Dafna Lender – Attachment Focused Play Therapy: Theraplay® Techniques to Transform Your Most Challenging, Resistant & Dysregulated Children

Description

Handouts

Outline

The 4 Dimensions of Theraplay®

• To Address Behavioral Problems and Gain Connection Cooperation
  • Structure: organization and safety
  • Engagement: connection, joy, co-regulation of strong emotions
  • Nurture: calming, emotional nourishment, secure base
  • Challenge: recognition, ride, celebration of self

Calm an Overactive/Aggressive/Oppositional Child

• Strategies to prevent outbursts and trauma-based aggression (The P.R.O.M.P.T) method)
  • Proximity
  • Rhythm
  • Optimal movement
  • Touch response
• Techniques to identify non-verbal signs of stress
• Activities for turning resistance into a connecting experience
• Video case examples: transformation from aggressive & uncooperative to focused & relaxed

Engage the Disconnected Child

• Strategies to capture and keep a child’s attention (The G.R.E.A.T. method)
  • Gesture
  • Rhythm
  • Eye contact
  • Affect
  • Tone communication
• Activities that children can’t resist getting involved in
  • Cotton ball war
  • Shaving ball pass
• Interventions to turn passivity into cooperation
  • Aluminum foil print
  • Paper punch
• Techniques to make sense of non-verbal communication & get child to start talking
  • Cotton ball blow
  • Balloon pass
• Video case example: before and after of clients ages 1-17

Promote Positive Parent-Child Relationship

• Activities to strengthen the parent-child attachment
  • Cotton ball hockey
  • Mirror mirror
  • Measuring
• Techniques to increase empathy by using eye contact, touch and turn-taking
  • Eye signal dance
  • Slippery slip
• Activities that create and solidify connection by fostering moments of joy
  • Balancing pillows
  • Feather decorate
• Interventions to decrease arguments and gain cooperation
  • Identify a child engaging in a power struggle before they do
  • Identify when oppositionality is really a trauma reaction
  • Empathy to melt oppositional behaviors
  • Know when to cool it
• Strategies to increase self-esteem and make a child feel unique
  • Special snack
  • Twinkle song
  • Favorite things
  • Powder prints
• Video case example: high and low functioning clients

Faculty

Dafna Lender, LCSW Related seminars and products: 5

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Dafna Lender, LCSW serves as the program director at The Theraplay Institute in Evanston, IL and is certified as a practitioner, supervisor and trainer in both Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP). Dafna trains psychotherapists internationally in these methods and trains in three languages. She is also a supervisor and author in the field of treating attachment and trauma issues in children.

Dafna has spent her career focusing children’s development of a secure attachment with their caregivers while resolving issues in their traumatic history. Early in her career, Dafna worked in treatment foster care and witnessed child after child “fail” out of foster placements due to difficult behavior. Children were disruptive, unsettled and unhappy, and their caregivers felt defeated. Dafna’s sense of discouragement went away after taking the Theraplay training and learning direct, concrete ideas and interactions that she could apply in home with her treatment families to promote healthier, more hopeful relationships. Dafna has successfully treated children with a variety of backgrounds, including children raised in orphanages, with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, exposed to domestic violence and community violence and children of parents with chronic mental illness. Dafna has worked in the field of child welfare and child mental health for 20+ years.

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Dafna Lender has an employment relationship with The Theraplay Institute. She receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.

Non-financial: Dafna Lender has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.