Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults

Moving from Helping to Healing

Denis' A. Thomas, Melanie H. Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429830273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

This practical, user-friendly manual shows mental health professionals how to implement play therapy with adolescents and adults and how to conceptualize client struggles using a wealth of creative approaches.

Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults follows an accessible seven-stage process for professionals to address clients' core needs and establish an empathic therapeutic relationship. The book charts the stages of play therapy and explores a range of expressive arts including art, drama, dance, writing and sand play and the key materials needed for each. It also considers additional aspects of play therapy including resistance, spirituality and self-care. Filled with techniques, skills and case studies to help demystify complex client work, the book outlines an easy-to-follow treatment protocol for healing and resolution.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of mental health professionals working with adults and adolescents as it encourages a more creative career and lasting, tangible progress in clients.

Part I

Creative Play Therapy and Core Needs

Creative Play Therapy is an adaptation of play therapy for older clients. With children, the therapist provides a playroom with carefully selected toys to facilitate nurturing, aggressive, real life and creative expression (Landreth, 2012), but with Creative Play Therapy, the therapist expands the creative category of “toys” (perhaps with a more professional grade of materials) to provide expressive arts tools for all forms of expression from an adult perspective. The creative expression is supplemented with talk therapy, not the other way around. Then, the therapist facilitates the stages of Creative Play Therapy while uncovering core needs, considering those needs within the context of development, taking into account any trauma during development along with current developmental stages.

This section will set the context for Creative Play Therapy, explain seven kinds of expressive arts and the basic materials needed, discuss how to use traditional talk therapy to supplement creative work, describe core needs and how to identify them, and review developmental models. These are the five areas of knowledge that inform the Creative Play Therapy: play therapy, expressive arts, talk therapy, core needs and development. See Figure 0.1.

Figure 0.1 Knowledge Blocks That Inform Creative Play Therapy

References

Landreth, G. L. (2012). Play therapy: The art of the relationship (3rd ed.) New York: Routledge.

1

What Is Creative Play Therapy?

People of all ages benefit from safe, accepting environments to risk expressing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Breen & Daigneault, 1998). Although play therapy has traditionally been a treatment for children, it can also be effective with adolescents and adults. In Creative Play Therapy, we use expressive arts instead of toys, add prompts strategically during some stages of the process, and focus the therapeutic work on core needs. While still grounded in client-centered theory, it is, at times, more directive. This chapter will provide an overview.

Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults

Play therapy works with adolescents, especially when expressive arts replace more juvenile toys. For adolescents who may have limited experiences of empathy or disrupted early relationships, play therapy provides an opportunity to experience a secure, close relationship through a therapeutic alliance characterized by empathy, not being judged and permissiveness (Green et al., 2013). Adolescents naturally gravitate toward expressive arts seeking self-expression, turning to arts-based methods of coping, such as reaching for a journal, playing a musical instrument, or painting (Perryman et al., 2015). Like child play therapy, play therapy with adolescents incorporates natural forms of expression that are developmentally appropriate.

Adolescents internalize safety and security through the psychologically safe therapeutic relationship as they express raw, honest emotions directly or symbolically without judgment or being asked to change parts of themselves that others may see as unacceptable or undesirable (Green et al., 2013). They respond well to play therapy as they develop self-awareness and individual identity, but adolescent play is based more in reality than fantasy and is characterized by logic, rules, and structure (Breen & Daigneault, 1998). Understanding this desire for logic, rules and structure, Creative Play Therapy incorporates prompts to help build trust and safety.

Play therapy can be an effective treatment for adults who experienced early childhood trauma by addressing fundamental core developmental deficits (Olson-Morrison, 2017). It also has been used to work with child alter personalities, in clients with multiple personality disorder, now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (Klein & Landreth, 1993), and adults with developmental disabilities (Demanchick et al., 2003). But play therapy can also be used with the general adult population. Greenwald (1967) even advocated for play therapy for clients over 21 more than 50 years ago.

While rigorous research studies provide evidence of large beneficial effects from a variety of psychotherapies that work with children, adults and older adults (APA, 2012), not all who seek services are finding these benefits. Among adults who received some type of mental health service in the previous year, 5.9 million (nearly 20%) reported an unmet need for mental health care according to the American Counseling Association (ACA, 2011). That means that millions of people who are accessing services are not finding relief. They need something more; something that goes deeper; something that heals.

The cost of not helping those with mental illness is staggering. In the United States alone, the estimated cost is $63 billion in lost productivity, $12 billion in mortality costs, and $4 billion in in productivity costs for those who are incarcerated and those who provide family care – for a grand total cost of a whopping $79 billion per year (ACA, 2011). Traditional talk therapy has helped many people, but only using a verbal approach misses the opportunity to provide treatment using both hemispheres of the brain, one that physiologically facilitates healing and generates new neuron growth.

The Definition of Play Therapy

Natural play serves six important purposes: fun, symbolic expression, catharsis, social development, mastery, and releasing energy (Ray, 2011). When natural play is combined with therapeutic objectives, it is often called play therapy, but credentialed play therapists would argue that adding toys or playful activities to therapy does not necessarily mean that it is play therapy.

Play Therapy is defined by the Association for Play Therapy as, ‘the systematic use of a theoretical model to establish an interpersonal process wherein trained Play Therapists use the therapeutic powers of play to help clients prevent or resolve psychosocial difficulties and achieve optimal growth and development.’

www.a4pt.org

The Association for Play Therapy, a professional organization with more than 7,100 members (APT, 2019b) defines play therapy with the following criteria (APT, 2019a):

1. Play therapy is systematic.
2. It follows a theoretical model.
3. The theory establishes an interpersonal process.
4. Trained play therapists use the therapeutic powers of play.
5. The goal is to help clients prevent or resolve psychosocial difficulties and achieve optimal growth and development.

What is notably missing from the definition of play therapy (APT, 2019a) is that it is only applicable to work with children. Although mostly used for children, the benefits of this treatment modality go well beyond the limits of age. However, it is a systematic approach that includes four elements: a theoretical model, an interpersonal process, therapeutic powers of play, and optimal growth and development. Creative Play Therapy meets these four criteria. NOTE: You may not align exactly with the systematic approach outlined below, and that is fine. Be authentic to your own training and beliefs.

• Theoretical Model. Theory provides a broad conceptual framework, a consistent system to view, assess and communicate with clients (Peabody & Schaefer, 2016). Creative Play Therapy is based upon the client-centered approach developed by Carl Rogers, but we encourage practitioners to expand from there. Philosophically, this means that we are oriented to believe the following, which is client-centered theory filtered through the Creative Play Therapy treatment modality:
  • Clients have inherent growth potential, and they are autonomous and direct their process (but with scaffolding from the therapist).
  • The environment is permissive for freedom and responsibility.
  • Reflective listening is THE technique, but we supplement it with skills, education and professional intuition.
  • Through this theoretical lens, the focus is on the present with an understanding that the present is shaped by the past and leads to the future.
  • Feelings occur before thoughts and behavior, often below awareness. However, thoughts can influence feelings (and vice versa), and both precede behavior, so by changing them, you change behaviors.
  • Finally, we are strongly shaped, but not determined by our culture.
• Interpersonal Process. The relationship between the therapist and client is seen as critically important t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• A Letter from the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Overview of the Field of Play Therapy
• Part I: Creative Play Therapy and Core Needs
• Part II: Stages of Creative Play Therapy
• Part III: Additional Aspects of Creative Play Therapy
• Index