What is play?
Play is an evolutionary and organic process that helps us learn about our ever-expanding world and ourselves. It lifts our spirits and brightens our outlook in life, preparing us for challenges that lie ahead.
How does play affect children?
Play helps children expand on their self-expression, self-knowledge, self-actualisation, and self-efficacy. It fosters their imagination and creativity whilst encouraging confidence and concentration helping them connect with peers and make friends.
When a young person is finding it hard to cope with life's challenges the resulting emotional difficulties can manifest themselves in their behaviour. Therapeutic Play and Creative Arts provide a way for young children and teenagers to express their experiences and feelings through a natural, self-guided and self-healing process.
Therapeutic Play and Creative Arts facilitate healing on an unconscious level, offering a platform for a child to regulate emotions and boost self-esteem. Within this therapeutic environment dilemmas and challenges can naturally filter through the unconscious mind and work themselves out. Various techniques can also be used to bring feelings, thoughts and behaviours into a clients conscious and are then explored together with the practitioner.
The main objective is to bring about emotional well-being in their lives by providing them with appropriate internal strategies to deal with situations in the real world. This occurs through building on their natural communicative and learning processes in a therapeutic manner using various mediums of expression including art, clay, sand, creative visualisation, storytelling, puppets, drama, music and dance and movement.
* Individual and group sessions available.
Therapeutic Sandplay has been termed an x-ray of the psyche. It is an activity that frees the unconscious mind to tell its story. Therapeutic Sandplay gives clients the opportunity to set up a world in a sand tray through objects and figures. Along with the arrangement of the sand it provides an avenue to a person's inner state.
Through this calming, dynamic and liberating experiential exercise unconscious processes are made visible in three-dimensional form. It is a creative form of expression that gives rise to symbols and images encouraging the stimulation of mental processes by bringing feelings, thoughts and behaviours into a client's conscious.
What has risen from the unconscious into the conscious can then be explored together with the practitioner in order for the client to gain insights about inner conflicts and dysfunctional thinking. This understanding allows for the resolution of those conflicts and the development of individuation (process through which a person becomes his or her true self).
Filial Play Coaching is a branch of therapeutic play that directly involves parents and carers. Children communicate through play as it is their innate language. By teaching parents the language of play, and how to use play therapeutically, the communication gap between parent and child can be bridged.
Parents will learn a variety of skills, which will translate into creating a warm, unconditionally accepting, genuine, and understanding environment. It is in this atmosphere that children feel safe in exploring their relationship with their parents and indeed themselves.
So Filial Play Coaching is an avenue through which understanding is attained and relationships are improved between children and parents. When children are given the opportunity to express themselves without losing status in the eyes of their parents their anxieties decrease and are replaced by a feeling of validation and value. From this feelings can be dealt with and eventually mastered rather than distorted or denied.
From a very early age children use play to engage and interact with the world around them. It provides an avenue through which they can create, explore and master their environment, including surroundings, objects and concepts.
Research suggests that play acts as a tool for creating new neural networks in the brain. It is believed to support flexibility in learning new competencies, skills and outcomes and in turn enhances confidence and resiliency that children need to face future challenges.
Developmental Play programmes are tailored to a childs needs aiding his or her natural developmental process while simultaneously unlocking innate potential using games and play activities.
Programmes can be geared specifically towards improving motor development, social development, emotional development, cognitive development, language development or a combination of the above..
Tim Hydari is a Practitioner of Developmental and Therapeutic Play. He has an MA from Swansea University and is a member of Play Therapy International (PTI) and Play Therapy United Kingdom (PTUK) as well as a member of the British Association of Therapeutic Play work (BATP). He has hundreds of hours of experience in enabling people's potential and bringing out the best in them.
Breath and Health Alternative Medical Centre
1080, Al Wasl Road,
Umm Suquim 2, Jumeirah
Dubai, U.A.E.
Mobile +971 50 5348267
Telephone +971 4 3489940
Fax +971 4 3489957
Bookings : hello_breathandhealth.net
Assistant Manager : eden_breathandhealth.net
