Gestalt Play Therapy

 

What is Play Therapy?

 

Play Therapy helps children understand

muddled feelings and upsetting events that they

haven’t had the chance to sort out properly.

Rather that having to explain what is troubling

them, as adult therapy usually expects, children

use play to communicate at their own level and at

their own pace, without feeling interrogated

or threatened.

Play Therapy is an effective therapy that helps

children modify their behaviours, clarify their

self-concept and build healthy relationships.

In Play Therapy, children enter into a dynamic

relationship with the therapist that enables them to express, explore, and make sense of their difficult and painful experiences. Play therapy helps children find healthier ways of communicating, to develop fulfilling relationships, to increase resiliency and facilitate emotional literacy.

 

Children use play as a form of communication. So often children referred to Play Therapy, lacks the vocabulary to describe their thoughts, feelings and perceptions of their internal and external world.
 
Since the 1920’s, play has been used in psychotherapy to help children express themselves.

 

When to refer a child for Play Therapy?

 

Difficult family lives, domestic violence, matrimonial discord, sexual, physical and emotional abuse can have a detrimental impact on a child’s development. Children also hold important information that can assist the court in making an informed decision about if a child should be placed back with his parent or if one of the parents does not have the capacity to meet the child’s needs. Andre helps the child to tell his/her story in a safe environment and become the voice of the child when the child feels overwhelmed by his/her family conflicts and supports the court in making a decision in the best interest of the child.
 
Children also need to make sense of their developing and changing worlds and Andre helps children through Play Therapy to integrate and assimilate their experiences and empower children to achieve a sense of self-mastering. Andre also helps children to reflect and develop healthy relationships with their parents and family members when the child has muddled and confused feelings following an acrimonious divorce of his/her parents.

 

Children can display all sorts of symptoms and Andre has years of experience working in CAMHS (NHS) helping children to overcome difficulties and to develop healthy strategies. Children may be anxious, have difficulties sleeping, refuse to go to school, bed-wetting, aggression, depression, or developing obsessive-compulsive disorders to try to manage their confusing worlds. Andre works in conjunction with parents/foster carers, local authorities and courts to help the child to develop healthy relationships.

Gestalt Play Therapy helps children in a variety of ways. Children receive emotional support and can learn to understand more about their own feelings and thoughts. Sometimes they may re-enact or play out traumatic or difficult life experiences in order to make sense of their past and cope better with their future. Children may also learn to manage relationships and conflicts in more appropriate ways.

 

The outcome of Gestalt Play Therapy may be general e.g. a reduction in anxiety and raised self-esteem, or more specific such as a change in behaviour and improved relationships with family and friends.

 

What will happen in the child’s Play Therapy?

 

The child’s Play Therapy will have a large selection of play materials from which the child may choose. These may include art and craft materials, dressing up props, sand and water, clay, small figures and animals, musical instruments, puppets and books. Andre will enable the child to use these resources to express him or herself and would gently lead the child to become dialogical.

 

What does a Gestalt Play Therapist do?

 

André holds a Clinical Masters Degree in Gestalt Play Therapy. Gestalt Play Therapists are mostly trainined within South Africa under the guidance of Dr Hannie Schoeman who had intensive training with Dr Violet Oaklander in Amerika. Gestalt Play Therapists are either Clinical Social Workers (South African Trained)  or Clinical Psychologists and have received an extensive and clinical training in subjects such as child development, attachment, psychology and sociology as well as the legal procedures in helping children through the court process. They are also trained to use play, a child’s natural form of expression, as a means for understanding and communicating with children about feelings, thoughts and behaviour.
 
A Gestalt Play Therapist will begin by carefully listening to everyone’s concerns about the child and family. They will review their history and find out about the stresses the family have been through so that they can help the child make sense of it. The Gestalt Play Therapists may ask to seek information from school and other significant adults in their lives. An assessment is made of the child’s strengths as well as their difficulties. André follows an evidence based process of working with children and adolescnets by making use of the Schoeman model. This process take into account the following: (1) Building a relationship with a child/adolescent. This process is a delicate and sensitively crafted process that allows the child/adolescent to feel safe to start telling their story or playing out their unfinished issue. (2) Sensonry awareness. Gestalt Therapy heightens senses in order for emotional unfinished issues to become aware. André does this through many different approaches, such as creating focus on breathing, muscle tension, body movements, heightening of smell, touch, sight, hearing and intuition, mindfulness, fantasy trips and hypnotic states and deepening states through hypnotic deepening strategies. (3) Helping the child/adolescent to make a projection through play or if the child/adolescent or adult for that matter does not want to play, the principles of Gestalt Psychology is used to help heighten awareness of the here and now and to become dialogical with the unfinished issues that present in the room. (4) This leads to negotian and finding an alternative narrative, story or outcome. This process goes hand in hand with the use of Systemic and behavioural techniques within a Gestalt Framework. (5) This leads to a process of self-nurturing, which in the Gestalt Psychology language means the connection with feelings that have just come to the emotional foreground. Self-nurturing paradoxically means that we own up to those parts we have denied for so long, those parts of who we are that we tried to push away or hide from the world. A Gestalt Play Therapy sesison always end with suggestions of how to be kind to oneself untill Andre sees the child again.