Experiential Self Care Practices for the Practicing Play Therapists

Diana Gibson

LPC-AT/S, ATR-BC, AAC

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

9am-4:30 pm EST
(APT Contact CEs)

Session Description

Play therapists are continually exposed to emotionally laden stories and experiences from their clients. The negative effects of such exposure can begin to cause therapists to become oversaturated and decrease their resiliency and balance in their lives. Through stories and images, the presenter explores the possibilities of experiential activities as an effective tool for resiliency, processing, and ethical boundaries between work and home. This workshop explores the effectiveness of using experiential activities as a processing tool in response to the lived play therapy experience of working with diverse clientele. Demonstration and exploration of supplies and directives will guide play therapists through engaging in experiential self care practices, such as visual journaling, and be led through five different expressive modalities to use in their own self care practice.

Primary Area: Play Therapy Special Topics

Play Therapy Competencies Addressed: Professional Engagement in Play Therapy

Theoretical Basis: Humanistic

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will explore aspects of secondary stress, vicarious traumatization, and burnout in relation to the therapeutic relationship between the play therapist and the patient.

2. Participants will be able to identify symptoms of deteriorating self care in play therapists and coping strategies for prevention.

3. Participants will become familiar with five expressive art media to utilize within the self-care process.

4. Participants will be able to identify three possible interventions utilizing expressive modalities with their individual populations of play therapy clients.

5. Participants will explore play therapy supervision challenges and benefits to utilizing expressive modalities.

6. Participants will become familiar with the challenges and successes of expressive modalities in response to play therapy interaction in order to combat secondary stress, vicarious trauma, and/or burnout.

Brief Bios

Diana Gibson graduated from St. Mary of the Woods College in 2016 with a dual Master's Degree in Art Therapy and Counseling. Before this she attended The University of North Texas to pursue a PhD in Art Education following a Master's Degree in Education from Sam Houston State University. This is also where she received her Bachelor's of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art. She has extensive experience working with children, adolescents, and adults using art therapy to overcome some of the toughest obstacles in their lives. She started her journey at Cook Children's Medical Center providing therapeutic art experiences to the families and patients in 2009 and remained the Resident Artist for eight years.

She then moved on to The Art Station in 2017 to provide art therapy services to populations such as, but not limited to, individuals diagnosed mental health disorders, mental health inpatient units, outpatient behavioral health centers for youth, veterans, and foster agencies. Diana also supervises interns in the field of art therapy as well as counseling in order to serve our future generations of therapists and counselors. She is currently an adjunct professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin in the Graduate Art Therapy Department. Recently, Diana has started a new initiative to provide art therapy services to other therapists in her program ""Art Therapy for Therapists"". She has also attended the Animal Assisted Counseling Academy provided by Texas State University to become certified as an animal assisted counselor with her therapy dog, Sketch. Sketch is a young male Papillion and has been in training since he was 12 weeks old. Diana is also a muralist, painter, sculptor, as well as a wife and mother of three.

Questions?

Please contact Dr. Kristie Opiola regarding program questions at kopiola@charlotte.edu.

Please contact the Office of School and Community Partnerships at oscp-coed@charlotte.edu if you have questions regarding registration.

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