Jennifer Lefebre – The Healing Power of Play Therapy: Advance Your Trauma Treatment with Children & Adolescent

Description

Handouts

Outline

Neuroscience of Trauma and Attachment

• Trauma & Attachment Theory
  • Regulatory processing, executive functioning, memory and language
• The Neuroscience of Play Therapy
  • What Play Does for You and Your Brain, and
  • What Happens to You if You Don’t Play
• Neuroscience and Fight-or-Flight
  • Parasympathetic / sympathetic nervous system
• Trauma and Stress Disorders
  • Classification, symptoms & labels
• Current Evidence-Based Treatment
  • Where are we stuck?

A New Clinical Framework – Integrating Evidenced Based Treatment with Play Therapy

• Establishing safety and a sense of competence/worth
• Appropriate attachments & relational engagement
• Self-regulation (body & emotions)
• Self-reflection & Introspection
• Integration of Traumatic Experiences
• (Acknowledgment & Processing of the trauma)
• Future safety
• Transitioning beyond the Trauma

Advancing Trauma Treatment with Play Therapy

• Verbal vs Nonverbal responses
  • How to recognize trauma without a verbal report
• Bottom-up versus Top-down processing
  • Embodied play & sensory integration rather than verbal strategies
• Non-directive versus directive play therapy techniques – How to integrate both
  • Widen the window of tolerance through up-regulating and down-regulating using embodied therapy activities

Play Therapy Activities

• Psychoeducation of brain-body relationship
  • Charades
  • Flip your Lid
• Target shame, self-doubt, and self-compassion
  • Safe place sandtrays
  • Drawings
  • All About Me
• Integrate traumatic experiences to acknowledge and process the trauma
  • Narrative work through sandtrays
  • Drawings
  • Dramatic play
• Target the parent-child relationship – Interpersonal reactivity and social skills
  • Weather Massage
  • Invisible String
  • Family Sandtrays
  • Drawings
• Improve emotional and bodily regulation
  • Be Spaghetti
  • Trashballs
  • Oobleck
  • Feelings Maps
  • Yoga
  • Floor is Lava & more!

Faculty

Jennifer Lefebre, Psy.D., RPT-S Related seminars and products: 8

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Jennifer Lefebre, Psy.D., RPT-S, TCTSY-F, is a clinical psychologist, registered play therapist supervisor, and trauma-sensitive yoga facilitator. She is the president-elect for the New England Association for Play Therapy. Her clinical and research interests focus on the assessment and treatment of children, adolescents, adults and families whose lives have been impacted by complex trauma. Dr. Lefebre has extensive experience working with young children (0-5), adult survivors of severe childhood abuse and neglect, first responders, and combat veterans.

Dr. Lefebre is the clinical director at Healing the Child Within, a holistic trauma center in northwestern Connecticut which integrates psychotherapy, yoga, play, and expressive arts therapies into the treatment of complex trauma. She also provides clinical supervision and play therapy consultation throughout New England and online, and an adjunct faculty member at several universities, teaching both at the undergraduate and graduate level. In addition to being an experienced play therapist and professor, Dr. Lefebre is a sought-after expert for speaking engagements, podcasts and webinars on the topics of play therapy and complex childhood trauma.

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Jennifer Lefebre is in private practice. She receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.

Non-financial: Jennifer Lefebre is a member of the Association of Play Therapy.