Children and Sand Tray Therapy

One of the techniques that the Family Christian Counseling Center uses in children’s counseling is the sand tray. The therapists at the Center use this method as an addition to traditional therapies. Sand tray therapy is defined as “The therapeutic use of a collection of miniatures in a sandtray. It is a non-verbal expressive and…

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Children’s Counseling Checklist

child behavior checklist

One of the instruments that the therapists at Family Christian Counseling Center use during child counseling to help assess children who are experiencing behavioral, emotional, and social problems is the Child Behavior Checklist. This is a checklist that has been developed over decades using evidence based research to aid in identifying behavioral, emotional, and social…

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Play Therapy and the Brain

children play therapy

I was fascinated recently when I read an article in the International Journal of Play Therapy by Hong and Mason entitled “Becoming a Neurobiologically-Informed Play Therapist” (Hong & Mason, 2016). Over the past years a new subspecialty of play therapy has been developing which some are calling “Neuro-biologically Informed Play Therapy”. As past president of…

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Brain and violence

child sitting

Overcoming Trauma’s Hurts Attached is a video from Bruce Perry’s youtube channel. It’s sobering to see how exposure to violence affects an infants developing brain. I see many children who were adopted fairly young. (before age two) Many parents assume that they were too young to remember the family trauma. Unfortunately the brain was at…

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Neurogenesis

brain cells

The Growing Brain   This is an amazing video of neurogenesis. It’s very encouraging to know that our brains continue to form new connections and prune old ones. This means that every time we respond calmly to our developmentally traumatized children we are teaching them that parents are safe instead of scary. Consistently calm parenting…

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