Hannah Jones/Winonan

On March 1, Winona State’s Rochester campus hosted a workshop inviting students and professionals alike to learn about the usage of play therapy for children with family members suffering from addiction.

This program, led by Dr. Gaylia Borror, allowed participants to learn about the various ways children can find healing through the action of play.

Borror has been a play therapist since the 1980s, and still remembers the early 2000s when she had her own private practice in Rochester. It was there, working with many clients who didn’t have ample insurance coverage, that she saw a whole new side to the Rochester Community.

“It was amazing to see the trauma and the pain,” she said. uses her training and experience as a Registered Play Therapist –Supervisor to train students in a practice that she knows  makes a difference in the lives of a lot of children.

More children, in fact, than many may realize.

Children of individuals  with addiction face many challenges. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, nearly one in every five adult Americans has grown up living with a relative whose life has been impacted by alcohol. Many of those one in five adults spent their childhoods dealing with shame, fear, anxiety, guilt, neglect and abuse because of their parents’ addiction.

Even closer to home, a 2010 survey found that 7.5 million children in the country had been living with an alcoholic parent in the last year.

Children, Borror explained, are not miniature adults, and cannot express their feelings in the same way adults can. In order to reach out to and heal children who have been exposed to a home situation troubled by addiction, play therapy communicates with them on their level.

During play therapy, Dr. Borror explained, children “tell their story through their play.”

Brittni Timmerman, graduate assistant and co-presenter at the workshop, went into detail on a few of the toys that can help with play therapy sessions: dollhouses help children simulate the home, and can help them explore their issues with their home situation; doctor kits can help them express desires for healing, assuaging fear and anxiety over a parent whose health is failing; vehicles, like toy cars, buses, and bikes, can represent a desire for travel—for escape.

“Play therapy provides a non-threatening, safe environment for children to express their feelings through a medium,” Timmerman said. “Children are inherently incredibly resilient. Play therapy taps into their strengths and allows them to draw on that.”

During the workshop on March 1, participants watched a video of a specific play therapy case involving a young girl whose mother needed a liver transplant. The girl, for her therapy sessions, asked for some squishy goop-like material to play with.

Once it was given to her, she began to roll the material into long snakes, then cut the snakes into little bits. She explained that she had turned them into “livers.” She pretended to set up a whole liver-making factory and ordered workers to hurry up and make livers so her mother could play with her.

“Children have their own best answers for what they need,” Borror said. “It takes time, but it’s rewarding—and it’s exciting.”

The workshop, which made steps toward getting more students into a field dedicated to helping children, also made a few unintended steps in the personal lives of a few of the attendees. Several of the students, Borror said, wrote about how the program resonated with some of their own traumatic experiences in their pasts.

“People come to counseling for all kinds of reasons,” Borror said.

One chief reason: “Don’t let what happened to them happen to other people.” For many attendees, Borror said, their own personal pain had not entirely healed.

Timmerman is among Borror’s best students, and when she completes her coursework and training, she will be eligible to begin work as a play therapist under Borror’s or another qualified Registered Play Therapist – Supervisor. With the help of play therapists like Borror and students interested in turning their concern, their worry, and even their pain into action, the healing can continue.

Contact Hannah at [email protected]