Using Play Therapy to Heal from Trauma
​         A Play Therapy Relationship for Practitioners (Level 2) course.

Course Date:  Refer to Calendar page.
​ Normal Fee: $980. Funding details available at the Funding page.

​Course Overview

The impact of both exposure to trauma and insecure attachment is now well understood to have a key role in most of the presenting problems for our child clients.  As play therapists, we need a framework to help children move from being either avoidant of these experiences or "stuck" in post-traumatic play. This two-day training builds on foundational play therapy skills to understand the impact of trauma and how to help children digest trauma and difficult experiences to reduce their reactivity. Participants will learn creative interventions as well as how to use the themes and metaphors of the child's play to gradually approach and process traumatic material.
The workshop will review in depth the work of leading play therapists such as Paris Goodyear-Brown and Eliana Gil. A core component of this training is understanding attachment wounds and how to utilize attachment-based activities and behaviors. You will also learn over 20 soothing interventions to manage dissociation and hyper-arousal.

​Upon course completion, participants will be able to:
  • Compare how kids are “stuck” in post-traumatic play to developmentally expected play.
  • Apply a phase model for trauma-informed play therapy to a current case.
  • Demonstrate in a practice session their mastery of a play- therapy based approach to assessing for trauma history.
  • Analyze the themes of a child client’s play to amplify and suggest metaphors to gradually approach traumatic material.
  • Explain the steps to follow in helping children construct a trauma narrative to digest the trauma fully in a play therapy setting.
  • Apply the principles of therapeutic storytelling (Mills, 2014) to a current case.
  • Practice 20 play-based soothing tools to manage dissociation and hyperarousal in and out of session.
  • Explain the mechanism of disrupted attachment and choose helpful attachment-promoting play therapy for children and their parents
 
This 2-days hands-on clinical skills development workshop uses lecture, experiential exercises and scripted interventions that will be practiced in the workshop.


​Workshop Trainer

This workshop is presented by Ms Ann Beckley-Forest. Ann is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in private practice in the Buffalo, New York area, and has focused on interventions with children and adolescents throughout her career.  She received her master’s degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1996. Ann is a registered play therapy supervisor and approved provider of play therapy education through the Association for Play Therapy and vice-president of the New York chapter of APT. Ann’s clinical specialties include intervention with very young children, adoption, problems of attachment and trauma work with adolescent and adult survivors of trauma. She is currently enrolled in the Foundation practicum for Theraplay through the Theraplay Institute.

Ann is certified in EMDR, an EMDR Approved Consultant and a faculty member of the Child Trauma Institute. She published an article on the integration of EMDR and play therapy in the fall 2015 issue of Play Therapy magazine and has offered professional trainings in play therapy and trauma treatment around the US, in China at the Sixth Hospital of Peking University, and in Singapore.  Most recently she co-presented with Annie Monaco and Paris Good-year-Brown a full day pre-conference workshop for the 2018 EMDRIA international conference in Atlanta on the topic: EMDR and Play Therapy: A Powerful Combination.  Ann is active in EMDRIA at the national level as the national Training Chair for the Child and Adolescent Special Interest Group of EMDRIA.


Target Audience

This workshop is designed for any mental health professionals (or graduate level students) working with children, adolescents and adults. This can include social workers, psychologists, counselors, school counselors and any other counseling disciplines. This is a hands-on clinical skills training for working with clients who have been exposed to significant trauma or loss.

Duration
2 days (9 - 4.30 pm)

Workshop Topics:

Day 1
 
Module 1:                    Trauma 101, ACE study
                                    Meaning of Behavior, Attachment priniciples
 
Module 2:                  Phases of trauma treatment
                                    Goodyear-Brown’s phase model
                                    Parents as allies
                                                           
Module 3:                  Assessment phase –Magic bowl and rainbow lights (worst things/best things), with practice
                                                           
Module 4:                  Play interventions for emotional literacy and self-regulation
 
 
Day2
 
Module 1:                    Digesting the Trauma
                                     Continuum of exposure (Gomez), CCPT
 
Module 2:                   Child-responsive play therapy and seizing the moment
                                     Eliana Gil (metaphors) practice and discussion
                                                           
Module 3:                  Implicit to explicit, narrative work, integration with other leading trauma treatments
                                                           
Module 4:                   Joyce Mills’ StoryPlay
                                     Working groups and a case consultation, writing a metaphor story for own case