4 Ways that Play Helps in Therapy: The Power of Games in CBT

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment that focuses on exploring the connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It can be used to change unhelpful thinking or challenging behavioral patterns by teaching specific skills. When working with children, play has an important role in making therapy more engaging, motivating, and enjoyable. Whether your child is struggling with anxiety, learning how to manage new responsibilities, having trouble following instructions, or working to address another emotional or behavioral challenge, incorporating games into therapy can be a powerful and effective tool. Using play as a strategy in therapy can help you and your child find success in treatment and have fun as you work toward your goals.

4 Benefits of Games in Therapy

Games are a type of play. When used in therapy, games can be a powerful tool to help improve motivation, increase levels of engagement, and strengthen the therapeutic relationship. Some of the benefits of incorporating play into therapy include:

1. 1. Decreased Resistance. For child therapy, parents are often the ones seeking out treatment options. Children may not be interested in treatment, and if they are unwilling to participate it can limit how much progress can be made in treatment. After talking to your child about starting therapy, a child psychologist specializing in CBT can use games as a tool to help your child feel more motivated to attend sessions and participate in treatment.
   2. Effective Skill Building. Games can help children and teens develop a sense of mastery over the skills that they are learning in therapy. These strategies can be helpful when it comes to teaching, practicing, and reinforcing the targeted skills to work toward their goals and make meaningful change.
   3. Improved Confidence. Play is a great way to increase confidence and reduce the fear of failure. A CBT psychologist can design games in a way that helps your child hit the “sweet spot” for learning new skills. Games that are too easy can lead to boredom, and games that are too hard can result in frustration or giving up. When there’s a balance, your child can learn to have a more motivated response to failure so that they are interested, maybe even excited, to try again. Games are designed to offer intermittent success, which can help your child practice dealing with failure and the difficult emotions that come with it, without the real-world consequences.
   4. Engaging Practice Opportunities. A big part of CBT is practicing skills—not just in sessions, but at home, too. Games are active and experiential. Your child may be more willing to practice a skill-building game rather than complete another worksheet or journal entry. This is a fun, goal-oriented structure to practicing therapy skills that can help your child or teen continue to make progress outside of therapy sessions.

How Games Can be Used in Therapy

Play is a valuable strategy in therapy. It can be enjoyable, but the games aren’t random and they aren’t “just for fun” either. Incorporating games into CBT is a purposeful therapeutic strategy designed to enhance the core components of treatment. The specific games and how play is used in therapy sessions can vary depending on a child’s unique needs and goals. Creativity is the limit when it comes to using games in therapy!

Games can be developed to help your child build rapport with their therapist and learn to better understand their emotions. Games can also be used to address specific challenges like anxiety, OCD, Tourette syndrome, and more. Your child’s CBT psychologist will adapt gameplay to help meet their specific needs and create a supportive, enriching therapeutic environment. Some examples of play in therapy can include:

• Jenga. A turn-based game like this can be used for rapport building when first starting therapy. Any time a player (i.e. your child or their therapist) takes a turn, they can share something about themselves to help build connection and familiarity.
• Emotion Charades. This game can be used to help your child learn about different emotions by modeling how they look on the body or appear in facial expressions. Your child can learn how to act out different emotions with their body language and share about a time they may have felt a certain way, helping them learn to connect emotions to experiences

• Hide and Seek. For children struggling with separate anxiety, playing this classic game can help them practice being separated from their caregiver. By playing this game in a safe and structured environment, children can work up to spending longer and longer periods apart from their caregiver and improve their confidence.

• The Name Game. If your child is struggling with anxiety, OCD, or another big emotion, those symptoms can be given a creative name like “The Worry Wizard” or “The Germ Goblin.” This can teach your child how to identify when they may be feeling an emotion more strongly. Giving the emotion a fun name like this can also make it feel less scary and easier to manage.

• Treasure Hunting. When practicing exposure therapy to address concerns related to contamination OCD, creating a treasure hunt can be a fun and creative way to help children become more comfortable interacting with “dirty” places inside or outside. Hiding objects or rewards by burying them in the ground or placing them in a trash can can help children gradually overcome their fears.

• Exercise Activities. Exercise-based games, such as pin the tail on the donkey or a jump rope contest, can be used as part of exposure therapy for panic disorder. For individuals who become anxious about physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g. increased heart rate, rapid breathing, dizziness) this can help them practice using coping skills to relax the body.

• “Catch the Tic” For children who have Tourette Syndrome, or who are learning how to manage different motor or vocal tics, this game can help them identify the urge to tic and use strategies to successfully resist that urge.

Using Games to Help Reach Goals

For many children, therapy is hard work. Facing fears, practicing new skills, and managing big emotions can feel overwhelming or daunting. By incorporating play, therapists create a warm, inviting environment where children can learn skills, build confidence, and enjoy the therapy process—even when there are challenging moments. Whether it’s a silly name for anxiety or a game centered around exposures, play turns therapy into something children can feel excited about and willing to engage with. Using play to structure a safe environment where children can engage with their fears and practice overcoming them can help make progress toward meaningful, lasting change.

If you feel that your child needs more support understanding their emotions, overcoming their fears, or assistance working towards other goals, CBT can help. Contact us to learn more about our child psychologists and how they can help you and your child find success in treatment.