What is Play Therapy?
Play therapy is different from typical talk therapy. However, it’s more than just playing with toys and talking about feelings. While building with legos and doing puppet shows is a perk for the creative play therapist, there are specific reasons to use play therapy that still follow the general steps and goals of talk therapy.
Play Therapy is Communication
Play is how kids communicate. In talk therapy, adults usually sit down and dive deep with their therapist for about 50 minutes or so. With kids, it is not developmentally appropriate for them to sit and discuss their feelings for that long. Many do not even have the words in their vocabulary to describe what they are feeling. Similarly to how adults talk to decompress their emotions and walk through life’s events, kids use play to communicate their experiences. The play therapist is trained to read and control the play in a way that the child won’t fully process the fact that they are playing and doing therapy.
Play Therapy is a Metaphor
A play therapist trains to be able to join in a child’s play and translate what the play could mean. Kids have big imaginations, so a play therapist can use their imagination to make a story out of dolls, puppets or animals. These stories take lived experiences of the child and apply different characters and settings, allowing the therapist to find positive options in the story to impact future interactions. This also gives the child a place to share their feelings about a situation that’s similar to their own life experiences. Working through situations mirrors the way adults talk through things in their version of therapy, just in a way that a child can communicate and understand. Talking with children through metaphors allows the play therapist a passageway into the child’s thoughts and feelings, which helps start the therapy process.
Play Therapy is a Partnership
Just like when an adult slowly opens up to their therapist, the play therapist needs to build rapport and trust with the child in order to be the most effective. As the relationship grows, a relationship forms between the child and the play therapist. The child needs to feel safe to explore the unknown feelings that they have been working through and know that their feelings are valid. This partnership flourishes with parent involvement, consistent therapy times, and positive experiences.
There are many parallels between talk and play therapy once you recognize that kids communicate differently. The kids still are processing through the important things in their life, even if it’s being communicated by a puppet. The specialized training gives play therapists the ability to notice key signals that may be present in a child’s play, similarly to how all therapists are trained to identify patterns when an adult is talking with them. It does look different, and that’s okay! We don’t expect a third-grader to learn the same way a college student would, and the same goes for therapy. Play therapists specialized training allows for developmentally-appropriate care and opens up a different way for the child to process emotions and feelings.
For more details on the what, why, who and how of play therapy, check out this link.
