Southside’s Therapeutic Play Service runs alongside our Family Support and Domestic Abuse services to provide in-depth therapeutic support for individual children and young people who have experienced trauma and adverse childhood experiences. Southside workers identify children who need this specialist support through assessments/reviews where children need help to build resilience and parent(s)/carers need help to understand their children’s needs and ensure that their resilience continues to grow.

The activities are:

• thINC Groups – these therapeutic emotional wellbeing groups enable children affected by trauma aged 7-11 years to build trusting relationships, explore feelings, express themselves and have fun whilst re-building confidence and self-esteem.
• Parent and Child Therapeutic Creative Workshops for children and their parent/carer together
• Therapeutic Art Sessions with individual children, and with children and parents/carers together
• Therapeutic Family Play Sessions
• Individual parenting support to identify the impact of abuse and trauma on children and help access available support.

Therapeutic play sessions create a safe space to improve children’s confidence and self-esteem and provide opportunities to relax and have fun. Our play sessions are child led and emphasise children’s choice and control, in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance. The workers use the Thrive approach, empathy, positive regard and congruency to help rebuild children’s confidence in themselves and in relationships with others. They help children to express their feelings of being unsafe, anxious and fearful and help them make sense of their experiences in order to overcome some of these these feelings. We give the children an opportunity to choose their own activities, try out new things and express themselves creatively.

We support parents to understand the impact of abuse, trauma and loss on their children, how to support them to process this within the family and learn ways to cope and deal with difficult feelings.