Counselling children through Play Therapy – what happens

Changing children’s behaviour happens through the experience of Play Therapy.

At Perth Children’s Counselling, Play Therapy provides therapeutic experiences which enable children to develop the capacity to self-regulate emotions, tolerate uncomfortable feelings and feel better about themselves.  They develop the capacity to work out their own strategies and solutions to problems.  Because the medium of counselling is play and toys, it is an active, engaging and absorbing experience for children, rather than a passive experience of being taught skills and behaviours.

In Play Therapy, the child expresses their thoughts and feelings through play, action and their relationship with the therapist.  The safety of the therapeutic experience allow children’s thoughts and feelings to emerge, rather than stay bottled up inside the child’s interior world.  This movement within the child’s inner world is integral to the process of how healing occurs through Play Therapy.  When a child’s interior world becomes more fluid and mobile through therapeutic self-expression, the child becomes ready for change.

Time and time again, therapists see how children become able to access the potential that lies within them.  Children access their inborn capacity to grow and develop in a way that is is functional and pro-social.  Because learning is child-led rather than directed by the adult, behaviour change through Play Therapy tends to be stable.

More than that, at Perth Children’s Counselling, we have seen children develop and flourish in ways that were not planned for – this is the joy, beauty and excitement that lies within Play Therapy.  Difficulties recede and parents begin to say things like “She’s like a different child!” and “I’ve got my little boy back again!”

 

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