The Healing Power of Play Therapy from Jennifer Lefebre

Neuroscience of Trauma and Attachment

• Trauma & Attachment Theory
  • Regulatory processing, executive functioning, memory and language
• The Neuroscience of Play Therapy
  • What Play Does for You and Your Brain, and
  • What Happens to You if You Don’t Play
• Neuroscience and Fight-or-Flight
  • Parasympathetic / sympathetic nervous system
• Trauma and Stress Disorders
  • Classification, symptoms & labels
• Current Evidence-Based Treatment
  • Where are we stuck?

​​​A New Clinical Framework – Integrating Evidenced Based Treatment with Play Therapy

• Establishing safety and a sense of competence/worth
• Appropriate attachments & relational engagement
• Self-regulation (body & emotions)
• Self-reflection & Introspection
• Integration of Traumatic Experiences
• (Acknowledgment & Processing of the trauma)
• Future safety
• Transitioning beyond the Trauma

Advancing Trauma Treatment with Play Therapy

• Verbal vs Nonverbal responses
  • How to recognize trauma without a verbal report
• Bottom-up versus Top-down processing
  • Embodied play & sensory integration rather than verbal strategies
• Non-directive versus directive play therapy techniques – How to integrate both
  • Widen the window of tolerance through up-regulating and down-regulating using embodied therapy activities

Play Therapy Activities

• Psychoeducation of brain-body relationship
  • Charades
  • Flip your Lid
• Target shame, self-doubt, and self-compassion
  • Safe place sandtrays
  • Drawings
  • All About Me
• Integrate traumatic experiences to acknowledge and process the trauma
  • Narrative work through sandtrays
  • Drawings
  • Dramatic play
• Target the parent-child relationship – Interpersonal reactivity and social skills
  • Weather Massage
  • Invisible String
  • Family Sandtrays
  • Drawings
• Improve emotional and bodily regulation
  • Be Spaghetti
  • Trashballs
  • Oobleck
  • Feelings Maps
  • Yoga
  • Floor is Lava & more!