play therapy

Play therapy is a way in when kids clam up, and a way out when kids feel stuck.

We can use therapeutic play to teach skills, tell important stories, encourage sharing feelings, and help kids manage their wishes and worries.

My job is to help kids find their voice and settle into their bodies in ways that feel better—often this includes more regulation and coping skills, fewer fears, and more capacity for connection.

Play is how kids show us their perspective and make meaning of their world.

Your child needs your support to change how they’re showing up and trying to get their needs met. While their current strategies may be clumsy or frustrating, they’re likely working with coping skills that were adaptive at some point. They’ve just outgrown these old strategies and need help building new ones. Let’s work together to cultivate tools that are much more effective!

You’ll often be invited into our play sessions, exploring new ways to communicate and collaborate with your child. You’ll get a glimpse of how we can co-regulate with kids, helping them seek and amplify connection—with you and with themselves—whether in the playroom or via video sessions.

Some concerns I help with…

• tantrums + aggression

• grief + loss

• separation anxiety

• school + social challenges

• communication delays + selective mutism

• sleep + bedtime upsets

• feeding + toileting

• sensory sensitivities

• lying + stealing

With kids under 10, talk therapy is not likely the way in. Play therapy lets us engage at different and deeper levels.

1) Physical stress + regulation are eased at the brainstem level.

When big behaviors show up in young kids, we have to get curious, first, about what’s happening in their bodies—since so much of early development and how they make sense of the world happens pre-verbally (before they start talking).

Working with animals, dolls, sensory activities, music, movement, art, LEGOs, and other non-verbal tools, we empower children to communicate emotions, experience, and how they see their world. When we join them in play, we can start to ease patterns that feel stuck or no longer effective in getting their needs met. We can model new strategies for handling overwhelm and build their capacity to regulate—by combining verbal and non-verbal tools for communication.

After all, play is their first language. Part of my job is to be fluent in how they communicate, so I can help you decode what their behavior is saying.

2) When loss and conflict happen in relationships, healing happens in relationship.

Our best bet for soothing upsets and easing stuck spots is intervention at the same level where a past trauma or loss occurred. We can access relationships + emotional expression through games, books, puppets, family therapy, and dramatic play—all ways to engage the social-emotional brain.

3) We access logic + language in the cortical (thinking) brain.

I’ll teach you and your child practical skills, flexible problem-solving, tools for talking about worries, and build on your strengths with parent coaching, so you can bridge what we’re doing in play sessions to shifting dynamics in everyday life.

We feel safe when we feel connected.

Feeling safe helps us trust that our needs will be met. We'll work on every level, soothing their brain from the bottom up, raising their resilience from the inside out. We’ll set goals together and create a tailored plan for supporting your family’s needs.