Services for Childen and Young People

Play has been recognized by philosophers over the span of time as a powerful agent of growth and change. Play relieves stress, enhances connections in relationships, stimulates creative expression and exploration, and helps us regulate our emotions. 

In play therapy the toys in the play room are the child’s words and the play itself is the child’s language. Play therapists are trained to understand the language of play. Play Therapists use play therapy in a strategic way to assist children in the process of expressing whatever may be bothering them through the play.

 Research shows that play therapy is indeed effective for children experiencing a wide range of challenges that range across the realm of social, emotional, and behavioural issues. Children facing life stressors and major transitions are able to heal, integrate and grow in the play room with a trained Play Therapist.

There are different approaches to play therapy from pure child centred play therapy which is non-directive to the other end of the spectrum in which therapist use very directive interventions with specific aims in session. Regardless of approach, all play therapy helps therapists to connect to the child through play-based activities and experience.

5 things to help parents understand how and why play therapy works: 

1. Play is the natural language for children through which they explore, express and experience. We are trained in knowing how to meet them there and speak their language so we can understand what is happening for them that they may otherwise not be able to express verbally

 2. Children act out what is bothering them metaphorically in their play. We know how to see these metaphors and we know how to facilitate experiences in the play room that help children naturally resolve what is bothering them.

3. Play therapy has been shown by research to be the most effective way to connect with children therapeutically and provide them a means to heal and grow.

4. Play is a natural stress reliever. When children get to play, they are able to release stress, and this helps them regulate their emotions.

5. Play is a way for children to bond and connect with others. Play IS the WAY children explore, experience and express naturally!

Sensory Attachment Intervention (SAI) is an integrative approach to the treatment of children and adults who have suffered abuse or severe neglect. Negative experiences in the womb and in early childhood impact on one's capacity to cope with stress throughout life. There is a tendency to either: flee and fight, freeze and dissociate, or fluctuate between these stress states when there is a hint or a reminder of traumatic events. Traumatised children and adults tend to operate in persistent fear mode. They maintain a state of hyper-vigilance. This impedes the capacity for filtering out "irrelevant" sensory experiences such as background sights and sounds. There is a tendency to be sensory defensive, as the sensory systems have become sensitised to the possibility of danger.

Children develop behavioural strategies early on in order to survive their attachment environment. The goal is to either maintain the attention, and regulate the response, of their attachment figures or to elicit their attention and approval. While these self protective strategies change in sophistication across the lifespan the basic functions of attachment do not (Crittenden 2015).

SAI recognises the need to target the areas of the brain that are the source of the dysfunction. The first requirement is to establish regulation of arousal states i.e. to shift from the Autonomic Nervous System bias of either freeze dissociation or flight fight responses (Schore 1994). It then focuses on facilitating modulation of the body senses through the just right combination of up regulating and down regulating experiences. This in turn enables higher level sensory, emotional and cognitive functioning.

SAI follows the neurological principle of use-dependent learning i.e. all parts of the brain can modify their functioning in response to specific patterns of activation. (Perry 2001) This is achieved through changing daily living routines in ways that are regulating. For example briskly washing and drying the skin is highly alerting and can inadvertently add to stress levels. In the case of children, the sensory and attachment patterns of Carers are also addressed, as attachment is a co-regulation process.

AutPlay Therapy was created by Dr. Robert Jason Grant and is a play therapy approach to. It combines the therapeutic powers of play therapy and relationship development approaches together in a collaborative model to assist children and adolescents in gaining needed skills and abilities.

 AutPlay Therapy is an integrative family play therapy approach incorporating a parent training component which values parents as co-change agents and teaches parents how to implement structured play times and structured play therapy interventions at home. Parents learn the procedures and techniques and are shown how to implement interventions at home to increase skill and ability levels in their child. AutPlay Therapy involves both the child and the parent in the therapeutic process and uses a play therapy base that is not only a natural language of the child but enables the parent to be involved with their child in a way that teaches skills and increases abilities within a positive and connecting process.

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AutPlay Therapy has Shown Effective Treatment Outcomes for the Following Areas:

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Increasing Emotional Regulation Ability

Improving Social Skills and Functioning

Improving Relationship Development and Connection

Reducing Anxiety Levels

Improving Sensory Processing Challenges

Increasing Concentration, Focus, and Attention

Improving the Parent/Child Relationship

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Creative Counselling combines talking therapies with creative interventions. As a model, Creative Counselling fundamentally respects a counsellors core training model (Integrative, Person-Centred, Psychodynamic, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy & Transactional Analysis) and compliments the core approach with Creative Interventions. When we work from a Creative Counselling approach, we prioritise our clients’ preferences placing them at the core of the work and meeting them where they are at through their own lens (photography), witnessing their story playing out (role play), and experiencing their world through their own words (poetry). We give expression, movement, a voice, a shape, a symbol, a metaphor and colour to a client’s experience bringing it to life in a way that often words alone can’t do.

Art therapy is an established form of psychotherapy, delivered by trained art therapists (also known as art psychotherapists).

Art therapy uses art as the primary mode of expression, alongside talking with an art therapist. It aims to reduce distress and improve social, emotional and mental health by promoting insight, self-compassion and a sense of agency and self-worth.

During art therapy, you are supported by an art therapist to use art to express and articulate often complex thoughts and feelings through art making. This may be following difficult or traumatic experiences which may be hard to talk about.

Who is art therapy suitable for?

Art therapy can help people of all ages and at all stages of life, including those whose life has been affected by difficult personal or cultural experiences, illness and/or disability. You do not need to be skilled in art to benefit from art therapy.

How is art therapy regulated?

In the UK, the title art therapist and art psychotherapist are protected by law. All UK art therapists must be state registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). All registered art therapists can be found on the HCPC’s register.

What is SMART?

• Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Treatment

• an innovative mental health therapy for children and adolescents for whom regulation of emotional and interpersonal life is a primary problem.

What does SMART do?

• utilizes an array of therapeutic equipment, such as weighted blankets, balance beams, fitness balls, mini trampolines, swings, large cushions, and shared play to support children’s natural ways of regulating their bodies and their emotions, facilitate attachment-building and allow for embodied processing of traumatic experiences.

• blends movement and relationship to regulate arousal states and powerful affect, thereby, engaging the subcortical, cortical, and attachment neural pathways to increase behavioural and psychological integration.

• widens the child’s window of tolerance for both positive and negative emotional states, and for interpersonal connection so that healthy development can proceed.

What makes SMART Different?

• does not rely on language and awareness as an entry point. A coherent narrative and cognitive understanding emerge as a result of fully embodied play engaging the sensory, motor, limbic, and arousal systems for self-exploration.

• engages the sensory motor systems, especially the vestibular, proprioceptive and tactile sensory systems for emotional, psychological, and relational regulation and repair.

• follows the child’s lead while tending to safety, uses full body participatory play with the child, to work with the unfolding process in real time in session as the path to developing new skills and processing traumatic experience.

The Safe and Sound Protocol is an evidence-based intensive listening programme aimed at those with anxiety, social communication difficulties and trauma that has been developed as a result of over four decades of peer reviewed research, based on Dr Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory. Music is played through over-ear headphones, which has been specially filtered in order to gradually expose the auditory system to different sound frequencies. It works by stimulating the facial and vagus nerves and helping the autonomic nervous system to regulate, improving concentration and social engagement. Safe and Sound Protocol is the only auditory intervention that directly retunes and regulates autonomic state, moving a person out of fight/flight/freeze and into a rest and digest/parasympathetic state. When faced with what the body perceives as threats or danger, it responds by re-tuning the nervous system into states of defense – either “fight or flight” (sympathetic) or “freeze” (dorsal vagal). The brain and body’s first priority is to keep us alive. When the nervous system remains in a chronic state of defense, it affects both the mind and body – impacting how we feel, think, and connect with others. This can adversely affect our health and day-to-day experience in the world. A proven solution is to look from the bottom up. In addition to acute, repetitive, complex and developmental trauma, the Safe and Sound Protocol has been proven to help the following difficulties and challenges:

Social and emotional difficulties

Auditory sensitivities

Auditory processing difficulties

Anxiety and trauma related challenges Inattention Stressors that impact social engagement