father figure and walks him to the art cabinet, puts him in, closes the door, and says, “He’s in jail.”
• A four-year-old child, burned as an infant, plays with the dollhouse and engages in repetitive trauma play by placing the baby figure on the stove.
• A first-grade child living in a domestic violence shelter takes a baby doll and slams it to the ground.
• A three-year-old child in in-patient care suddenly tells his play-therapist, “The police are coming, we need to hide.” He then explains that the toys he was previously playing with from a medical kit, are items we also need to hide. After all, the police are on their way.

 
I think of each of these children and how different therapy would have been had I approached them with words and my own agenda of what the child needs, or worse, worksheets. Imagine approaching a ten-year-old boy and asking him how he feels that his father is in jail? We could clearly expect a shrug of his shoulders and an immediate, “I don’t know.” Cognitively, he probably doesn’t really “know”. A young child burned in infancy surely has a scar that remains but would likely not have sufficient words to talk about it. After all, this is a pre-verbal trauma, thus there is no formal and conscious memory to pull from. She simply doesn’t remember; but, her body does. We know this from modern day neuroscience, and her play shows this. What if I had taken the liberty to start with the last child example on how to manage our anger, as that was what brought the child into counseling? I would be working on my agenda, and I would be asking the child to enter into my adult world of full brain development and understanding. I would also miss the larger problems at work and operating in his life. The problem is, we are dishonoring the child by these common day and frequent approaches of asking children to participate in talk therapy.  
 
Through Child-Centered Play Therapy, I instead enter into the child’s world, rather than expecting a child to enter into my adult world. Child therapy must be more than an adult approach to therapy, simplified. In my treatment room, I get out of the way while providing all of the tools/toys that children need for expression, so they can go where they need to go for healing. In this space, my presence as a very well-trained clinician fills the room with understanding, and the carefully thought through responses then enable the child’s world to come alive, in the context of the play therapy room. Why? Because the child does know what the problem is and given the right environment with a well-trained play therapist, they will go there. And they will process it. 
 
I firmly believe that every therapist who works with children should be a play therapist[2]. And I think you should see it this way, too. 
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[1] What Is Play Therapy? UNT, College of Education, Center for Play Therapy. https://cpt.unt.edu/what-is-play-therapy#:~:text=Play%20therapy%20is%20to%20children,through%20toys%20instead%20of%20words.    
 
[2] I also want to recognize other expressive therapies which are similar and important, as they work differently from talk therapy. Such credentials to look for are Art Therapists (ATR, ATR-BC, and ATCS) as well other credentials (RSP/CST/CST-T, REAT, RDT), all of which are earned and maintained through either national or international organizations.