Play therapy is specially designed for children between 3-11 years. For every child, play comes naturally and is an important part of his/her development.
Play therapy techniques provide a way to express the feelings and experiences through a natural, self-guided and self-healing process.
Play therapy allows the person to act out true but with repressed feelings without being judged.
Play therapy permits a kid or adult to get touch their feelings and relieve themselves from negative feelings.
The therapy is very beneficial with the children who undergo physical or sexual abuse, domestic violence or who feel difficult to form and maintain a relationship with others.
The technique uses role playing, play therapy toys, dolls and puppets to communicate what is happening to them and how they feel to these events in their lives.
One of the common play therapy techniques that most of the experts use is asking the children to draw a picture of their family. The position, sizes, attributes, and colors reveal various feelings and emotions and also the events that the child wants to not to reveal.
For instance, the child of an involved alcoholic doesn’t want to discuss the drinking of a parent, but they focus huge bottles with smaller images of their alcoholic parent while drawing.
Play therapy to treat an autistic child:
- The therapist uses exploratory and manipulative play to interact with autistic children and observes how they interact with the objects and the environment around them.
- To develop motor skills in an autistic child, engage him/her in tumbling and physical activity. Physical activity shows how the children react to the objects and interact with others.
- Use social play and role play to mimic the real life situations. Autistic children can learn a lot from the world around them by experiencing the manner people interact in various relations, such as student and teacher, customer and cashier.
- Choose the bright colored toys for autistic children that have various shapes and textures. Improve the physical activity with games, swings and slides that need interaction.
- Include the children in functional play, where a child can offer suitable reactions and sound effects for the toy.
Benefits of play therapy to adults:
Play therapy techniques allow both the adults and children in making bonding with others and to form healthy relationships for those who have experienced serious dysfunctional interactions.
When an adult is exposed to play therapy, he/she can gain access to the inner child.
Most often, unhealthy feelings and emotional repression are formed during the childhood and adults find out to ignore exterior presentation of these disturbing traumas.
Play therapy when used for adults, they can realize and act out to the negative feelings and can make a decision to become happy and healthy individuals.
