Child Therapy

Every now and then, it helps a child to have a special place to play and create when things are hard.

Children and young people often show their distress in their outward behaviour.  Sometimes they don’t feel ready to talk or are too young to talk about their experiences.  By offering a variety of play and creative art materials in a safe therapeutic environment in which the child is “contained”, the therapist is able to help the child/young person to connect with their emotional experiences that they struggle with.

Play Therapy is a structured, theoretically based approach to therapy whereby the child's natural means of expression, play, is used as a therapeutic method to assist him/her in coping with emotional stress or difficult behaviours.  Using play, rather than relying on ‘talk’ allows the child to make connections to their world though play because it is their natural language of communication.  This approach can be adapted to work with children from the age of 3.5 years through to older adolescents.  Older children can express in the same what, but may feel that drawing, sand trays and clay are more suitable than actual play.

Child therapy can help the child to regress and repair development milestones that might have been missed or express painful experiences that they haven’t been able to talk about before.  Hence, it can help with brain development or to help children to find supressed emotions.

The therapy is non-judgemental and accepting, allowing the child to safely explore traumas or emotions that they may otherwise not be able to be put into words. It doesn’t matter about creative ability as this isn’t a requisite of the therapy.