Using Play Therapy in Your Work

Let’s Play

Play can be defined as a voluntary activity involving pretend or fantasy, but it can be so much more than that. Play can be useful therapeutically, helping adults and children to improve their mental and physical health.

What is play therapy?

Play therapy is a form of therapy that, obviously, involves play. It is suitable for children and adults and encourages people to express themselves through play, arts, crafts, toys and games.

Not everyone is able to express themselves well verbally, so play therapy enables them to share their feelings and thoughts in a different way.

Types of play therapy

For example –

Asking a person to draw pictures or paint images of how they feel
Use puppets and ask them to act out how they feel
Role play

Lego Therapy is a well-known form of play therapy, where children or adults use Lego blocks to work together. It encourages team work, creativity and communication, which are useful skills for the child or adult to develop.

Play therapy can involve –

Functional Play – This involves manipulating objects or practising a skill.
Constructive play – involves making things. Lego Therapy is an example of constructive play.
Dramatic play involves acting out roles, such as teacher, friend. It can also involve pretend play, fantasy play or acting out social scripts, such as how to behave in a queue, for example.
Games with rules – Games such as football, tennis, chess and draughts have rules. Playing games with rules can help children and adults to gain an understanding of boundaries and rules when interacting with others.

Play therapy with kids

Play is an important activity for children to engage in, and gain tremendous enjoyment from. Most children engage in play spontaneously and different types of play seem to be more prevalent in children of different ages. Since children are not as advanced as adults in terms of language, play is sometimes regarded as the language of children. Play therapy taps into the child’s affinity with play as a way to communicate with them.

Play therapy involves allowing children to express their thoughts and feelings through play activities in the presence of a caring and empathic adult. Children are allowed to use toys or activities to play out their inner experiences in a safe space.

Play therapy with adults

Exploration of self through play can be used to treat adults, including the elderly and also adolescents in the issues facing them. By the time a person reaches adulthood their ability to explore themselves and the word around them through play seems lost – but we do play in various ways even as adults: singing, dancing, acting, dressing up, are all forms of play and help adults and adolescents to unlock creativity, to rehearse for perceivably uncomfortable or important situations (e.g. talking to yourself or going through what you will say in an important interview, in a meeting or even at a doctor’s appointment). Play can be ‘relearned’; as adults we never really lost the ability to play - we either do not recognise our day to day actions and thoughts as ‘play’ or we have suppressed the ability to play.

Play therapy, in a safe and comfortable environment, is used for range of issues in adults and adolescents and includes several of types of ‘play’ to explore both the mind and the body for example:

Movement
Dream
Fantasy
Storytelling
role play
vocal play
sand play

Etc.

It is used to treat a range of issues, such as –

Grief and loss
Anxiety
Social skills
Mood swings
Low self esteem

Etc.

Training as a play therapist

Play therapy is useful for children and adults who are struggling to express themselves, to share how they are feeling.

We are currently seeing an increase in mental health difficulties in adults and children, and play therapy offers an alternative option to traditional counselling to children and adults who might struggle to express themselves well verbally.

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