Play therapy training
Sep. 30th, 2011 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahkaOn September 30th, I went to Mankato State Universty for full day training on play therapy. The event was called From Assessment to Termination: Empirically-informed Play Therapy Techniques by Sueann Kenney-Noziska, MSW, LISW, LCSW, RPT-S.
I was very excited about this opportunity. I am still in the process of figuring out my focus of work as a mental health therapist and I remember that during my internship I worked with kids 3-11 and their parents and really enjoyed that type of work. Those sessions were not dreadful and scary. At that time I had limited training in play therapy. I read a lot of books and did what made sense to me using the resources of playroom and even my creativity.
I’ve become a member of Association for Play Therapy and started to read their journal and follow up on their list-serve. That is how I got the information about this training.
Sueann is a wonderful presenter who gave us a lot of tools to use with kids from icebreakers to get to know each other and develop a trusting relationship with kids to activities that would help work on the issues to the termination and evaluation of the session. I really liked her structured games.
The kids that I saw during my internship lived in abusive families, divorced families or families that had an unhealthy relationships. It was traumatic but not as much as Sueann presented to us of clients that she has been working with. It is difficult to admit that there are children who live through horrible events such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, catastrophes, natural disasters, losses, etc.
I was traumatized myself from listening to these horrible stories. Never the less, Sueann gave hope that these events could be processed, worked over, kids with therapist must define what is true and what is not, what had changed in their lives after the event, what was bad and what is good still left, what do they feel like at the beginning of the therapy and what do they feel like after the therapy is getting to the end, how to sort out the problems and rate them as huge or small problems and life should not be going down the hill but instead give these children the power to go forward with their lives.
She presented to us 20 interventions with very important notes and explanations based on her work experience. Each intervention is super valuable. Some of these are in her book Techniques-Techniques-
I was very excited about this opportunity. I am still in the process of figuring out my focus of work as a mental health therapist and I remember that during my internship I worked with kids 3-11 and their parents and really enjoyed that type of work. Those sessions were not dreadful and scary. At that time I had limited training in play therapy. I read a lot of books and did what made sense to me using the resources of playroom and even my creativity.
I’ve become a member of Association for Play Therapy and started to read their journal and follow up on their list-serve. That is how I got the information about this training.
Sueann is a wonderful presenter who gave us a lot of tools to use with kids from icebreakers to get to know each other and develop a trusting relationship with kids to activities that would help work on the issues to the termination and evaluation of the session. I really liked her structured games.
The kids that I saw during my internship lived in abusive families, divorced families or families that had an unhealthy relationships. It was traumatic but not as much as Sueann presented to us of clients that she has been working with. It is difficult to admit that there are children who live through horrible events such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, catastrophes, natural disasters, losses, etc.
I was traumatized myself from listening to these horrible stories. Never the less, Sueann gave hope that these events could be processed, worked over, kids with therapist must define what is true and what is not, what had changed in their lives after the event, what was bad and what is good still left, what do they feel like at the beginning of the therapy and what do they feel like after the therapy is getting to the end, how to sort out the problems and rate them as huge or small problems and life should not be going down the hill but instead give these children the power to go forward with their lives.
She presented to us 20 interventions with very important notes and explanations based on her work experience. Each intervention is super valuable. Some of these are in her book Techniques-Techniques-
