{"id":120365,"date":"2025-09-24T10:27:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T15:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thechicagoschool.edu\/insight\/?p=120365"},"modified":"2025-09-25T13:00:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T18:00:19","slug":"healing-through-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thechicagoschool.edu\/insight\/from-the-magazine\/healing-through-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Healing Through Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY ISABEL NELSON<\/p>\n

For Kim Vander Dussen, Psy.D., play is serious business. A professor in the Psy.D. Clinical Psychology program at The Chicago School, Dr. Vander Dussen is coordinator of the Child and Adolescent concentration. She has been teaching in this field for more than 20 years, but her passion for children\u2019s mental health began long before. \u201cI knew from when I was in high school that I wanted to work with kids,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen says. \u201cI\u2019ve never wavered from that commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she began her graduate studies, she entered a program much like the one in which she teaches today, focusing on child and adolescent psychology and doing her practicums based on the specific needs of young people. Dr. Vander Dussen allowed the children to show her what they needed with the best tool available to them: their play.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat children were naturally drawn to do whenever they were allowed to be self-directed was play,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen says, \u201cso I knew they were showing me things that were very meaningful to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Vander Dussen says that while pursuing more training to better understand children and their play, she \u201cstumbled upon this program where I could get a certificate in play therapy, which then led me to discovering the Association for Play Therapy.\u201d That association, of which she is immediate past chair of the board of directors, was life changing. Although she\u2019d been to many conventions, Dr. Vander Dussen says the people she met through the Association for Play Therapy felt like \u201cher people,\u201d understanding children as complex human beings.<\/p>\n

As with any specialized field, however, the average layperson has their own misconceptions about play therapy. \u201cPeople think that play therapy is using board games to trick kids into talking.\u201d Others assume that it\u2019s only parents who need assistance, but Dr. Vander Dussen thinks that couldn\u2019t be further from the truth. \u201cChildren are whole beings with thoughts, feelings, and struggles of their own, and to believe that only parents struggle minimizes the humanness of children,\u201d she says \u201cPlay therapy is a whole system for how we engage with children therapeutically, with goals and aims that align with the needs of children.\u201d<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean adults don\u2019t benefit from Dr. Vander Dussen\u2019s work. In a 2023 article for Insight, she detailed how many clinicians had minimal formal preparation for handling the immense trauma caused by war. \u201cThe field of professional psychology in Ukraine is in its infancy,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen wrote. \u201cThere is no licensing board, no training requirements, and no oversight. You need only a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology to practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

A group of counseling psychologists had been involved in developing the Play Therapy Training Institute at the University of Central Missouri to support Ukrainian clinicians working with displaced and traumatized children. After Russia\u2019s invasion in 2022, the need for urgent, targeted intervention skyrocketed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe circumstances for the clinicians working with children were dire,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen wrote. \u201cThey needed help providing intervention in bomb shelters, with no supplies, no resources, and little to no privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Vander Dussen responded by conducting a two-part training focused on play therapy interventions specifically designed for extreme crisis situations, brief techniques that required no resources and emphasized co-regulation between children and caregivers.<\/p>\n

Some participants had to log in from bomb shelters, so they often couldn\u2019t turn their cameras on as they learned. \u00a0\u201cThere was a translator I worked with, she was in Kiev at the time,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen says. \u201cShe told me that, as she was translating, and I was directing, she was doing all of [the work] too. She said, \u2018Oh, my God, this has helped me so much.\u2019 It was incredibly humbling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The success of these sessions led to Dr. Vander Dussen\u2019s invitation to co-lead a more extensive five-month training series with the Neurosequential Network, which develops training and treatment programs. With two other trainers, she introduced foundational principles of developmental trauma and its impact on functioning, providing Ukrainian clinicians with a framework to plan long-term interventions for children in schools and refugee centers.<\/p>\n

For Dr. Vander Dussen, the experience was perspective altering and life changing. \u201cThere I\u2019d been, complaining about doing therapy over Zoom,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ll never complain about anything I have to do ever again. I recognize that, in America, I get to practice psychotherapy with a degree of privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY ISABEL NELSON For Kim Vander Dussen, Psy.D., play is serious business. A professor in the Psy.D. Clinical Psychology program at The Chicago School, Dr. Vander Dussen is coordinator of the Child and Adolescent concentration. She has been teaching in this field for more than 20 years, but her passion for children\u2019s mental health began long before. \u201cI knew from when I was in high school that I wanted to work with kids,\u201d Dr. Vander Dussen says. \u201cI\u2019ve never wavered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":120367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,113],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1062],"class_list":["post-120365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-magazine","category-psychology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHealing Through Play: How Dr. Vander Dussen Uses Play Therapy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discover how Dr. Kim Vander Dussen uses play therapy to help children heal from trauma, including her impactful work training Ukrainian clinicians in crisis zones.\" 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