Behavioral cognitive therapy is not child’s play. With Playing CBT, it can be.
You go to work just like you do every morning, meet one of your colleagues, and great her with a smile, just like every other morning. But this time, she don’t smile back.
Suddenly, thoughts start rushing through your head.
What happened? What did I do to upset her? Doesn’t she like me anymore?
How do you react? Do you spent the rest of the day feeling hurt? Do you shrug your shoulders and dismiss it? Or do you just smile?
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is all about how our interpretation of an event determines our behavioral reaction and the way we cope with that event.
The same applies to children and adolescents: an event leads to an automatic thought, which evokes emotions and generates a behavioral reaction.
The greatest challenge faced by therapists is helping children identify their interpretations, automatic thoughts and emotions, in order to increase their capacity for emotional regulation and give them a wider range of behaviors to choose from.
But how do you get children to open up and share their inner worlds with their therapist?
How do you spontaneously and indirectly convey all the meanings of an emotional experience?
How do you help children identify, recognize and stop those chain reactions that lead to uncontrolled, emotional eruptions?
That’s exactly what Playing CBT is for.
Playing CBT is a unique game that provides therapists with quick, direct access to children’s actual emotional worlds in a fun and creative way. While playing, children learn to identify the diverse elements of their emotional experience, practice being more flexible with their thinking, emotions, sensations and behavior, and discover alternative and better ways of dealing with the different situations they encounter in their everyday lives.
The result is substantial reinforcement of self-control and emotional regulation, and a significant decrease in impulsive behavior.
Playing CBT is based on the second-wave therapeutic approach of the cognitive behavioral model, but also supports equally effective application of approaches from the first wave (behavioral therapy) and the third wave (spiritual teachings and mindfulness) as well.
A Therapeutic Game
Playing CBT is based on the behavioral-cognitive theory.
Unique and Effective
A unique, effective therapeutic tool for developing more flexible emotional, cognitive, physical, and behavioral reactions and habits.
Suitable for all ages and all forms of therapy
Playing CBT is highly effective for children, adolescents, parental counselling, staff training, and family therapy, in individual, couple or group sessions.
Fun and Motivation
Change occurs while playing and having fun, through open dialog and a positive atmosphere.
A Bridge for Parents
Playing CBT illuminates the child’s inner experience for their parents, and helps them better understand the causes for their children’s behavior. It also helps clarify the parents’ own inner experiences and the causes for their own reactions.
Improvement in Three Simple Steps
Playing CBT allows patients to make significant progress through three essential steps:
- Acknowledging all parts of the emotional experience – thought, emotion, sensation, and behavior.
- Identifying external triggers (events) and internal triggers (thoughts and emotions).
- Applying flexibility of emotions, thoughts and behavior by thinking coping thoughts, and using the Rethink cards to refute automatic thoughts.
Inside the box
The box contains cards with carefully chosen questions. It provides many options for diverse therapeutic goals, ages and developmental stages:
- Introduction to the Cognitive Behavioral Approach: Game board 1 and 2.
- Emotion Games – Emotion Bingo, Mixing Emotions, and Identifying Others’ Emotions.
- Physical Sensation Games – the Emotion Sculptor, Associating Emotions with Physical Sensations.
- Thinking Games – Emotion-Event memory game, Coping Thought/Negative Thought, On the One Hand/On the Other Hand, and more.
- Thinking Traps – The Mind Reader, On Second Thought.
- Interpersonal interactions -The Chain of Behavioral Reactions, The Chain of Parental Reactions.
- And much more: Quartets (Go Fish), Speed CBT, Positive Narrative/Negative Narrative.
The box contains a detailed booklet with complete instructions on how to use all the items in the kit.
Two game boards are included to offer as many options as possible, for both beginner and advanced players:
- Beginners’ game board (stage 1): learning to identify events, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
- Advanced game board (stage 2): learning to identify events, thoughts, emotions, behavior, coping thoughts, and physical sensations.
Also included:
- Emotion board – to identify emotions , and a scale from 0 to 10 to measure their intensity.
- Physical sensations board – to identify physical sensations and understand the connection between sensations and emotions (with the help of the emotions cards – see below).
- Event cards (green) – to facilitate talking about events from the child’s everyday life.
- Negative thought cards (red) – to understand and identify automatic thoughts that are ineffective.
- Coping thought cards (light blue) – to facilitate development of flexible thinking.
- Emotions cards (blue) – to display “pleasant” and “unpleasant” emotions, with a scale to measure the intensity of these emotions from 0 to 10 and associate them with thoughts and behavior.
- Physical sensation cards (orange) – to identify physical sensations and associate them with emotional experiences.
- Behavior cards (purple) – to distinguish between behaviors that are effective for the long-term (adaptive) and emotion-driven behaviors that are only effective for the short term.
- Strip of thinking traps – a list of 10 cognitive distortions based on the cognitive behavioral model, used to identify the automatic thoughts that correlate with these thinking traps.
- Rethink cards (yellow) – questions that allow players to refute automatic (negative) thoughts that arise for each corresponding thinking trap.
- Task cards (green) – social situations.
- Blank cards – cards that allow children to add their own personal experiences using a whiteboard marker (included).
- Emos – pawns with faces displaying emotions.
- Tokens – 60 tokens.
Who is it for?
Playing CBT is suitable for anyone who interacts with children and addresses their emotions and behaviors, who seeks quick, easy access to their inner worlds:
- Psychologists
- Social workers
- Educational counselors
- Art and drama therapists
- Life coaches
- Group facilitators
- Family therapists
- Educators
and more