Clair Mellenthin – Attachment Centered Play Therapy

You can watch me in this interactive recording and learn more about an integrative therapy approach. Attachment Centered Play Therapy This includes parents as well.

Clair Mellenthin – Attachment Centered Play Therapy

Family Treatment: Advancing Play Therapy

• Here are 4 key concepts to attachment
• Play therapy and attachment theory can be combined
• Attachment Patterns across life and their impact on the parent-child relationship
• Limitations and risks

Invite Parents Play

• Engaging strategies to strengthen the parent-child relationship
  • Roadblocks and triggers – parent/child/therapist
  • Shame and vulnerability – shame shields
  • Make a rappaport to make it possible for parents to play in the playroom
    • Sand tray, genograms and play-Based treatment planning
  • Set boundaries and expectations
  • Encourage participation

Attachment Centered Play Therapy Strategies

• Relational trauma treatment – Attachment, wounding and rupturing
  • Relationship between parent and child
  • Generational attachment patterns –
    • You can catch me if possible
    • Butterfly fly away
    • Two hands
    • Empowerment collage

Healing through Case Studies of Abuse Attachment Wounds

Challenging Emotional & Behavioral Disorders

• ODD, Defiance, Moodiness, Anger, Aggression, and School Refusal
• Attachment Injuries are the root cause of unattractive behavior
• Prescriptive playtherapy interventions
• Self-Coregulation-Regulating
• Guided imagery, calm down the jars

Study of School Refusal and Extreme Defiance

Positive Strategies Attachment-Based Parenting

• Maximize parental involvement to repair and rebuild trust
• Reactive parenting vs proactive parenting
• Buy in your parent

Case Study: Proactive vs. Reactive Parenting

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Description:

A child who is traumatized, grieving, or loses a parent can feel unsafe, disloved, or not loved. This can cause relational injury, and sometimes even break the attachment bond. Children, not having the words to express how they feel, display the hurt in maladaptive ways — aggression, rage, defiance, oppositional behaviors, shutting down, hiding away, or numbing. Shame is a factor for the parent. Shame that they can’t “parent away” the hurt and the misbehavior—that their love isn’t “good enough”.

How do we as therapists, help families begin repairing and rebuilding the lost connection/disruption?

You can watch me in this interactive recording and learn more about an integrative therapy approach. Attachment Centered Play Therapy Parents are also included in therapy. Parental involvement is crucial in creating trustworthiness and security to address attachment wounds, trauma and grief.

This client is developmentally-appropriate-The centered approach brings about a holistic and systemic approach to solving problems:

• Vulnerability: To acknowledge the hurt, and the roadblocks
• The challenges of shame, vulnerability grief, loss and despair
• Aggression, defiance, and other maladaptive behavior issues
• Attachment Instead of reacting or reacting, adopt proactive, centered strategies
• Strengthening the attachment bonds between parent and child
• Parents are a resource as well as a coregulator of their child’s education.
• The most important aspect of family and child therapy is the building of rapport with parents.

You’ll learn new and innovative attachment-centered play therapy techniques including hands on experiential activities, guided imagery, sand tray interventions, and expressive arts—practicing sand tray therapy, techniques assessing family relationships, bonds of attachment, and family dynamics.

We will discuss difficult cases, ask questions and develop new assessment skills. We also explore attachment styles and how they play out in therapeutic relationships with clients.

Here’s what you’ll get in Clair Mellenthin – Attachment Centered Play Therapy