Play therapy can do more than we thought. Much more. Integrating Extremes: Aggression and Death in the Playroom offers a new perspective on working with kids. Lisa Dion, LPC, RPT-S, provides therapists and other professionals that work with kids a science-based process for working with children at the deepest, most profound levels of healing while staying safe and sane.

This book explores a new understanding of aggression and death play that's based on brain function and neuro-science. It provides therapists with a framework to authentically work with the intensity of aggression and death play, without causing their own nervous systems to start to shut down. Integrating Extremes shows therapists how to facilitate aggression and death play in a way that truly allows healing to occur, for both the therapist and the child, at the deepest level possible.

A Handbook of Play Therapy with Aggressive Children is an invaluable resource for both new and seasoned child practitioners. This comprehensive compilation of specific and practical techniques provides child and play therapists with the tools they need to address the challenges of treating aggressive children.

Authored by David A. Crenshaw and John B. Mordock, who together bring over fifty years of experience in the residential treatment of severely aggressive and often traumatized children, this book covers the essential elements of play therapy. Key topics include:

• The therapeutic alliance and aims of play therapy with aggressive children.
• Setting limits on destructive and obtrusive behaviors.
• Typical play themes of aggressive children and developing distancing and displacement through playful action.
• Teaching, modeling, and structuring action play.
• Creating more mature defenses and calming strategies.
• The role of interpretation and the use of spontaneous drawings as a bridge to fantasy play.
• Specific drawing techniques to access the inner world of children.
• Teaching and modeling pro-social skills and the language of feeling.
• Facilitating affect expression and modulation, contained reenactment of trauma, and children's ability to mourn tangible as well as intangible losses.

The authors also introduce the Play Therapy Decision Grid, a tool designed to guide therapists in selecting the most appropriate level of therapy for a child based on their resources and the anxiety provoked by the therapy process.