Speaker, Author & Clinician
Paris Goodyear-Brown, LCSW, RPT-S, is the creator of the TraumaPlay™ model, the founder and Clinical Director of Nurture House, and the Executive Director of the TraumaPlay™ Institute. She is an internationally renowned speaker, a prolific author (Check out Paris's books here), and a master clinician. While she has spent the past 25 years specializing in treating trauma (sexual abuse, physical abuse, maltreatment and neglect) and attachment disturbances, as well as anxiety disorders, she often provides help for angry, dysregulated and depressed children and teens. She is an Adjunct Instructor of Psychiatric Mental Health at Vanderbilt University, guest lecturer for several universities in middle Tennessee, and travels around the world helping clinicians, parents, and teachers better serve children from hard places. She particularly enjoys integrating trauma-informed approaches and is an EMDRIA Certified EMDR therapist. She also finds great joy in helping other clinicians create safe spaces for children and families. She is a child development expert and frequently provides parent consultation, dyadic assessment and parent coaching to help parents manage and resolve their children’s behavior problems. With trainings in Morocco, Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Istanbul, South Africa, Nepal, Turkey, Taiwan and China as well as frequent domestic presentations, she is best known for developing clinically sound, played-based interventions that are used to treat a variety of childhood problems. She has received the APT award for Play Therapy Promotion and Education, serves on the Board of the Tennessee Association for Play Therapy, and served as the Executive Director of the Lipscomb Play Therapy and Expressive Arts Center. She provides play therapy and licensure supervision and consults with various school districts, agencies, and mental health organizations to help develop play therapy programs and create more developmentally sensitive programming. Some of her most recent books include Polyvagal Power in the Playroom, Big Behaviors in Small Containers, Parents as Partners in Child Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide, Trauma and Play Therapy, Tackling Touchy Subjects, Play Therapy with Traumatized Children: A Prescriptive Approach and The Worry Wars: An Anxiety Workbook for Kids and their Helpful Adults. She delights in her husband, her three children, shifting paradigms, and holding hard stories for families in need.
Order Paris’s newest book!
Polyvagal Power in the Playroom by Paris Goodyear-Brown (Editor), Lorri A. Yasenik (Editor)
Polyvagal Power in the Playroom shows therapists how to treat children using play therapy to address the hierarchy of autonomic states. What do children need and how do play therapists purposefully use the principles of play to increase the feeling states of safety and regulation? Step inside the playroom and discover how trained play therapists are addressing treatment using polyvagal theory when working with children and teens.
The book is organized into three parts:
Interruptions explores developmental derailments brought about by relational betrayals such as domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and attachment ruptures implicated in a myriad of adverse childhood experiences. In these cases, the neuroception of safety scaffolded through "good enough" rhythms of healthy caregiver/child interactions is either compromised through a thousand relational cuts (parental addiction or parental mental illness) or abruptly ended (divorce, death or incarceration of a parent)
Happenings explores events that involve an external intrusion, such as natural disasters, wars, and pandemics
Expressions of risk and resilience explores mental health symptom clusters such as depression, anxiety, dissociation, and explosive behavior through the lens of dorsal vagal or sympathetic nervous system states, as well as specific play therapy methods for healing the nervous system
The therapeutic powers of play are illustrated through case examples and in practical, play-based interventions woven throughout the book.
Child and play therapists will come away from Polyvagal Power in the Playroom with the tools they need to help children and their caregivers achieve deeper levels of safety and connection.
TraumaPlay™ Institute
Global Presence
The TraumaPlay™ Institute provides education, training, and consulting in the field of child and adolescent therapy. The TraumaPlay Institute™ has developed the TraumaPlay Model, a flexibly sequential play therapy model for treating children who have experienced extreme stress related to chronic maltreatment, discrete traumatic incidents, interpersonal trauma, or attachment disturbances due to caregiver disruptions. The TraumaPlay™ Institute is also your source for TraumaPlay Tools™, a signature line of books, games, and specifically designed toys, all of which are available for purchase through the TraumaPlay™ Institute website.
Nurture House
Local Presence
Nurture House exists to help parents and children in distress recapture the joy stolen by early neglect, trauma, anxiety, dysregulation, or a simple lack of connectedness. While children’s negative behaviors can seem to be the root cause of chaos in families, we believe revolution in families can occur when parents shift their paradigms and children get their underlying needs met. Nurture House is a uniquely designed treatment center that provides fun, developmentally sensitive spaces that make it easier for families to do the deep work of healing.