Child and adolescent psychotherapy using play

So what is child and adolescent psychotherapy and why use it? And does it have to do with play?

Play

First we must realise that play is vital to a child’s development. When a child plays, especially when that play is self directed, i.e. not completely restricted by adult’s expectations and constraints, then they are functioning at their most optimal level. When this happens, powerful opportunities become available to the child: opportunities to problem-solve, learn, create, to feel important and useful and to feel powerful in their actions. These are hugely instrumental qualities when faced with over-coming obstacles in life. These same qualities, among others become blocked and/or stuck when children are overwhelmed and so they don’t/can’t function at their best or reach their full potential. On top of this their actual ability to play can become restricted and you may see your children become withdrawn, rigid and repetitive in their play and it can often sadly lack the joy and spontaneity that makes play so wonderful in the first place.

How can play become therapy?

Play actually possesses therapeutic powers in of itself that can happen through the quality of the play. Crucially it allows your child to use the fantastic reality that is created through the play and enables them to “play out” their troubles/confusions in the ways an adult might talk them out. But in play therapy (child and adolescent psychotherapy) the dynamics of a healthy relationship (i.e. the therapist/child relationship) are harnessed to provide a supportive environment that paves the way for a play and therapeutic experience that can meet your child at their appropriate developmental stage. This allows for optimal levels of functioning where your child can experience regulation (validation, empathy, soothing, sensitivity to need leading to a return to a calm and organised state of well being) and positive repair.

Creating this environment enables your child to now attempt to make sense of, re-organise and repair previously overwhelming life experiences and/or perceptions within a comfortable window of tolerance. By remaining in this comfortable window, the therapist avoids overwhelming your child once more as can happen though talk only therapy where there is no opportunity to use their body or experience visceral regulation.

Your child can now make a difference in their play that they couldn’t make in the real world. But this experience of “making a difference” is also real and tells their body and brain that they can help themselves and can be helped. This gives them hope, in a lived way, and that hope can act as a buffer to future stress. Also, it can stand to them as a learned experience, which can and will challenge other, more disruptive learned experiences. The learning here can be that they can and so will try to problem solve in the future. Your child can now hold mastery over the play where they did not experience mastery over the original overwhelming experience(s). The fun and regulation achieved through the play actually calms down the lower more primitive parts of the brain that get activated when a person’s existing coping is overrun. These lower parts of the brain high-jack the other higher regions of the brain and interrupt your child’s problem solving, reflective and healing (anti-anxiety) capacities.

The reflections of the informed play therapist (child and adolescent psychotherapist) can then support the child to put an organising framework around the experience i.e. a story around what they are doing and why. This in turn facilitates greater reflective capacities and problem solving abilities. Most importantly though, your child will be solving problems in a fun, joy-filled manner where meaning is shared and the exchange of emotional material can become significant and useful and not disruptive and problematic for them such as in the case of acting out behaviour.

Furthermore the experience of play therapy can be hugely helpful in building your child’s self esteem The reflections of the therapist build on this, with your child benefitting from many lived and so learned experiences of appropriate power and control where they may have previously felt powerless and out of control, not forgetting the wonderful shared experiences of “I did it!”

The more all of these things happen in the play the more patterned and habitual they can become in the brain and so effectively by playing well your child’s brain is working at its best and its hardest! I often compare this to train services. The more you use a service the better it often becomes as it gets developed and enhanced over time and through demand. So play therapy can support better and more elaborate train services in the brains of our children to transport and deliver important information in a useful way with little interruption, disruption and/or breakdowns, in the hope that the only service breakdowns we encounter are the services that are no longer useful, such as in the case of unhelpful brain messages and coping strategies.

In time these unhelpful coping and defence mechanisms may even be discontinued in their service, once there need for service is no longer present. Play therapy is a perfect medium for the establishment of elaborate, well functioning and sophisticated brain (train!) pathways to be forged!

So let’s play and let our children play and let their brains do what they are capable of doing – who knows what the limits are.

Reference
Schaefer, C.E. & Drewes, A. (2013). The Therapeutic Powers of Play: 20 Core Agents of Change.2nd Ed. New York: Wiley and Sons