What’s Play Therapy?
Play is a child’s natural language. While adults often use words to communicate thoughts and emotions, children may express themselves more naturally through play, movement, creativity, and imagination. Play therapy provides a safe, supportive, and developmentally appropriate space for children to explore their thoughts, feelings, relationships, and experiences in ways that feel comfortable to them.
Using evidence-based play therapy approaches, the therapist listens, observes, and collaborates with the child to better understand their inner world while supporting emotional awareness, regulation, coping skills, and healthy development. Sessions are paced to meet each child’s individual needs, allowing them the time and space to process experiences and move toward meaningful and lasting change.
Play therapy can support children experiencing emotional dysregulation, meltdowns, tantrums, or anger; anxiety, depression, irritability, or sadness; attention, executive functioning, or behavioral challenges; and trauma, grief, stress, or difficult life experiences. With safety, support, and the freedom to express themselves through play, children can build new skills, work through difficult experiences, and move toward healing and growth in their own time and in their own way.
Trauma in Children/Teens
Trauma does not always look the same in children and teens as it does in adults. Children and teens often communicate distress from trauma through behavior rather than words. Trauma may present as emotional outbursts or shutdown, increased anxiety or fearfulness, changes in sleep or appetite, regression in skills, difficulty concentrating, aggression, withdrawal, or repetitive play themes.
Trauma Therapy
Trauma Therapy helps children and teens process overwhelming experiences in developmentally appropriate ways, often without requiring them to put painful events into words. Through play, creative expression, and gentle structure, children and teens can safely explore experiences, regulate their nervous systems, build coping skills, and make sense of what happened. Caregivers are supported in understanding trauma responses and learning how to help children and teens feel safe, supported, and in control again, allowing healing to happen at a pace that feels manageable and empowering.
The Four Pillars of Play Therapy
Safety – Creating a predictable, supportive environment where children feel secure enough to explore and express themselves.
Relationship – Building a trusting connection with the therapist, which supports healing and growth.
Play as Communication – Using play, creativity, and movement to express thoughts and emotions when words are hard.
Self-Directed Growth – Trusting a child’s natural ability to move toward healing at their own pace, with guidance and support when needed.
Types of Play Therapy I Use
I use a Humanistic-Adlerian, trauma-informed, and systems-informed evidence-based approach to play therapy, recognizing each child within the context of their development, experiences, relationships, family, and environment.
Adlerian Play Therapy
Adlerian Play Therapy, grounded in a humanistic foundation, is my primary play therapy approach. It focuses on understanding the meaning behind behavior while emphasizing encouragement, belonging, connection, and the therapeutic relationship. Through play, children explore emotions, experiences, behaviors, and relationships while developing insight, confidence, coping skills, and healthier ways of connecting with others. Adlerian play is an evidence-based approach with supporting research.
Other Approaches That Inform My Work
Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT)
A child-led approach that uses a safe, accepting therapeutic relationship and the child's natural language of play to support emotional expression, self-understanding, confidence, and growth.
Cognitive Behavioral, Skill-Building & Directive Play
I integrate Cognitive Behavioral Play Therapy (CBPT) and other directive play interventions when children benefit from additional structure or skill-building. Games, stories, art, role-play, and therapeutic activities can help children explore connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors while developing emotional regulation, coping, communication, social, executive functioning, and problem-solving skills.
Sand Play & Expressive Arts
Sand, miniatures, art, storytelling, and other creative activities provide children with developmentally appropriate ways to express, explore, and process emotions and experiences that may be difficult to communicate through words.
Parent & Caregiver Support
I incorporate parent coaching, attachment and Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT)-informed principles to help caregivers strengthen their relationship with their child and better understand and respond to emotional and behavioral needs. This may include skills for connection, attachment, child-led play, encouragement, communication, limit-setting, and responding to challenging behaviors while supporting the parent-child relationship. These strategies are informed by CPRT principles but are not provided as the formal CPRT protocol.
Rather than expecting a child or family to fit one therapy model, I adapt my approach to the individual child, their family, their needs, and their goals.