The Play Therapy Circle

The Playroom as the Third Therapist: Setting Up a Child-Centred Space

In this episode, Kylie continues the foundational series with a deep dive into the child-centred play therapy playroom, what belongs in it, why it matters, and how the space itself communicates safety, welcome, and possibility to the children we work with.

Drawing on Gary Landreth's teaching that the playroom is "the child's world in miniature," Kylie unpacks the t...

Episode 50: Characteristics of a Child-Centered Play Therapist, The Way of Being Behind the Technique

We've hit a milestone, you guys, Episode 50! To mark one year of The Play Therapy Circle Podcast, Kylie Ellison is kicking off a brand-new series unpacking the core topics she covers in her CCPT training programs, starting with a question that comes up again and again in her supervision sessions: what kind of person does this work i...

🎉 Happy 1st Birthday, Play Therapy Circle! + Our First-Ever Conference

It's officially been 12 months since The Play Therapy Circle podcast began and in this special milestone episode, host Kylie Ellison (therapist, clinical supervisor, and play therapy trainer) is celebrating with a shorter, more personal episode recorded on the run between training sessions.

In this episode, Kylie reflects on:
🎙️ A whirlwind first year - reach...

For our very first guest interview on The Play Therapy Circle Podcast, host Kylie Ellison sits down with the incredible Dr. Jodi Mullen, a professor in the counselling and psychological services department at SUNY Oswego, where she has worked as a counsellor educator for nearly 30 years. Jodi is the founder and director of Integrative Counselling Services, a registered play therapy supervisor, a CCPT Master, an internationally soug...

🎧 Flashback Episode: Self-Care for Play Therapists (A Revisit)

We're pulling this one back into your feed because some conversations deserve a second listen, especially when life gets busy and self-care quietly slips down the priority list again. If that's you right now, welcome back to this one.

In this episode, Kylie Ellison gets refreshingly honest about what self-care actually looks like in the life of a play therapist, recorded...

When Parents Push Back: Working with Resistance in Play Therapy

You can have every handout, every strategy, every piece of psychoeducation ready to go, but if the parent sitting across from you is defended, exhausted, and quietly drowning in shame, none of it is going to land. So what do we actually do?

Ever sat across from a resistant parent and thought, "If I could just get through to them, everything would shift for this child"? Y...

Episode 46: Reflecting Feelings (Back to Basics) + Listener Q&A on Post-COVID Babies

In this episode, Kylie returns to her Back to Basics series to unpack one of the most fundamental and often most challenging skills in child-centred play therapy: reflecting feelings. Coming live from the playroom (beanbag and all), she takes listeners through why this skill can feel so vulnerable for beginning play therapists, even though it's ...

This week's episode is one we didn't plan to record, but one that felt necessary.

On the day our community learned of the passing of Dr. Garry Landreth, Kylie sat down to record this special tribute episode in honour of one of the most influential figures in child-centred play therapy history.

Dr. Landreth's contributions to the field are immeasurable. As a Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, he founded the Center for...

Have you ever finished a session and wondered, did any of that even matter? You've shown up, you've held the space, you've given everything you have and then that child walks back out into a world you can't control. A chaotic home. An unstable system. A family in crisis. And you're left sitting with the quiet, heavy question of whether what happens inside the playroom can possibly be enough.

In this episode, Kylie gets honest about ...

Back to Basics: Tracking Plus Your Questions | EP43

This episode marks something new. Listener questions, answered on the show. And the question that came in was so good, it deserved real time and real depth.

But first: a back-to-basics teaching segment on tracking — one of the very first skills we learn in Child-Centred Play Therapy, and one of the most quietly powerful. What it sounds like, why it matters, and the common mist...

Revisited: The Pandemic Ripple Effect

This week, we're reaching back into The Play Therapy Circle archives to revisit a conversation that continues to resonate and perhaps now, more than ever, feels urgently relevant.

The Pandemic Ripple Effect.

If you are working with children aged 4–6 years old right now, whether as a play therapist, counsellor, early childhood educator, teacher, parent or carer, there is a very good chance yo...

Kylie dives deep into the science behind the COVID generation - what the research is now telling us about children born between 2019 and 2022, why so many kids are struggling right now, and why that is absolutely not a reflection of your parenting. From maternal prenatal stress tripling during the pandemic, to MRI findings showing differences in brain development, to the speech delays, separation anxiety, and social-emotional gaps ...

Kylie checks in live from Mildura - exhausted, dinner-less, and fresh off one of her most chaotic travel days yet (yes, there was an emergency Kmart suitcase run). But between the laughs, she unpacks the big takeaways from a massive week of Child-Centred Play Therapy training across Victoria, connecting with close to 70 practitioners in Bendigo, Ballarat, Wyndham Vale, and beyond.

The conversation this week kept coming back to one p...

Is mess in the playroom always therapeutic? In this milestone 40th episode, Kylie challenges some of the assumptions that can creep into Child-Centred Play Therapy practice - specifically around permissiveness and what it really means when a child tips into chaos and destruction during a session.

Kylie unpacks why limit-setting isn't a restriction on a child's freedom - it's one of the most empathetic, clinically informed things a p...

Ever had that nagging feeling that you're not quite good enough - even when the evidence says otherwise? This week, Kylie gets honest about something that came up in real time: imposter syndrome in the helping professions. And if you've ever quietly wondered whether you truly belong in this work, this one is for you.

Imposter syndrome isn't new - the term emerged in the 1970s, originally observed in high-achieving women - but its gr...

Big Feelings, Small Bodies: What Emotional Dysregulation Is Really Telling Us | Ep. 38

When a child explodes, shuts down, bolts from the room, or cries at everything, what is their nervous system actually communicating?

In this episode, Kylie Ellison breaks down the neuroscience of emotional dysregulation in children, unpacking the four key presentations play therapists and caregivers see most: the fight response, the flight response...

In this episode, Kylie breaks down polyvagal theory and its three key nervous system states - safe and social, fight or flight, and freeze/shutdown and explores what each one actually looks like when a child walks through the playroom door. Because understanding which state a child is in changes everything about how you respond to them.

From neuroception (that unconscious, automatic threat-scanning happening in every child's nervous...

Holding Hope in the Playroom | Play Therapy Circle

In one of her most personal episodes yet, host Kylie Ellison pauses to name what so many play therapists are quietly carrying, the weight of showing up for children and families during a time of profound collective anxiety and global uncertainty.

This episode is for you, the therapist in the trenches.

Kylie explores how the state of the world filters into the playroom - from children ...

🎙️ FLASHBACK EPISODE — Episode 7: Understanding the Child's World Through Play

Play is children's universal language — and once you understand it, you'll never look at it the same way again. In this flashback episode, we explore how children use play to communicate what they can't express in words, and what that means for us as CCPT practitioners, parents, educators, and caregivers.

We dive into:

• Why play is a child's p...