The Play Therapy Haven

28/05/2026

Play therapy and Counselling🌿

From August, a small number of spaces will be available at The Play Therapy Haven.

Therapy can support children and young people with:

🌿 Anxiety and worries
🌿 Big feelings and emotional overwhelm
🌿 Family changes and separation
🌿 Low self-esteem and confidence
🌿 Low mood and sensory differences
🌿 Trauma and difficult experiences

If you’re wondering whether therapy might be helpful for your child, you’re very welcome to get in touch.

A caregiver meeting is the first step. This gives us space to talk things through gently together and think about what support might feel right.

📍 Dunblane
Supporting families across Stirling, Perthshire, Falkirk and surrounding areas.

Please note I’ll be on annual leave from 22nd June until 27th July.

Suze🌿

25/05/2026

A few spaces opening up from July 🌿

As some families come to the end of their therapy journeys, a small number of spaces will be opening up at The Play Therapy Haven.

If you’re thinking about support for your child and would like to explore whether therapy might be helpful, you’re very welcome to get in touch to arrange a caregiver meeting. We can meet, talk things through, and see what might feel right.

Just to note, I’ll be on annual leave from 22nd June until 27th July.

14/05/2026

💛 At The Play Therapy Haven, this belief sits at the heart of our Child-Centred Play Therapy work. CCPT is grounded in the understanding that children carry an innate wisdom about what they need, how they feel, and how they heal.

When they are offered the right environment — one that feels safe, accepting, and emotionally attuned — alongside a trusting therapeutic relationship, children are free to explore, express, and grow in their own way and at their own pace.

Through play, we nurture a child’s belief in themselves, helping them feel seen, valued, and accepted exactly as they are. Because every child deserves to know that their uniqueness is not something to fix, but something to celebrate. 🌿✨

28/04/2026

🌈🌟 As parents, we all genuinely want to do our best, but none of us can do it all the time. Every day, we face moments full of connection and, sometimes, conflict and misunderstanding.

It’s completely normal to have those ruptures in our relationships with our children. What really matters is how we come back to each other, repair those moments, and show up with love and understanding. 💖

We are all perfectly imperfect! Remember, it’s never too late to reconnect and strengthen those precious bonds! 🤝

24/04/2026

💙💜🩷❤️💚

08/04/2026

Oxytocin is often referred to as the ‘bonding hormone’, but through a neuroscience lens, it is central to how children experience safety, trust and connection.

When a child feels seen, soothed and understood, oxytocin is released. This has a direct impact on the nervous system, helping to reduce stress responses and support a shift from survival states into connection and engagement.

Oxytocin supports:

• The development of secure attachment relationships
• Emotional regulation through co-regulation
• A reduction in fear and threat responses
• Increased capacity for trust, curiosity and social connection

When early attachment experiences have been inconsistent or disrupted, children may not easily access these states of safety. Instead, their nervous system may remain primed for protection, showing up as hypervigilance, withdrawal or controlling behaviours.

Play Therapy offers a relational, neuroscience-informed space to gently shift this.

Through consistent, attuned interactions, the therapist provides repeated experiences of safety. Over time, this can support oxytocin release and help reshape the child’s internal working model of relationships, as described by John Bowlby.

In the playroom:

• Attuned responses communicate safety at a nervous system level
• Predictable sessions build trust and reduce uncertainty
• Play enables connection without reliance on verbal processing
• The therapeutic relationship becomes the foundation for change

This is not just emotional support. It is biological.

It is .

It is the brain and body learning, through experience, that connection can be safe.

02/04/2026

Keep showing up❤️‍🩹

We tend to measure our parenting by the moments that stand out - the times we lost patience, the big feelings or behaviour we didn’t handle as well as we’d hoped, the days we were too tired, too distracted, too human.

We tend to hold those moments up as evidence of what we are - or aren’t - as parents.

But that’s not how it works.

What shapes a child’s sense of who they are isn’t any single moment. It’s the accumulation of ordinary ones - the ones in which they feel seen, safe, loved.

Neuroscience keeps telling us this quietly and consistently: the repeated experience of a calm, present, loving adult is what builds the architecture of a child’s nervous system over time. It’s not about the dramatic moments, but the ordinary ones.

Every time you showed up calm when they couldn’t. Every time you came back after a hard moment. Every average Tuesday where nothing much happened except that you were there - those moments matter.

They aren’t stored as memories they can retrieve and tell you about, but as a felt sense of the world they live in, who they are to you, and eventually, just who they are. They are stored as the answer to the question their nervous system - their foundation in the world - is always quietly asking: Am I safe? Is there someone here for me?

The body keeps score in both directions. The stress, yes - but also the warmth. The consistency. The thousand small moments of being held, seen, safe, loved, and not left alone with the hard things.

So if you tend to carry the weight of every moment you got wrong - and we all tend to do this - put some of that down.

Because the moments you got right - the ones that felt like nothing at the time - they matter, so much. And even through the messy times, those ‘got right’ moments are still there. Still working. Still building the foundation your child will stand on long after they’ve forgotten the day itself.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to keep coming back.

The ordinary moments are doing so much more than you think.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​❤️

27/03/2026

✨ Laura – Friday Play Therapy Sessions Available ✨

As Laura settles into The Play Therapy Haven, I wanted to share a little more about the brilliant support she is offering here.

Laura is a BAPT registered Play Therapist, offering non-directive, child-led play therapy on Fridays. She creates a calm, safe space where children can explore their thoughts and feelings in their own way and at their own pace.

With over 20 years’ experience working with children as a primary teacher and within ASN settings, Laura brings a deep understanding of attachment, autism, and social and emotional development. Her approach is gentle, attuned, and rooted in both strong therapeutic training and real-life experience of supporting children in educational settings.

Laura holds qualifications in Primary Teaching, a Master’s in Education (Inclusion), a Master’s in Play Therapy, and postgraduate certificates in Autism and Social and Emotional Inclusion.

If you’ve been considering play therapy for your child, Laura currently has Friday availability.

You can get in touch via:
📧 hello@playtherapyhaven.co.uk

📧 laura.allan9213@outlook.com

We’re really pleased to have Laura as part of The Play Therapy Haven 💛

17/03/2026

💛 A Little Update

My diary and waitlist are currently full, so I’m not able to take on new families right now.

I really appreciate how important it is to find the right support, and you’re very welcome to check back in a few weeks to see if a space has opened up.
Warmly,

Suze 💛

13/03/2026

Forever remembered 💛