Adolescents are often resistant, hostile, moody, and difficult, but they can also be fascinating, creative, spontaneous, and passionate. How do mental health professionals get past the facade? Play Therapy with Adolescents is the first book to offer a complete variety of play therapy approaches specifically geared toward adolescents. The chapters, written by experts in the field, offer readers entry into the world of adolescents, showing how to make connections and alliances.

This practical, user-friendly manual shows mental health professionals how to implement play therapy with adolescents and adults and how to conceptualize client struggles using a wealth of creative approaches. Creative Play Therapy with Adolescents and Adults follows an accessible seven-stage process for professionals to address clients’ core needs and establish an empathic therapeutic relationship. The book charts the stages of play therapy and explores a range of expressive arts including art, drama, dance, writing and sand play and the key materials needed for each. It also considers additional aspects of play therapy including resistance, spirituality and self-care. Filled with techniques, skills and case studies to help demystify complex client work, the book outlines an easy-to-follow treatment protocol for healing and resolution. This book will be of interest to a wide range of mental health professionals working with adults and adolescents as it encourages a more creative career and lasting, tangible progress in clients.

Interventions and approaches from the expressive arts and play therapy disciplines Integrating Expressive Arts and Play Therapy With Children and Adolescents presents techniques and approaches from the expressive and play therapy disciplines that enable child and adolescent clinicians to augment their therapeutic toolkit within a competent, research-based practice. With contributions representing a "who's who" in the play therapy and expressive arts therapy worlds, Integrating Expressive Arts and Play Therapy With Children and Adolescents is the definitive bridge between expressive arts and play therapy complementarily utilized with children and adolescents in their healing and creative capacities.

Structured Play-Based Interventions for Engaging Children and Adolescents in Therapy is a compilation of playful interventions for use by mental health professionals treating children and adolescents with emotional or behavioral problems.

Attachment-Focused Family Play Therapy presents an essential roadmap for therapists working with traumatized youth. Exploring trauma and attachment through a neurobiological focus, the book lays out a flexible framework for practitioners treating young clients within the context of their family relationships. Chapters demonstrate how techniques of play and expressive therapy can be integrated into work with different developmental stages, while providing the tools needed to fully incorporate the family into the healing process. The book also provides clinical examples and guidance on the ethical decision-making needed to effectively implement attachment work and facilitate positive change. Written in an accessible style, Attachment-Focused Family Play Therapy is an important resource for mental health professionals who work with traumatized children, adolescents, and adults.

This book addresses the challenges faced when children who refuse to talk, children who lack psychological mindedness, teens who experience a strong aversion to the influence of any adult, and children and teens who mask their woundedness by hostility or diffidence show up for therapy. This book does not push one therapeutical or theoretical approach over another but specifically describes useful tools that can be utilized within a wide range of approaches.

Play Therapy with Preteens presents integrative models of play therapy that incorporate expressive arts and evidence-informed interventions into working with preadolescents. The current research demonstrates treatment efficacy in incorporating creative, dynamic interventions into work with preadolescents and their families. This unique book is written specifically on play therapy with preadolescents, presenting a comprehensive yet practical approach that integrates expressive arts like music, movement, play, sand, and poetry into treatment, along with familial involvement. Contributors cover a multitude of therapy options including: cognitive behavioral; attachment-centered; Alderian; family play; relational transformation; nature-based; and directive. This volume is the perfect companion to beginning and seasoned practitioners.

Starting Treatment With Children and Adolescents provides therapists with a time-tested framework for treatment and a moment-by-moment guide to the first few sessions with a new patient. In twelve remarkable case studies, verbatim transcripts of individual play-therapy sessions are brought to life through running commentary on techniques and theory and a fine-grained analysis of what worked, what didn’t, and what else the clinician could have done to make the session as productive as possible. Clinicians will come away from the book with a unique window into how other therapists actually work as well as new tools for engaging children and adolescents in process-oriented treatment. They’ll also be guided through an exploration of common questions such as how else could I have handled that situation? What other paths could I have tried? Where might those other paths have led? What treatment strategies are most advantageous to my patients’ growth – and to my own?

The second edition of Play Therapy Techniques includes seven new chapters in addition to the original twenty-four. These lively chapters expand the comprehensive scope of the book by describing issues involved in beginning and ending therapy, using metaphors, playing music and ball, and applying the renowned "Color Your Life" technique. The extensive selection of play techniques described in this book will add to the clinical repertoire of students and practitioners of child therapy and counseling. When used in combination with formal education and clinical supervision, Play Therapy Techniques, Second Edition, can be especially useful for developing treatment plans to address the specific needs of various clinical populations. Students and practitioners of child therapy and counseling, including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and child life specialists will find this second of Play Therapy Techniques informative and clinically useful.

Demystifying Jungian play therapy for non-Jungian therapists interested in enhancing their clinical repertoire. Child and family psychotherapist Eric J. Green draws on years of clinical experience to explain his original model of Jungian play therapy. The empathic techniques he illuminates in The Handbook of Jungian Play Therapy with Children and Adolescents can effectively treat children who are traumatized by abuse, natural disasters, and other losses, as well as children who have attention deficit and autism spectrum disorders. The overarching goal of Green’s Jungian play therapy model is to help children and adolescents become psychologically whole individuals. Toward that end, therapists encourage children to engage in sandplay, spontaneous drawing, and other expressive arts. Green demonstrates how therapists can create an atmosphere of warmth and psychological safety by observing the child’s play without judgment and, through the therapeutic relationship, help children learn to regulate their impulses and regain emotional equilibrium. Designed for master’s level and doctoral students, as well as school counselors, play therapists, and private practitioners, the book covers the theoretical underpinnings of “depth psychology” while highlighting easy-to-understand case studies from Green’s own practice to illustrate Jungian play therapy applications at work.