As a therapist working with children and families for over 20 years, I have come to understand that healing is first and foremost about relationships. True healing does not come from insight but rather with play, movement, emotional expression, sensory experience, and a felt sense of being met by another nervous system capable of attunement and presence. The adventurous task of fostering an environment to support this experience is left to the therapist’s creativity, capacity, and attunement.
Family therapist and author Neal Brodsky illustrates how he creates this relational presence through body-centered play in his new book Embodied Play Therapy: Healing and Building Identity with Children. Brodsky teaches the techniques and tools of embodied play therapy that he uses with children and parents, and offers specific, guided suggestions and recommendations on when and how to engage in his structured approach. The generosity of this book offers a window into Brodsky’s work with his clients; his narrative weaves play, dialogue, and embodiment practices, which he explores through practical application with his own clients as he follows the course of their treatment.
Brodsky’s Embodied Play Therapy emerges as a body-oriented, relational, sensory, and movement approach to working with children. The theoretical lineage comes from D.W. Winnicott, Erik Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich, as well as body-therapy pioneers Alexander Lowen (Bioenergetics) and John Pierrakos (Core Energetics). The practice that makes this model successful with children is Brodsky’s integration of containment and relational attunement, drawing on Structural Family Systems Therapy, Dynamic Play Therapy (McCarthy), and contemporary neuroscience theories by Stephen W. Porges, Deb Dana, and Janine Fischer.
To read the complete review please click here, Embodied Play Therapy Reviewed by Tim Rodier
