Next Level Play Therapy: A Podcast for Play Therapy Excellence

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Do you feel like a fraud as a play therapist? 

Imposter syndrome in play therapy is one of the most common struggles for new play therapists and child therapists, and it's usually a lie your brain is telling you.

If you're overwhelmed, second-guessing every play therapy session, and worried your clients are suffering because you're not good enough, you're not alone. 

Every play therapist I've trained has felt this way. 

In this free podcast episode, you'll learn how to recognize imposter syndrome and build real confidence using play therapy, so you can make a difference for the kids and families you serve.

In this podcast you'll learn: 

✅ What imposter syndrome in play therapy is, and why it's rooted in perfectionism 

✅ Signs you're struggling, including avoiding or over-accommodating parents 

✅ 4 tips to overcome imposter syndrome and stop second-guessing yourself 

✅ Why learning a play therapy model builds confidence with clients and parents

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

Is play therapy working for your client, or are you stuck in the "I don't know if this is helping" loop? 

In this free weekly podcast episode for play therapists and child and adolescent therapists, you'll learn 4 practical ways to tell if play therapy is working and what to do when nothing seems to help.

You've tried the play therapy activity books, searched Pinterest for play therapy ideas, and used what you learned at your last play therapy training. 

Your supervisor was supportive, but they don't practice play therapy. If you're worried you're failing your client, this podcast is for you.

In this episode you'll learn: 

✅ How to revisit your case conceptualization and ground yourself in your play therapy model 

✅ Why safety and therapeutic rapport come before insight, and how to check your expectations 

✅ How to get useful feedback from parents, caregivers, and the child 

✅ Why play therapy consultation helps you see what's happening in the playroom

For play therapists and child and adolescent therapists at any stage of their play therapy journey.  Join my free webinar, How to Provide Play Therapy Without Second-Guessing Yourself, Even With Complex Cases. 

We'll focus on building the confidence to trust your clinical decisions, even when a case gets complicated.

📅 Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET
 🔗 Save your free spot here → https://www.rhplaytherapytraining.com/f/pta-webinar

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

In family play therapy, the caregiver's readiness matters as much as the child's. Because the parent-child relationship is the vehicle for healing, a parent has to be emotionally and mentally prepared to enter their child's world without taking it over.

In this free weekly podcast, we break down how to assess parent readiness for family play therapy sessions, so you can decide when to bring a caregiver into the playroom and when more preparation is needed first.

You'll learn:

✔ 3 signs a parent IS ready for joint family play therapy: following the child's lead without correcting, showing curiosity about the child's inner world, and staying regulated during moments of distress

✔ 3 signs a parent is NOT ready yet: demanding quick fixes and immediate compliance, using the session to lecture or interrogate the child, and being too consumed by their own unresolved stress or trauma

✔ What to do when a parent isn't ready, including how parent consultation sessions and individual therapy referrals can build the caregiver's capacity to show up

✔ How to keep the door open to family play therapy without pushing caregivers before they can succeed.

Who this is for: Play therapists, child therapists, adolescent therapists, and mental health professionals who work with children and families and want more confidence in caregiver assessment, parent consultation, and family play therapy.

Key takeaway: A parent who isn't ready yet doesn't mean family play therapy is off the table. It usually means the work starts with the caregiver, so the family play therapy sessions are set up for real connection and healing.

Want to go deeper? If you're ready to build your skills in play therapy and learn how to involve caregivers in the healing process, explore Play Therapy Academy: https://www.rhplaytherapytraining.com/play-therapy-academy

Listen to the podcast, bring your questions and your toughest caregiver scenarios, and let us know in the comments: what signs do you look for when deciding if a parent is ready?

👍 Like, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode.

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

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If you're a play therapist or child therapist meeting with kids weekly while updating parents on the side — this episode is for you.

Individual play therapy is powerful. But when the family system stays the same, even the best playroom work has a ceiling.

In this free weekly podcast, we're exploring one of the most important clinical questions in play therapy: when does individual work hit its limits — and what changes when you bring the family into the room?

We cover:

• Where individual-only play therapy runs out of room

When the family system stays unchanged, progress in the playroom has a ceiling — no matter how skilled you are.

• What changes when the family is in the room

Observe relational patterns firsthand, coach attachment-focused parenting strategies in real time, and create change where the problem actually lives — in the parent-child relationship.

• When family play therapy isn't the right fit

Family play therapy isn't always the right next step. We'll walk through the clinical situations where family play therapy sessions may not serve the child.

• Why a strategic family play therapy framework matters

Inviting parents into the playroom isn't enough. A structured framework is what turns "everyone's in the room" into lasting change in outcomes.

Listen to the podcast and share with a colleague!

This episode connects directly to this month's Consultation Call theme: bringing caregivers into the room. Come with your questions and cases.

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

Congruence & Co-Regulation in Play Therapy: How Nervous System Attunement Heals Kids

What does it really mean to use "therapeutic use of self" in the playroom? In this podcast episode, we go beyond the buzzwords to explore how congruence and co-regulation actually help children build their own capacity for emotion regulation.

This is part three in our series on the nervous system in play therapy — and why oversimplifying this concept can get in the way of the deep, lasting healing our clients need.

In this podcast episode, we cover:

🔹 Congruence in the Playroom — What it really means to match your internal experience with what you express, and why "performing" calm or warmth isn't the same as being a regulated, authentic presence

🔹 The Coregulation Connection — How your nervous system state becomes the mechanism through which children learn their own emotions are safe, workable, and useful

🔹 Self-Awareness for Therapists — Why you have to be congruent with yourself before you can be congruent with a child, and how "resonance circuits" let your nervous system attune to theirs

🔹 Supporting Parents & Caregivers — Creating safety for caregivers so they see you as a true partner in their child's healing, and recognizing what activates your own insecurity or imposter syndrome in session

🔹 Therapist Self-Care — The "put your own oxygen mask on first" principle, and why your own therapy and a supportive play therapy community aren't optional extras — they're part of doing this work well

Ray, D. C., Jayne, K. M., & Stulmaker, H. L. (2014). A way of being in the playroom: Experience-expression congruence model (EECM). International Journal of Play Therapy, 23(1), 18–30.

Johnston, T. E., Gross, J. J., Chen, W., McEvoy, P., Becerra, R., & Preece, D. A. (2025). Emotion beliefs and emotion regulation strategy use. Personality and Individual Differences, 240, 113066.

#PlayTherapy #TherapistSelfCare #NervousSystemRegulation #Coregulation #ChildTherapy #EmotionRegulation #TherapeuticUseOfSelf #TraumaInformedCare #PlayTherapist #ChildDevelopment

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

You're 20 minutes into a play therapy session. The child is in it — deep in the sandtray, the story, the metaphor. And then, without warning, they bail. Silliness. A different toy. A total tonal 180.

If you've ever second-guessed yourself in that moment — wondered if you lost the thread, if they're avoiding, if the work "didn't land" — this episode is for you.

That shift isn't resistance. It isn't disengagement. It's regulation happening in real time.

A child's nervous system was never built to sustain 45 straight minutes in emotional intensity — and clinicians who miss this often misread the most important therapeutic moment in the room. 

In this week's podcast for play therapists and child therapists, we're unpacking:

✅ Why the exit out of deep affect is a nervous-system-driven event, not a client "resisting the work"
✅ How to distinguish regulation-seeking behavior from true avoidance or disengagement in session
✅ What this means for pacing, containment, and how you structure session flow around a child's window of tolerance
✅ How to track these shifts clinically — and use them as data, not disruption

This is a working conversation for play therapists who want to sharpen their read on nervous system cues in the playroom and stop treating natural regulatory rhythm as a problem to manage.

This is also one small piece of what we go deeper on inside Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE — my community for play therapists who want ongoing case consultation, clinical skill-building, and support that goes beyond a single play therapy training. 

More on that soon — for now, come learn, bring your questions, and let's dig into the work together.

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

Free Podcast Training for Play Therapists: How the Brain Constructs "Explosive" Emotions in Kids

Join Renewing Hearts Play Therapy Training with Cathi Spooner, LCSW, RPT-S podcast as we go beyond simple redirection strategies to explore how the brain actually constructs emotional experiences in dysregulated children and why it matters for play therapists.

If you're a child and adolescent therapist working with kids who have "explosive" emotions — the "angry tornado" in your playroom, or desperate parents asking "what do I do when this happens at home?" — 

This weekly podcast episode gives you a fresh clinical lens for nervous system regulation, grounded in the Theory of Constructed Emotions and Attachment Theory.

In this episode, we cover:

🧠 Developmental Expectations — Why a child's developing neural circuitry matters for self-regulation (and why "just calm down" doesn't work).

🌪️ Constructed Emotions — How the brain uses interoception and environment to construct emotions that predict what needs to happen next.

🔗 Attachment as Bio-Regulation — Exploring attachment as a bioregulatory system, and the brain as a "prediction machine."

🎭 Play Therapy Application — Why emotion vocabulary is the key to building true resiliency, and how to use play therapy with intention.

👨‍👩‍👧 Caregiver Co-Regulation — How to teach parents to model regulated states so kids can borrow their calm.

💬 Drop a comment: what's the hardest "explosive" moment you've navigated in the playroom or with a caregiver?

References mentioned:

• Dr. Pascal Vrticka (Substack article #36): The Bioenergetic Map of Social Connection
• Hoemann, Xu, & Feldman Barrett (2019): Emotion Words, Emotion Concepts, and Emotional Development in Children

Attachment Insights #36 (https://pvrticka.com/attachment-insights/#36), and the full version on Substack is available here: https://pvrticka.substack.com/p/the-bioenergetic-map-of-social-connection. 

Website: https://pvrticka.substack.com/p/attachment-and-caregiving-as-social-allostatic-inference)

#PlayTherapy #ChildTherapist #NervousSystemRegulation #AttachmentTheory #EmotionRegulation

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

What do you do when your 6-year-old client is kicking things in the lobby or a 7-year-old starts using cursing in a family session?

If you've ever felt like your play therapy questions are falling flat or a client’s behavior is spiraling out of control, you aren't alone. 

After 30+ years as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, I’ve learned that these moments aren’t failures—they are data.

In this podcast, I break down a 3-step framework to help you decode dysregulated behavior using neuroscience and attachment theory so you can move past the "acting out" and access deep healing.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Behavior as Communication: Why children don't actually want to be "bad" and how to shift your mindset from "what are they doing?" to "what is activating this response?"
• The Role of Neuroscience: How predictive processing, beliefs, and emotions influence a child's nervous system and your treatment decisions.
• Mastering Co-Regulation: How to use your own regulated state to help a distressed child feel seen, safe, and organized.
• Your Roadmap to Success: How your play therapy model (including Integrative Play Therapy) guides your decision-making in the playroom.

About Cathi Spooner: I help play therapists and mental health professionals integrate neuroscience and attachment into their practice so they can work with more confidence and help their clients achieve lasting change.

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

Have you ever finished a challenging play therapy session, watched the child walk out the door, and then just sat there — processing everything alone with no one who truly understands what happened in that room?

If that feels familiar, this free weekly podcast episode is for you.

Most play therapists think of community — a membership, a consultation group, a peer network — as emotional support that’s optional. A nice-to-have. A place to vent. More of a luxury than a necessity

But in this episode, play therapy trainer and educator Cathi Spooner, LCSW, RPT-S, makes the case that community is far more than that. 

Community is a clinical tool that ensures your clients get the best support possible for healing because you get the clinical support you need. 

And play therapists who practice without it aren't just lonelier — they're making harder clinical decisions, experiencing more burnout, and serving their clients at a fraction of their potential.

This is the episode that connects everything — and introduces Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE, now open for enrollment through August 29, 2026 at 11:59 PM.

In this episode, you'll discover:

🎯 Why community is a clinical tool — not an emotional luxury — and the specific clinical outcomes that change when play therapists practice in connection instead of isolation

🎯 What happens to your clinical thinking, decision-making, and confidence when you have play therapists around you who speak your language and understand your cases

🎯 A full inside look at Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE (PTEC) — including monthly group consultation calls, the monthly book club, weekly play therapy tips, and the community itself

🎯 The real cost of the "I'll wait" mindset — and why the growth starts the moment you're in community of like-minded play therapists, not before

This episode is for you if:

→ You're the only play therapist in your agency — or you're in private practice navigating complex cases alone

→ You process your hardest cases in silence with no one who truly understands play therapy

→ You've been thinking about joining a play therapy community but keep putting it off

→ You want to know exactly what's inside Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE before enrolling

→ You're a child/adolescent therapist, registered play therapist, or play therapist-in-training working with children, teens, and families

Play Therapy Elevation CIRCLE (PTEC)

The ongoing community for play therapists who are done going it alone.M<

Inside PTEC, you get:

✔️ Monthly group consultation calls — bring your real cases and get real clinical support

✔️ A monthly book club — clinically relevant reading to keep your thinking fresh and sharp

✔️ Weekly play therapy tips — practical, immediately applicable tools for the playroom

✔️ A private community of play therapists who speak your language

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills

Send us Fan Mail

Tired of feeling like you’re just "playing" without a clear way to track progress in play therapy?

As play therapists, we often hear the same question from parents: "How is my child actually doing?" 

And maybe you’re struggling to answer that question yourself, let alone explain it to parents.

If you find yourself unsure how to tell if your clients are progressing in play therapy or if play therapy is working, this free weekly podcast episode is for you.

In this episode, we’re diving into why measuring progress in play therapy feels so difficult without a solid clinical framework. 

We’ll discuss how to track progress in the playroom and determine if you’re on the right course helping clients heal. 

What we’ll cover:

• The Framework Gap: Why most play therapists watch for the wrong indicators (and what to do about it).
• Stage-Specific Progress: How "success" looks different in the early, middle, and late stages of healing.
• The 3 Essential Categories of Progress:
  1. Therapeutic Relationship: Identifying shifts from guardedness to vulnerability.
  2. Play Themes & Content: Recognizing when chaotic play transforms into mastery and resolution.
  3. Regulation & Agency: Spotting the growth in self-regulation and emotional tolerance.

Stop second-guessing your clinical decisions and start reporting to parents with confidence. Learn how to name exactly what is happening in the playroom and why it matters for the child’s healing journey.

Let’s connect in the comments: What do YOU currently look for as indicators that play therapy is working? 

Drop your thoughts below!

#PlayTherapy #ChildTherapy #PlayTherapyFramework #MentalHealthProfessionals #TherapistTraining #ClinicalProgress

Join my free Facebook Community Play and Expressive Arts Therapy Playground.

Check out my free resources for mental health professionals working with children, adolescents, and families who want to integrate play therapy and expressive arts into their clinical work.

I work with individuals and agencies to develop successful strategies and meet the treatment needs of your child and adolescent clients and their families using play therapy & expressive arts.

Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute video call if you're ready to level up your skills