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Creative Adlerian Play Therapy Interventions 

In this fun and experiential workshop, you will learn practical play therapy intervention techniques for building a relationship, exploring clients’ lifestyles, helping clients gain insight, and facilitating them making changes in their behavior, thinking, and feelings.  You will learn a model for metaphor design and therapeutic storytelling; art techniques; structured play activities, and dance, movement, and music processes you can use in your play therapy sessions for assessing clients and facilitating movement in their therapeutic process.

Days/Times

Monday, June 23, 2025, 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM CT

Objectives:

  1. Describe 2 play therapy techniques used to build a relationship with clients.  
  2. Describe 2 play therapy techniques used to explore clients’ lifestyles. 
  3. Describe 2 play therapy techniques used to help clients gain insight.  
  4. Describe 2 play therapy techniques to facilitate clients making changes in patterns of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving.  
  5. Describe 1 method for designing therapeutic stories in play therapy.  
  6. Explain 1 art technique for using in play therapy.  
  7. Describe 1 way they can use dance, movement, and/or music in play therapy. 
  8. Learn 3 hours play therapy seminal or historically significant theories .
  9. Describe 3 play therapy skills and methods.

Meet the Speaker

Terry Kottman developed Adlerian play therapy, an approach to working with children, families, and adults that combines the ideas and techniques of Individual Psychology and play therapy. She founded the League of Extraordinary Adlerian Play Therapists and created a certification program for Adlerian play therapy. Terry is a fun and engaging presenter and author who regularly teaches classes and writes about play therapy.  She is co-author (with Kristin Meany-Walen) of Doing Play Therapy: From Building the Relationship to Facilitating Change and Partners in Play: An Adlerian Approach to Play Therapy, and the author of Play Therapy: Basics and Beyond and several other books. In 2014, she was granted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Play Therapy; in 2017, she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Iowa Association for Play Therapy; and in 2020, she received a third Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology. (She seems to be collecting them.) In 2024, Terry received the Innovation in Counseling: Practice and Clinical Service Award from the National Board of Certified Counselors. She has been married to her husband Rick for 46 years and has a delightful adult son, Jacob, of whom she is inordinately proud.

References

Dillman Taylor, D., Thompson, K., & Kottman, T. (2022). Strengthening the efficacy of Adlerian play therapy through the measurement model, International Journal of Play Therapy, 31(3), 164-173.  

Hunnicutt Hollenbaugh, K. M., & Joyal, A. (2024). Adlerian play therapy and dialectical behavior therapy skills: An integrated approach. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/15401383.2024.2404005 

Kottman, T. (2020).  Adlerian play therapy: A personal and professional journey. Journal of Individual Psychology, 76(2), 162-175.  

Kottman, T., & Ashby, J. (2024). Adlerian play therapy. In D. Crenshaw & A. Stewart (Eds.), Play therapy: A comprehensive guide to theory and practice (2nd ed.). Guilford.   

Kottman, T., & Ashby, J. (2024).  Play therapy: Basics and beyond (3rd ed.). American Counseling Association.   

Kottman, T., & Meany-Walen, K. (2018). Doing play therapy: From building the relationship to facilitating change. Guilford.  

Meany-Walen, K. K. (2020). The current state of Adlerian play therapy published research. The Journal of Individual Psychology, 76(2), 176–186. https://doi.org/10.1353/jip.2020.0005 

Meany-Walen, K. K., & Kottman, T. (2017). Adlerian play therapy: Practice and research. In R. L.  

Steen (Ed.), Emerging research in play therapy, child counseling, and consultation (pp. 100–111). Information Science Reference/IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-2224-9.ch006