Play Therapy is an intervention to help children/young people decrease their emotional and behavioural difficulties, assist with adult-child relationships and helps develop impulse control/ self –regulation.

Play therapy can facilitate the child/young person to revisit developmental stages, play out hidden, primitive feelings and enable a corrective emotional experience which approximates to what should have occurred in their formative years.

Play therapy can help with issues of abuse, neglect, trauma, stress, hyper-arousal, attachments/relationship difficulties, missed developmental stages, bereavement, loss, multiple moves, identity, sense of self/ self-worth, confusion, guilt, anxiety, behaviour issues.

Children/young people may learn to self-regulate, manage frustration, develop empathy, process stressful experiences and learn social skills.

Play therapy is particularly appropriate for children whose experiences they cannot express in language but can use play/expressive medium to formulate and assimilate their experience or whose trauma/memories are sensory and cannot be expressed verbally.

Relationship building sessions also assist with the above and also use non-verbal communication but may be more directive.