What is Adlerian Play Therapy?

Therapy Goals

         The general goals of Adlerian play therapy are for clients to: (a) feel more connected to others and be able to interact with others in prosocial ways; (b) develop and practice more positive ways for belonging and gaining significance; (c) learn to cope with feelings of discouragement and inferiority in healthier ways; (d) recognize patterns of self-defeating beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors and shift them to more constructive patterns; and (e) notice when they are stuck in feeling inferior and develop coping strategies to address this (Kottman & Meany-Walen, 2016, 2018). 

         Due to Adlerian play therapist’s custom-design their treatment plans and interventions for specific clients, individual therapy goals are based on the presenting problem, the underlying dynamics of clients’ interpersonal and intrapersonal struggles, and they focus on the client’s strengths. Depending on the client’s lifestyle assessment, therapists may choose interventions to help clients become aware of the choices they have in behavior (addressing goals of misbehavior), shift feelings of inferiority (e.g., by fostering the crucial Cs), or become aware of relational styles that undermine their social connectedness and practice new styles. 

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Treatment Description

Four Phase Process:    

1. Building a relationship

2. Exploring the client’s lifestyle

3. Helping the client insight into his/her lifestyle

4. Reorienting and re-educating the client

 

        Progress unfolds through the four phases of Adlerian therapy, and Adlerian play therapists combine non-directive skills with directive strategies according to the phase of counseling and clients’ specific needs (Kottman & Meany- Walen, 2016) 

 

        In the first phase of play therapy, building the therapeutic relationship, Adlerian’s are mostly non-directive, though they may sometimes use directive techniques to deepen the connection with clients. 

 

        In the second phase, exploring the clients’ lifestyles, Adlerian’s observe clients’ behavior and discover clients’ intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics using questioning strategies and strategically planned activities. In thinking about clients’ lifestyles, Adlerian’s consider: clients’ strengths; functioning at life tasks (e.g., work, love/family, friendship); family constellation (i.e., psychological birth order); goals of misbehavior (e.g., attention, power, revenge, inadequacy); the Crucial Cs (i.e., courage, capable, connect, and count); and personality priorities (i.e., pleasing, comfort, superiority, and control; Kottman & Meany-Walen, 2016, 2018). Based on lifestyle information gathered during the first and second phases of therapy, the Adlerian play therapist develops a conceptualization and treatment plan that guides the rest of the process. 

 

       The third phase is designed to help clients gain insight into their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. In this phase, the counselor uses mostly directive techniques with a special emphasis on custom-designed stories and meta-communication to enhance clients’ understanding of themselves and others. 

 

       The fourth phase, reorientation and reeducation, consists of a combination of therapist-directed activities intended to teach a variety of skills including problem solving, communication, anger and anxiety management, and meta-communication designed to teach and reinforce the client’s constructive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Consulting with parents (and teachers) is an essential element of AdPT that supports any changes children might make in the process, and it unfolds in parallel to the individual work with children. 

 

Service Expectations

Making Progress is a team effort, all parts of the family system should be involved. 

• Child participates in individual therapy

            The child will work their way through the phases, and work toward their individual goal while shedding light on and learning about what is impacting them(internal and external). They will gain insight into themselves, their family and the world around them as thy see it and then as they really are.

• Parents participate in Parent Consultations(at minimum of once every 3 weeks)

            Parent consultation time will allow the parents to explore their lifestyle, areas for growth, process all the components of parenting, gain insight and learn/explore new ways to interact and promote ongoing healthy parenting skills/interactions with their child.

• Family sessions are conducted throughout treatment.

            Family sessions are a time to put to practice all the work that the family has been conducting in their separate sessions. The family can use that time to address attempts, practice new strategies and demonstrate how the family system operates/interacts. A family that plays together can heal and grow together

 

Making Progress

• There is always validity in having a second set of eyes, and remember that giving up before working through something can cause you to restart the process again.

~” The past is where you learned the lesson, the future is where you apply the lesson, don’t give up in the middle.~ Unknown Origin

• Trust the process: making progress in therapy takes time. Your child and family have had years to get to this point and growing closer together and healing also takes time.

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References

Adler, A. (1958). What life should mean to you. New York, NY: Capricorn. (Original work published in 1931) 

Carlson, J., & Englar-Carlson, M. (2017). Adlerian psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 

Corey, G. (2017). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage. 

Disney. (n.d.). Words are useless... unless they come from Edna Mode. Retrieved from https://ohmy.disney.com/movies/2013/08/25/words- are-useless-unless-they-come-from-Edna-Mode/ 

Kottman, T., & Ashby, J. (2015). Adlerian play therapy. In D. Crenshaw & A. Stewart (Eds.)., Play therapy: A comprehensive guide to theory and practice (pp. 32-47). New York, NY: Guilford Press. 

Kottman, T., & Meany-Walen, K. (2016). Partners in play: An Adlerian approach to play therapy (3rd ed.). Alexandria, VA: American Counseling Association. 

Kottman, T., & Meany-Walen, K. (2018). Doing play therapy: From building the relationship to facilitating change. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Schaefer, C. E., & Drewes, A. A. (Eds.). (2014). The therapeutic powers of play: 20 core agents of change (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.