When a child’s behaviour is off kilter because they don’t feel right on the inside, it may or may not be obvious to the adults why this is so. Because behaviour has meaning and is a way of communicating, we can view this as children telling us that something is not quite right.
Telling children how to behave may not work if the source of the difficulty is something that is off kilter in the child’s interior life. They will not have a way of communicating this to us, other than through their behaviour. They may not even be especially aware of what is going on.
If something is not quite right in the child’s inner world, Play Therapy can help with this. This is similar to what happens for adults: when you feel better and calmer, your perception changes: you feel differently, see things differently, you behave differently and you may suddenly come up with the ideas and solutions that you could not have come up with before, when you were not feeling so calm.
So it is with Play Therapy. We don’t work on the child’s outer world by telling them what to do. Play Therapists are not teachers who have a magical, special way of telling children to do things. Instead, we work with their inner world. Through play, we work with the child’s inner world and help them feel better on the inside.
When the child feels better in their inner world, they don’t feel the need to “do” the same kinds of behaviour anymore. Their behaviour changes because their inner world has changed. Then, they become receptive to instructions on the outside, if that is necessary.
