The Power of Play
What Play Therapy Is, Why It Works, and Why Words Aren’t Always Enough
If you’ve ever watched a child in a play therapy session and wondered are they actually doing anything? Then this is for you. And the short answer: YES! Much more than you might imagine. 😊
Play therapy isn’t a break from real work. It is the real work. Understanding why requires a brief, honest look at how children, and even adults, actually process experiences in life.
The Brain Has More Than One Language
The part of the brain most people think of when they imagine ‘talking through a problem’ is the prefrontal cortex — the thinking, reasoning, language-processing part that sits right behind our forehead. It’s remarkable. It’s where we can reflect, plan, problem-solve, and articulate. It’s the part that responds when in conversation.
But, it’s not the part that stores trauma, anxiety, fear, grief, or shame. Those experiences live deeper — in the limbic system and brainstem, the older (pre-verbal), faster parts of the brain that respond to threat and safety before a single word is formed. ¹˙²
Current research has established what clinicians have long observed: that traumatic and deeply emotional experiences are encoded in the body and the nervous system. They live as sensation, posture, reaction, and feeling rather than narrative (language) memory.¹
The same goes for joyful or celebratory experiences. The amygdala, in particular, doesn't discriminate or ascribe a value. It encodes all high-arousal emotional experiences regardless of whether they're threatening or joyful. Intense positive memories (the birth of a child, Christmas morning, a moment of profound belonging, a peak experience) are all stored and retrievable through the same subcortical architecture as fear and grief. ³
The problem, is that the brain has a well-documented negativity bias. Threat-relevant experiences (such as trauma) are prioritized for deep encoding because survival depends on it. In other words, trauma, fear, and shame tend to be encoded more rapidly, more deeply, and with stronger somatic tagging than equivalent positive experiences. ⁴
Joy, celebration, and belonging can be stored with comparable depth, but they typically require either repeated exposure or deliberately sustained attention. This is the neurological premise for practices like gratitude, savoring, or ‘taking in the good.’ The experience has to be held long enough, and with enough presence, for it to move from short-term processing into lasting structural change.⁵
This means that asking a child, or even an adult, to talk their way through something stored at that level is a little like asking someone to describe a color they’ve never seen. The language simply isn’t there. Not because they’re resistant. Not because they’re being difficult or even confrontational. But because the experience was never stored in words to begin with.
Play is the language the deeper brain already speaks.
What Play Actually Does
Play isn’t the opposite of being intentional, serious, or even of work itself. For a child, play is the primary vehicle for processing experience, building understanding, and making sense of a world that they are just beginning to grasp. This isn’t a theory. It’s observable in brain development research, in attachment science, and in decades of clinical outcome data. ⁶˙⁷˙⁸
In play therapy, a trained therapist creates a safe, structured environment in which the child is free to express. They express through movement, symbol, story, art, and relationship what they can’t yet speak with words. The sandbox becomes a landscape for what’s happening inside. The figurines become the characters of their internal world. The therapist isn’t passive. They are reading, tracking, and responding. Not to the play itself, but to what ‘the play’ is communicating.
The nervous system must first experience felt safety (not just be told it’s safe, but actually experience safety in the body), before any deeper processing can take place. Play, by its nature, activates our social engagement system.² It signals safety. And when safety is present, the nervous system opens. The deeper brain begins to process what it’s actually been carrying.
Experiential Learning Isn’t Optional — It’s Primary
Research in experiential learning, from Dewey’s foundational work to contemporary neuroscience, consistently demonstrates that human beings learn, heal, and integrate experience most deeply through doing, not just through listening or talking. ⁹˙¹⁰ Direct experience engages the whole person: body, soul (mind, emotion, volition), spirit, relationship, and thought together. This isn’t a pedagogical preference, but a holistically integrated design.
For children carrying difficult experiences, play and experiential approaches are not a second-best option when talking fails. They are often the first and most direct route to the places that need to be reached.
You are not watching your child play.
You are watching them do the deepest work they know how to do.
A Word to Parents
It can feel counterintuitive, even frustrating, to sit in a waiting room while your child plays with sand, paints, or moves around a room. You want them to get better. You want to see or hear something measurable (by verbal, adult standards). Be encouraged, something is happening. It may just look a little different than how you expected healing to look.
The most important thing you can offer your child in this process is permission. Permission to heal in the language that is natural to them, at the pace their nervous system requires, without the pressure to perform or progress through words they may not yet have.
Have you ever found yourself carrying something you couldn’t quite put into words, something that lives more in your body than in your memory? Then you already understand, in your own way, exactly why play therapy works.
Healing doesn’t always begin with words.
Sometimes it begins with a sandbox, a paintbrush,
And someone safe enough to play with.
References
1. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
2. Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.
3. LeDoux, J.E. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster.
4. Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
5. Hanson, R. (2013). Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. Harmony Books.
6. Landreth, G.L. (2012). Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship (3rd ed.). Routledge.
7. Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock.
8. Schaefer, C.E., & Drewes, A.A. (Eds.) (2014). The Therapeutic Powers of Play (2nd ed.). Wiley.
9. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. Macmillan.
10. Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall.