Treating trauma in young children: Integrating EMDR, child-centered play therapy, and developmental play therapy

This chapter reviews how clinicians can combine play therapy skills with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to treat young children who have experienced trauma. It presents a descriptive approach to integrating play therapy skills with the EMDR protocol for therapists already using play to facilitate trauma. Young children's trauma often arises from early neglect and abuse, resulting in emotional dysregulation and inappropriate behaviors. Child-centered play therapy, developmental play therapy, and EMDR are interventions that address these issues and are also effective relational therapies that can be even more powerful when combined. These therapies complement each other to allow successful treatment of complex trauma in our youngest clients. Through examples and a case study, therapists will appreciate how play therapy and EMDR work well together and how clinicians' play therapy skills can be easily incorporated into all phases of the EMDR protocol.

Book Section

English

Roxanne Grobbel

Grobbel, R. (2021). Treating trauma in young children: Integrating EMDR, child-centered play therapy, and developmental play therapy. In Ann Beckley-Forest and Annie Monaco (Eds.), EMDR With Children in the Play Therapy Room: An Integrated Approach (145-182). New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company. doi:10.1891/9780826175939.0005