Playful Practice

Building materials can do much more in clinical work than fill time or build rapport. Open-ended, instructional, collaborative, constrained, and repair-based builds each create different possibilities for expression, agency, flexibility, persistence, and relational work. The materials matter, too. What makes building clinically useful is knowing what you’re asking of a client, what you’re making hard and why, and what you do together with what shows up.

Stories can be powerful clinical tools, but their value isn't just in what they say. Shared, co-created, invited, and internalized stories each create a different relationship to lived experience. This article explores how therapists can use stories to adjust that distance—helping clients stay close enough for the work to matter, while far enough away to reflect, make meaning, and change what becomes possible.

Fidgeting is often the body’s attempt to regulate sensory load, not a sign of distraction. This article reframes fidgets through sensory systems, showing how different inputs support or disrupt attention depending on context. It critiques commercialization that blurs tools and toys, and highlights how misinterpretation leads to restriction—especially for neurodivergent youth—while calling for environments that support embodied attention.

Creative work in therapy can stabilize or overwhelm depending on how it’s used. This article distinguishes therapeutic art from art therapy, emphasizing clinical containment, scope, and ethical responsibility. It explores how material choice, structure, and pacing shape activation, and frames containment as a practice of care that protects client autonomy, supports regulation, and resists extraction-based models of healing.

When families ask to cancel IHT sessions, they are communicating important clinical information about stress, capacity, and need. This article reframes cancellation as an opportunity for intervention, showing how providers can adapt sessions to real-life circumstances, maintain continuity of care, and strengthen engagement through flexibility, presence, and team-based responsiveness.

Therapeutic use of games becomes more effective when clinicians focus on game mechanics—the rule structures that shape emotional, cognitive, and relational experiences—rather than using games simply as engaging activities.