Play Can Open Gates to Imagination
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A 12-year-old boy was referred to me by his school counsellor. The note said he bullies, and gets bullied.
In the sessions that followed, I could not have predicted what would unfold between us.
When Words Are Not Enough
In the early sessions, I tried to build a picture of who he was: his family, his friendships, his history. Very little reliable information came through. He was guarded, almost unreachable. Paucity of speech. Flat affect. Uncertain responses to even simple requests. The space between us felt wide.
This is not unusual in child therapy. Children are not small adults. They do not come into a room, sit down, and articulate their inner world in words. Particularly children who have learned, for whatever reason, that words are not safe, or simply not available to them. For many children, the feelings that most need to be expressed are precisely the ones that language cannot reach.
By the fourth session, I changed my approach. I introduced free play.
What Happened When He Played
The shift was immediate and remarkable.
In free play, he was uninhibited and organised. He made food for the dolls. He changed and washed their dresses. He bathed them. He wove imaginative, intricate stories through objects and movement, stories that the same child had barely been able to produce in spoken sentences just a few weeks earlier.
It was a reminder of something that child psychologists have long understood: play is not a break from the work of therapy. Play is the work. Research published in the World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics describes play therapy as helping children change their mode of self-expression from avoidant or distressed behaviours to more expressive ones, using toys and activities as their words. For children who struggle to communicate verbally, play becomes the language through which their inner world becomes accessible.
Over subsequent sessions, his play grew richer. Stories about violence. Stories about death. Sometimes, stories about affection. Each one telling me something he could not say directly. By the ninth session, he began to self-talk during play: a quiet, significant signal that he had come to feel safe enough in the room to let his internal world become audible.
A 2023 systematic review in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that over half of randomised controlled studies on play-based interventions showed significantly improved social interaction in children, with play-based approaches also showing benefits for communication skills. Research consistently confirms what clinicians observe in practice: play therapy helps children suffering from bullying, domestic violence or abuse, and social withdrawal, and it facilitates the kind of adult-child communication that conventional talk therapy often cannot reach.
Working with Feelings
Once trust was established through play, we could begin to work with feelings more directly.
We used a feelings sheet together. We explored different emotions, their facial expressions, and what they might look like in the body and in behaviour. Two dolls became characters through which emotions could be acted out and examined. He used his own face to demonstrate what each emotion looked like, a small but meaningful act of embodied self-awareness.
Then we explored feelings about his family members. This opened something. The play that had been happening in the session was not separate from his life at home. It was a reflection of it. The foreground of home was being played out in the background of the therapy room, in the stories about the dolls, in the narratives about violence and care.
What the Family Revealed
Towards the end of our work together, I met his family. What they shared filled in pieces I had been holding without context. There had been violence at home, in both directions. And there had been a previous mental health assessment, followed by medications for autism and schizophrenia-spectrum presentations.
As I looked at what he had shown me across our sessions, things began to cohere. The flat affect, the limited verbal communication, the difficulty with social reciprocity, and the remarkable capacity for imaginative and symbolic play once he felt safe: these were the presentations of a child whose inner world was rich and complex, but who had not yet been met in a way that allowed it to emerge.
This is part of what makes child therapy, and play-based approaches in particular, so important. A child who presents as unreachable through one modality may be entirely reachable through another. The question is not whether the child can communicate. It is whether we are using the right language.
In the Last Session
In our final session, I asked him what he had felt about our time together. He said he had liked playing with the blocks and drawing.
It was a simple answer. But it was an answer, offered freely, by a child who had barely spoken when we first met. I told him how I had felt in our sessions. I gave his mother a list of referral resources for ongoing support. I informed the school counsellor.
Eleven sessions. A boy who bullied and was bullied. A foreground of chaos at home and a background of imagination in the therapy room. And somewhere in between, through the medium of play, a small opening.
Why Play Therapy Matters
Children are not always able to name what they are carrying. They act it out, play it out, draw it out. The violence in the doll's story. The careful way the clothes are washed. The food prepared for figures who might represent the people they love, or the people they fear, or both.
Play therapy provides a structured, intentional space in which a child's inner world can be received without demand, without pressure to articulate what may not yet have language. It is particularly valuable for children who are navigating bullying, family conflict, trauma, social difficulties, or neurodevelopmental differences. Research on play therapy in children with autism and related presentations describes it as helping children to honour their unique mental abilities and developmental levels, and to achieve optimal growth and development at their own pace.
The child I worked with showed me something I already knew but was reminded of again: that imagination does not disappear when a child goes quiet. It waits for the right door.
- Sakshi Singhania, Counselling Psychologist, Feel Fuzzy
This piece was written by Sakshi Singhania, counselling psychologist at Feel Fuzzy. Sakshi has supported 2000+ individuals across the world, including clients from India, the USA, the UK, Canada, the Middle East, and beyond. She uses an integrated approach combining Integrated Somatic Trauma Therapy, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and Circadian Rhythm Optimisation, and works with stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, self-esteem, relationships, and more.
She believes that learning to love and accept oneself is often the starting point for healing, and she brings genuine curiosity and warmth to every session.
You can learn more about working with Sakshi Singhania here.
References
- Elbeltagi, R., et al. (2023). Play therapy in children with autism: Its role, implications, and limitations. World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics, 12(1), 1-17.
- Dijkstra-de Neijs, L., Tisseur, C., et al. (2023). Effectivity of play-based interventions in children with autism spectrum disorder and their parents: A systematic review. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53(4), 1588-1617.
- Ren, Y., Jia, S., Liu, C., et al. (2024). A systematic review of the effect of sandplay therapy on social communication deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Pediatrics, 12.
- Landreth, G. L. (2012). Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship (3rd ed.). Routledge.