Paris Goodyear-Brown

When it comes to working with children, sometimes the biggest behaviors come in the smallest containers. Sometimes these behaviors are externalizing (screaming, crying, hitting) and sometimes these are internalizing (anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation). So often, the focus of treatment in these instances becomes about extinguishing the behavior without understanding what is driving it in the first place. Whether the end result involves a child shutting down or shouting out, it is critical that helping professionals be able to answer this key question: What is the need underlying the behavior?

This workshop will offer more than a dozen practical, fun, and immediately useful play therapy interventions, based on TraumaPlay®, that engage the family in setting treatment goals, augmenting adaptive coping, enhancing the healthy attachment between parent and child while helping them shift paradigms around problematic child behaviors. Powerful exploration of the stress response system helps clients increase anger management skills, expand emotional literacy, practice pro-social skills with family and friends, address their difficult thoughts, and increase coherence in their trauma narratives. 

Learning Objectives:  

• Evaluate disorders of dysregulation through the lens of bottom-up brain development and through a trauma-informed lens. 
• Extrapolate polyvagal theory to children and families through play therapy interventions. 
• Execute a play therapy intervention that can be used to target movement in each of ten separate areas of dysregulation. 

Paris Goodyear-Brown, LCSW, RPT-S, certified EMDR therapist, is the creator of TraumaPlay®, a flexibly sequential play therapy model for treating trauma and attachment disturbances in family systems. She is the founder of the TraumaPlay Institute, the Clinical Director of Nurture House, an Adjunct Instructor of Psych iatric Mental Health at Vanderbilt University, and an EMDRIA Approved Consultant.