Client-Led Care for Children
A common experience trauma survivors articulate is that choice was taken from them; they didn’t get to choose what happened. This is as true for child survivors as it is for adults. And it’s why, at Family Services of Greater Vancouver, trauma-informed care centers on the client, whether they’re 3 or 63.
For the trauma counsellors at FSGV who work with children, the philosophy of trauma-informed, client-led care gets a small, yet significant update: trauma-informed, child-led.
This approach isn’t one-size-fits-all; instead, it’s clinically responsive to the individual child, their developmental stage, their needs, and the unique ways they show up in sessions. This is how we mete them where they’re at. While adults in counselling often do talk therapy, young children don’t usually have the language to describe their experiences or internal world in words. Instead, they play it out and the results are powerful.
Life Lessons and Conflict
In sessions, children play out experiences: ones they want to have and ones they’re trying to make sense of. Specialized clinical counsellors notice the themes that arise. Play therapy offers an accessible and developmentally appropriate opportunity to heal from a traumatic relationship or experience.
Children learn through play, even early in their development. For example: peek-a-book and hide-and-seek are an evolution of the same game, increasing in complexity as children age. In both, it’s exercise for the child’s nervous system, to learn what separation and reunion feel like.
Another example: a game of monsters and fairies. A child’s storytelling might explore themes of power, justice, and order. They may share the satisfaction of successful escape or just punishment of a monster. Counsellors can support social learning by naming feelings, building social reasoning in narrating “the fairies don’t like it when the monster stomps on their homes,” and modeling boundaries—all inside a game.
Interruption Meets Restoration
“Child-centered therapy is about tuning into what’s happening in the child’s inner world,” explains Areej Siddiqui, a counsellor in FSGV’s PEACE program for children and youth who have experienced family violence. Trauma can interrupt normative development, especially of a child’s sense of personal agency and emotional regulation. Play offers, well, a playground for restoration.
In the play therapy room, counsellors create opportunities for children to make decisions. This can be as simple as asking the child whether they’d like their snack at the beginning or at the end of the meeting. Empowering survivors’ decision-making is vital in supporting the healthy reintegration of their autonomy; it’s the foundation of the story “I have the power to choose.”
How trauma is presenting and how a child is playing can show us how to support the restoration of their sense of autonomy and power. The clinical counsellors at FSGV are attuned, observant, and responsive, integrating what they see into how they interact with a child in order to best model processing feelings and experiences. Our play therapy rooms provide the space to do that in the language of play.
We can’t change what happened, but we do have the ability to restore power, one snack and one game at a time—for an impact that changes lives for years to come.