What is Mindfulness Based Play-Family Therapy?

Over the past thirty years, Dottie Higgins Klein, the director of the Center has developed this way to use Play Therapy and Family Therapy as reciprocal parts of a holistic system. In the Play Therapy component, Mindfulness Based Play-Family Therapy uses both directed and non-directed approaches to promote the healing of emotional and somatic problems in children, and the correction of behavioral and developmental issues. In the Family Therapy component, it uses Contextual Family Therapy with the child's family. Within this component, the child is not singled out in a negative way, nor is the child excluded. Play-Family Therapy includes Mindful Parenting sessions. The adults often begin to see the child's presenting symptoms within the larger context, and are encouraged to make changes in themselves. Many therapists working in this modality receive additional training in Contextual Family Therapy in order to see individual adults and couples.

The Play Therapy component is a most effective and enjoyable tool for working with children ages two to twelve, in a family context. In the play therapy, the child's individual personality and unique self are given direct attention. The healing addresses traumatic events that may be part of the child's history. Key to MBP-FT is the therapist's intention to establish a space of unconditional presence in which the emotional and somatic conditions of the child are free to unfold from their confinement and to be transformed. Ideally, it nurtures the growth of trust that allows the child to feel, "I am okay for being me as I am in my core self."