Book Study – Integrating Extremes: Aggression and Death in the Playroom

Integrating Extremes: Aggression and Death in the Playroom

By Lisa Dion, LPC, RPT-S

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 who work with kids a science-based process for working with children at the deepest, most profound levels of healing while ensuring those therapists stay safe and sane. This book explores a new understanding of aggression and death play that’s based on brain function and neuroscience. 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.

Participants will:

1. Develop an understanding of aggression and death play that is based on brain function and neuroscience.
2. Explore the four threats to the brain that activate a fight/flight/freeze/collaspe response and why this is so important to know when working with children.
3. Learn practical ways to authentically work with the intensity of aggression and death play, without causing compassion fatigue or burnout.
4. Gain an understanding of how to set boundaries without shaming or shutting the child down.
5. Learn ways to regulate yourself in the midst of intense play so as to model to the child client how to do the same, thereby enhancing the child’s capacity for self-regulation.