December 8, 2023 1pm Battling Burnout in Play Therapy

This workshop is appropriate for play therapists of intermediate to advanced training. It will begin with an open discussion about burn out, giving the audience a chance to voice their experiences and current concerns. Common factors and overlapping themes will be written down to refer back to throughout the presentation, as well as to validate the prevalence of the feelings. The presentation will then briefly outline some of the key literature on effectiveness and discuss how therapists can utilize these resources. From there the presentation will review how the presenter's research on Effective Moments in Play Therapy was conducted and outline the findings. During the afternoon the presentation will focus be on experientially applying the learnings from the research to help the participants develop individualized plans to increase their feelings of effectiveness. Exercises will include developing a plan of self-care, discussing the importance of working with others (such as the child's family, school, and also having supervision and peer support/networking), creating their own journal to record effective moments in play therapy, and more.