Integrating Expressive Arts and Play Therapy with Children and Adolescents

Book Preface

Welcome to Integrating Expressive Arts and Play Therapy With Children and Adolescents . The premise of this book began as an idea in October 2010 at the Association for Play Therapy ’s Annual Conference in Sacramento, California. Rachel Livsey, Senior Editor at John Wiley, approached me (Green) with an idea. She inquired about my interest in compiling a resource-type book integrating the expressive arts and play therapy frameworks so that clinicians would have ease of access to the ethical considerations and competency implications when developing a multimodal treatment stance.

Little has been written in the literature regarding clinicians seeking to competently integrate the expressive arts into their child play psychotherapy practice. At fi rst, I was ecstatic about the idea. This could be another opportunity for our disciplines to bridge commonalties under the expressive art therapy umbrella, as opposed to us looking at the negatives and the defi cits in each other and our training. Sometimes we engage in anxiety-driven, petty turf wars, where unchallenged ideology and rigid doctrine blinds us to the real mission of why we ’re here in the first place. At this point, I also instinctively knew this project was going to have a bit of a synergistic element, and so it began. First, I implored Athena Drewes to co-edit the volume with me. We sought out the consult of one of the gurus in the expressive arts fi eld, Barry Cohen, who hosts the annual Expressive Arts Therapy Summit in New York City. This summit is a conference where therapists from all of the expressive arts disciplines from all over the world come together to provide trainings from their respective fi elds of expertise. This is when the book began to take its shape, focus, and soul.

This guidebook ’s overall premise is meant as a practical illustration for child-based mental health clinicians to competently integrate interventions and approaches from the expressive arts and play therapy disciplines. Moreover, we compiled this volume so that clinicians and graduate students in mental health programs can augment their therapeutic toolkit and training within a competent, research-based practice. The second aim of the book is to provide a resource guide and practical textbook for educators in university settings who teach either play therapy or one of the disciplines in the expressive arts that seek to integrate disciplines for holistic care of children, adolescents, and families. We have found that clinicians who are certifi ed in the expressive art therapies are typically unfamiliar with some of the interventions and approaches used in play therapy, and vice versa. Therefore, we hope this book will be a bridge between the expressive art therapies and play, as they are therapeutic modalities utilized with children that are complementary in their healing and creative capacities. Play therapists who utilize techniques from the expressive arts disciplines may benefi t from exposure to the diverse and innovative approaches within the expressive arts literature that this book presents.