What We Do

We are highly experienced in the delivering therapeutic services for children, young people, and adults, particularly in the areas of recovery from trauma (single-incident and the cumulative effects of abuse-related trauma), family violence, parental separation, self-regulation, emotional and behavioural issues, grief and bereavement.

Other issues that Play Therapy and counselling may assist with include:

With our counselling services, we hope that more people can find the courage to move on from and overcome some of the most difficult challenges of your life. We serve clients from the North-Eastern suburban areas of Melbourne, Victoria. Contact us today for more information!

Children Aged 2 – 12

Down the Rabbit Hole – Play Therapy Victoria (DTRH) passionately believes that children and young people should have access to appropriate mental health services so that they can reach their full potential. We honour a child’s journey in our therapeutic services by engaging with the child in trauma informed and child sensitive counselling practices.

To this end, DTRH seeks to support little people with big worries and believes that by helping the big people in a child’s life, a holistic level of care is wrapped around the child and their family unit. Children aged 2 – 12 are engaged in the therapeutic process via the Child Centred Play Therapy (CCPT) modality.

Play Therapy is a professional counselling modality where the toys act as the children's words and play as their vocabulary (Landreth, 2012i). Children best express themselves through play as they do not have the linguistic capacities that adults have. A child's behaviour will frequently tell you about the state of their world as they do not usually have the verbal abilities to tell us what is happening for them. By working with children in the play room we help children work through difficulties and process feelings in a way that empowers the child and capacity-builds their way of responding to events and sorts through feelings, emotions and behaviours to arrive at a place where a child is safe, secure and able to make sense of their world and events.

Young People Aged 12 – 18

“Adolescence is a critical period of development for all individuals, but particularly for those who have suffered earlier emotional difficulties or abuse. If these problems go unresolved, patterns of behaviour which become established during this period may be more difficult to change later on. However, more traditional talk therapies may be resisted by adolescents… non-directive play therapy, given age-appropriate adaptations, offers an approach which, since it encompasses both play and verbal communication, is well suited to addressing adolescent concerns, particularly those of early adolescence” (Wilson & Ryan, 2002, p.178, ii).

We believe that connection is everything when working with adolescents, and to this end we spend time building a sound therapeutic relationship with the young person so that they feel safe and trusting in the process of engaging with a safe adult outside their family who they see as a safe person to share their worries and work on their dreams.

Adults

We also offer adult counselling services and therapies to enhance and improve your life. A confidential setting means that an unbiased clinician can work with you to help you understand your thoughts and feelings to better understand how these affect your behaviour. This means that you are better able to learn constructive ways to deal with them in a safe place.

1 Landreth, G. L. (2012). Play therapy the art of the relationship (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

1 Wilson, K., & Ryan, V. (2002). Play therapy with emotionally damaged adolescents. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 7(3), 178–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632750200507015