——————————————————————————————————————————————————

If you’re a child therapist using play therapy or play-based approaches, you have no doubt resonated with Garry Landreth’s famously quoted phrase – “Toys are children’s words and play is their language”. It has likely been instilled in your training, and you hold firmly to this anchor in your practice.

But at what cost?

What potential does the child miss out on if we don’t feel competent and confident to work with a child’s verbalisations in therapy?

Children communicate in many ways – through their play, behaviour, body, and patterns of relating.

And of course….Kids talk too!

They have valuable insights into their own experiences they are capable of speaking about.

They strive to make meaning of their experiences and communicate this through narrative.

They seek understanding and ask questions. 

If we don’t give children permission talk in play therapy, we deny them these opportunities. And most alarmingly, we risk not communicating to the child an explicit message they can tell us if they are not, or do not feel safe, becoming unintentionally complicit in the secrecy that often characterises abuse and family violence.

Over the latter part of 2025 and throughout 2026, we will be running a series of workshops designed to equip child and play therapists with essential foundational verbal counselling skills across 4 evidence-based therapy modalities:

• Humanistic Therapy
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Our goal is to support you to integrate developmentally appropriate verbal counselling techniques seamlessly with your play-based interventions so you can effectively respond to the child’s need for this when it arises in sessions.

This workshop (Workshop 1), will focus on general and Humanistic verbal counselling skills for children.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

•  Create a therapeutic context that explicitly communicates to children permission to talk in therapy
•  Describe the principles and indicators for using verbal counselling in the context of play therapy and play-based children’s counselling
•  Use the foundational Humanistic verbal counselling skills with children
•  Increased confidence responding to disclosures and safeguarding concerns
•  Seamlessly integrate Humanistic verbal counselling techniques within the play therapy process

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

This workshop is essential for play therapists and other child therapists from various professional backgrounds (e.g. psychologists, social workers, counsellors, MHAOTs etc.). Supervisors will also benefit as the workshop offers a helpful process for supporting supervisees in this area of their work.