What You'll Get From This Course with Non-Contact/Distance Learning CE hours

Course Description:

Expressive arts provide a powerful tool for your adolescent clients in the play therapy process to express themselves, identify cognitive distortions and shame, explore self-concept and their relationships, and develop resiliency through the creative process. This course uses a neuroscience and attachment lens in play therapy to give you a  framework to recognize what factors may be contributing to your client's mental health challenges.  You'll use this "lens" to explore and address these core issues underlying many mental health challenges for adolescents. You'll learn a variety of expressive arts activities using mindfulness, art, poetry, and music to explore these keys areas with your young clients.  These activities will help them explore painful emotions and experiences using expressive arts to help them engage in the change process more deeply. You'll learn a neuroscience and attachment-informed framework to help you ground your expressive arts strategies in theory and application in the play therapy process.

This course provides 8 non-contact/distance learning CE hours for the following organizations based on completing the course in its entirety, engagement in the Community Group discussion for each course module, and successfully passing the Quiz with 85% accuracy:

Association for Play Therapy
NASW UT Chapter  - currently pending approval for distance learning/home study.

If you are not interested in the Non-contact distance learning CE hours, please go to the version of this course without CEs.

What you will learn:

1) Define the concept of mentalization and its relationship with attachment and emotion regulation in play therapy

2) Learn the relationship between attachment, mentalization, and our conceptualization of self, others, and relationships in play therapy for adolescents

3) Explain the mind-body connection for emotion regulation in play therapy

4) Identify at least three therapeutic powers of play to use with expressive modalities

5) Explain the archetypes and shadow and light attributes of attachment and how to use them to integrate expressive arts activities in the play therapy process

6) Describe the elements of the Be 5 Framework to apply clinical decision-making for integrating expressive arts in play therapy and establish a strong therapeutic relationship to facilitate change

7) Demonstrate at least four expressive arts activities to use with adolescents in the play therapy process to explore self-concept, relationships, regulate emotions, develop coping skills, and increase resiliency


To help you apply the information learned in the training, there is a Community Group (like a Facebook Group) to share ideas, ask questions, and get feedback that's available 24/7.   There are additional Live Zoom Calls scheduled periodically for additional consultation support to help you effectively and confidently use the information learned in the course.  You'll have lifetime access to the course as long as the course is available with access to the training material, Community group, and periodic Zoom calls, including any updates made to the course along the way.

For mental health professionals pursuing a Registered Play Therapy (RPT) credential through the Association for Play Therapy, this training fits into Category 3: Play Therapy Skills and Methods.    

Here’s the rationale for Category 3: the seminal and historically significant theories underlying this training is Child Centered Play Therapy/Humanistic because the use of the therapeutic relationship is critical for the change process. Ecosystemic/Prescriptive play therapy models provide a framework for integration of theories to individualize the interventions used to meet the needs of individual clients. This training uses these seminal and historically significant theories as the foundation for the inclusion of neuroscience to inform the treatment process and use interventions based on the needs of each client/family within a safe, strong therapeutic