Dr. Joyce C. Mills, Psychotherapist, Marriage and Family Therapist, Registered Play Therapy Supervisor (RPT-S), and Adjunct Faculty Member: Overview
Dr. Joyce C. Mills, Psychotherapist, Marriage and Family Therapist, Registered Play Therapy Supervisor (RPT-S), and Adjunct Faculty Member: What do you do, Typical Day, and Education and Training
Psychotherapist, Marriage and Family Therapist, and Registered Play Therapist Supervisor
Psychotherapist
A psychotherapist helps people improve their mental health by better understanding their moods, feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and how to better respond to life's challenges. The purpose of psychotherapy is to achieve better problem solving, higher functioning levels, and most importantly an increased feeling of the client's own well-being.
Psychotherapy most often utilizes spoken conversation, art, music, role playing, and story telling to explore the healing pathway.
Marriage and Family Therapist
A Marriage and Family Therapist focuses on families, systems including organizational systems, and communities by nurturing positive change and development in the interaction between members.
Play Therapy
The Association for Play Therapy simplifies the definition of play therapy as a way of being with the child that honors their unique developmental level and looks for ways of helping in the language of the child, play.
Advice and Soundbites
Play is the language of children. Joyce Mills, Ph.D.
We enter a field of service and we really don't know where it is going to take us.... It doesn't always make sense. You know. It may not be in the script, but you have to follow your heart. Joyce Mills, Ph.D.
Definitions
Transference* - The process by which emotions and desires originally associated with one person, such as a parent or sibling, are unconsciously shifted to another person, especially to a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst during a course of treatment.
Countertransference* - Psychological transference by a psychotherapist in reaction to the emotions, experiences, or problems of a patient undergoing treatment.
Play Therapy - A form of psychotherapy used with children to help them express or act out their experiences, feelings, and problems by playing with dolls, toys, and other play material, under the guidance or observation of a therapist.
RPT-S - Registered Play Therapist - Supervisor
* The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
