Connect Play Grow
Therapy for Children
Play and movement speak to the natural developmental language of a child.
Clinical psychotherapy informed by a neurosequential therapeutic approach supports pathways for a child’s neurodevelopment, emotional regulation, communication, social and relational skills, and the formation of a positive self-concept.
The neurosequential approach recognises that children’s brains develop from the bottom up through repeated sensory and movement experiences in the lower brain regions that support regulation and emotional processing. For this reason, play and movement are powerful ways to support healthy development and wellbeing.
Play-based psychotherapy can support children who may be experiencing anxiety, behavioural difficulties, emotional distress, family changes, social challenges, trauma or specific conditions such as ASD and selective mutism. Through the therapeutic relationship and the language of play, children can build confidence, strengthen emotional regulation, develop problem-solving skills, and form healthier ways of relating to others.
Children learn and develop through experience and through ‘doing’. With the support of a therapist, they are able to reflect on and integrate these experiences in meaningful ways. Play-based psychotherapy helps children express thoughts, feelings, and experiences through play. Because children do not always have the language or emotional awareness to talk about difficult experiences directly, play becomes their natural way of communicating.
This approach respects the child’s developmental stage and allows them to work through difficulties in a way that feels natural and comfortable. Over time, play-based therapy supports children to make sense of their experiences and build resilience for the future.
Dance Movement Therapy is a movement-based psychotherapy that provides a therapeutic space for expression, creative movement, relational connection, and imagination. Movement interventions engage lower brain systems first – including the brainstem and limbic areas involved in sensory, emotional, and relational processing – which are closely connected to experiences of stress and dysregulation. Working through the body therefore supports regulation and integration.
Dance Movement Therapy is grounded in the understanding that mind and body are interconnected, and that change in one supports change in the other. Movement begins before birth, with the first motions in utero helping shape the developing brain. From infancy through childhood and beyond, brain organisation and emotional regulation develop through movement and sensory experience. Using movement therapeutically therefore makes neurophysiological sense as a way to support children’s physical, emotional, cognitive, and social wellbeing.
Evidence based benefits:
Physical: Towards a healthy, mobile, functional & expressive body
Emotional: Towards embodied healthy regulated emotions
Social: Towards embodied satisfying reciprocal relationships
Cognitive: Towards healthy executive functioning and healthy enquiring mind
Integration: Towards embodied wholeness, vitality, aliveness
Trauma-Informed
Contemporary neurobiological research into trauma suggests that trauma has a powerful physical component and thus an essential step in addressing trauma in children should be to attend to embodied trauma responses. Because dance movement therapy and play-based therapy works with the psychotherapeutic landscape of the body, children can express themselves, even without words, and can effectively address trauma and emotional and physical dysregulation.
Meagan has over 10 years experience working with children therapeutically
and extensive experience as a dance specialist in Early Childhood Education
Enquiries for play- based psychotherapy & dance movement therapy for children:
NDIS funding for plan and self managed participants
