Play & Creative Therapy Bundaberg

11/11/2025

I’ve recently been hearing parent experiences of a local “management program” for young children.

Parents are placed in a room with their child while practitioners watch from another room, guiding them on how to control, restrict, and “manage” their child’s behaviour. They are coached to stop their child from touching toys, moving freely, or playing in natural, developmentally appropriate ways… even told to ignore their distress until they comply.

What’s being taught in these moments is not emotional regulation or connection, it’s submission.

The child learns that their natural curiosity, body impulses, and emotional expressions are “wrong.” The parent, often desperate for help, is left feeling disconnected and unsure, believing this is what support is meant to look like.

But this isn’t support. It’s behaviourism, disguised as guidance.
ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) dressed up with softer language in promoting the program. And for a nervous system that thrives on safety, trust, and relationship, it can be incredibly damaging. 💔

Hearing these stories, my heart absolutely ached💔

The focus isn’t on “why” the child is doing something. It’s on how to make them stop.

With all the neuroscience we now have on children's behaviours, I’m utterly shocked that these programs still exist.

💔 Why this is so harmful

This kind of program teaches the child one thing above all else… that love and approval depend on obediance and compliance.

When a neurodivergent child is exposed to behaviourist or compliance-based approaches that suppress their natural communication and exploration (like these “management programs”), the long-term impact can go far beyond masking or people-pleasing.

Over time, this can lead to:

💔 Chronic anxiety from living in a constant state of hypervigilance, trying to predict what will bring approval or disapproval.
💔 Depression and low self-worth: internalising the message that their authentic self isn’t acceptable.
💔 Emotional dysregulation, because emotions that are ignored or punished aren’t processed, they build up and explode later.
💔 Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), a deep pain or panic at even small signs of disapproval, leading to shame spirals or withdrawal.
💔 Alexithymia, difficulty identifying or expressing feelings after years of being told to suppress them.
💔 Attachment ruptures: mistrust toward caregivers or therapists who ignored their distress.
💔 Fear of vulnerability, associating openness or emotion with rejection or punishment.
💔 Loss of autonomy and struggling to make decisions later in life without external approval.
💔 People-pleasing or fawning, seeking safety by anticipating others’ needs rather than expressing their own.
💔 Difficulty asserting boundaries, equating “no” or “I don’t like that” with being “bad.”
💔 Chronic stress and burnout from prolonged sympathetic activation (fight/flight) without enough co-regulation.
💔 Body disconnect: tuning out sensory needs or gut instincts to survive in controlling environments.
💔 Identity confusion and not knowing who they are beneath the masks they’ve built to stay safe.
💔 Learned helplessness: giving up trying to advocate for themselves after repeated invalidation.

When we train children out of their authenticity, they don’t become regulated, they become disconnected. The cost isn’t better behaviour; it’s loss of their sense of self.

Neurodivergent children thrive when adults move from control to curiosity. They need adults who see and understand them, not shape them. Who stay with them in the storm, instead of turning away when they need us most.

Relational, neuro-affirming approaches honour the whole child, their autonomy, sensory world, and nervous system, instead of trying to extinguish it.

If a parenting program makes you feel uneasy, that’s your intuition speaking. Please trust it.

If you’d like to learn another way, please reach out.

Kara now has limited openings for Neuro-affirming Parent Counselling and Coaching, grounded in the science of relational neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, and ND-led lived-experience perspectives.

Sessions are available in-person and online.

We’re here when you’re ready. 🌿
www.playcreative.com.au

09/11/2025

A meltdown isn’t a child 'losing control' on purpose.
It’s the nervous system moving into overwhelm — often because things have felt too loud, too fast, too uncertain, or too much for too long.

When we understand the phases of a meltdown, we can respond with care rather than correction.
We can spot the early signs.
We can keep connection safe.
We can help a child return to calm without shame.

Today we’re exploring the Timeline of a Meltdown— what’s happening in the brain and body, what it looks like, and how we can support at each stage. Visuals for parents/educators and child voice style for young people. For more support, see our Timeline of a Meltdown Resource Pack – link in comments below ⬇️ or Linktree Shop in Bio.

08/11/2025

There’s something about reading on neurodivergent mental wellbeing while surrounded by the joyful sounds of kids freely playing, sunshine and ocean breeze on my skin… I’m in my absolute element while on a mini family getaway. My perfect kind of reset 😍

Have a great weekend friends☀️

06/11/2025

Sometimes your child’s play, or their sudden shifts in intensity, can look really confusing.

🤔 They roar like a monster, then whisper softly.
🤔 They laugh wildly, then burst into tears.
🤔 They build something, then destroy it.
🤔 They push you away, then climb into your lap.

It’s easy to wonder 💭 why?

What’s happening here could be deep emotional work. 🍃

Play often mirrors the pendulum swing between states of expansion (joy, excitement, power) and contraction (sadness, fear, vulnerability).

Children instinctively revisit feelings and experiences that once felt too big or unsafe. They move between opposites such as brave and scared, angry and loving, powerful and helplessness, to practice what it feels like to hold both.

Their nervous system is learning how to move between big emotional states and return to safety. This back and forth is the body’s way of practising regulation… through finding balance in the space between.

In our Play Therapy rooms, we call this the concept of polarities. It’s the dance between two sides of opposing yet interconnected experiences. Your child’s body is moving between states, testing what it feels like to leave protection and return to safety again.

Each time they swing between extremes, their brain is gently asking,
“Can I feel this and still be safe? Can someone stay with me through it?”

Steady presence is the answer. It’s about holding both ends of that experience so your child can move toward integrating aspects of the self.

When we stay near… steady, kind, reflective, with one foot in their world and one foot anchored in our own, not swept away by the storm, we give their little system the message it needs:

“Yes. You are safe in all your feelings. And both feelings can exist here.”

……..

We know these experiences can feel really BIG sometimes. We are here to help when you are ready 💛🍃

06/11/2025

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06/11/2025

Staying in a brain-body mindset when parenting my son who has a vulnerable nervous system helps me to stay regulated because it reminds me that… he would cope better in this moment if he could 🌱

06/11/2025

The work we do is only possible because of the brave hearts who step into this space with us. Feeling deeply grateful for the families who trust us within their journey. Your words mean the world to us. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. 💛🙏

05/11/2025

New game delivery day 🧠🎲
It’s never really just a game though.
It’s the window into a child’s world,
… and blessed we are to be invited in. 💛

03/11/2025

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas 🎄 🌟

02/11/2025

For many years I was a music teacher, a musician, and an early childhood music specialist. Music was my world. It was how I connected. How I breathed.

But after I had my second child, everything fell apart. My mental health, my physical health, even my ability to play music or sing. I developed extreme neurological symptoms which left me unable to walk or talk. It was like my body completely burnt out and said, “enough”.

I had deeply held trauma and undiagnosed neurodivergence.
Layers I didn’t even know were there.
And no amount of thinking, analysing, or positive self-talk was going to pull me out of it.

I tried everything in my recovery.
An array of holistic modalities, naturopaths, doctors, specialists, psychologists, counsellors… you name it. Each helped in small ways, and I certainly made small steps forward, but nothing reached the depth of what was really happening inside me.

Then, when I started studying to become a therapist myself, things began to shift. I trained in both Holistic and General Counselling, Creative Arts Therapies, Meditation Teaching, and many other spiritual and energetic practices. I studied Neurologic Music Therapy and explored different models of Play Therapy through a depth-oriented, attachment-based, neuroscience lens.

That’s when I realised something deeply moving about where healing really lives. It doesn’t just happen in the mind. It happens in the body. In the nervous system. In the parts of us that have carried pain and protection for far too long.

I’m not saying you have to go and do a mental health degree to heal. What I’m saying is that I finally found where healing truly lives. And I found ways that work for me, for my family, and for the kind of life I want to build.

This has become my big “why” as the heartbeat of my practice. It’s what guides me each day as I share these discoveries with others and hold them with care as they move through their own unique journey.

One of those ways for me personally, is through song. Through this reclamation process I call “Singing to My Parts”.

“Singing to My Parts” is a creative process I’ve been developing that blends parts work, music therapy, and therapeutic songwriting. It’s about giving voice to the parts of us that feel unseen or overworked and invites compassion, rhythmic regulation, and reconnection.

It’s about meeting the inner voices that carry fear, control, shame, or exhaustion… our protectors, exiles, and wounded selves… and bring them back into relationship. I pair that with the creativity and nervous system regulation that comes through therapeutic songwriting and varied sources of sound.

This little song I wrote, “Hey Anxiety”, came from a moment when I stopped fighting that familiar rush in my chest and decided to listen instead.

When I sing to my parts, I’m not performing. I’m reconnecting. I’m in dialogue with my inner world. I’m offering presence, compassion, and real listening to the parts of me that once only knew survival, letting them know they can rest now. And every time I do, something shifts, the armour loosens, the body breathes, and the part feels heard.

If any part of this speaks to you, please stay close. I have a beautiful offering coming soon where I’ll be sharing how you can write, sing, soothe, and reconnect to your own parts too - No musical training necessary. It’s not about hitting the notes, it’s about reconnecting with self.

This practice has changed the way I meet myself. Maybe it will do the same for you. 🍃💖🎵 ✨

02/11/2025

30/10/2025

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