Order Paris’s Newest Book!
Big Behaviors in All Containers by Paris Goodyear-Brown
Big Behaviors in All Containers dives into how to work with the parents and teachers of traumatized children. These interventions support the caregivers in a child’s life in growing their Safe Boss, Nurturer, and Storykeeper presence. Clinicians will learn practically, immediately useful exercises that help caregivers enhance self-regulation, deepen attachment capacities, provide safe structure and needed nurture, and expand their reflective capacity.
Big Behaviors in All Containers helps therapists, educators, and caregivers understand and respond to children's challenging behaviors through a trauma-informed, play therapy lens. Rather than viewing behaviors as problems to fix, the book explores how they are often adaptive responses to trauma, attachment disruptions, and nervous system dysregulation.
The book is organized around the concept of "containers"—the various environments where children live, learn, and heal, including homes, schools, therapy offices, foster and adoptive placements, and residential settings. Across each setting, the emphasis is on creating safety, connection, and opportunities for co-regulation.
Key themes include understanding the roots of big behaviors, building emotionally safe environments, and using play-based, relationship-focused interventions that can be applied across caregiving settings. Clinical examples and practical strategies are woven throughout to help adults respond with curiosity, empathy, and therapeutic intent.
Play therapists and other helping professionals will come away with practical tools for supporting children with significant behavioral and emotional needs by fostering regulation, resilience, and secure relationships.
Another Great Resource: Polyvagal Power in the Playroom
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.
Order Big Behaviors in Small Containers: 131 Trauma-Informed Play Therapy Interventions for Disorders of Dysregulation!
When it comes to working with dysregulated children, sometimes the biggest behaviors come in the smallest containers.
From tantrums and defiance to self-injury and withdrawal, even the most skilled professionals find themselves focused on extinguishing the troubling behavior rather than stepping back to ask: What is the underlying emotional need?
In Big Behaviors in Small Containers, you’ll find 131 practical, fun, and ready-to-use play therapy interventions that shift the paradigm around problematic behaviors to allow for therapeutic growth and healing. Based on TraumaPlay®, a treatment approach that prioritizes attachment, co-regulation, and the science of the stress response system, the interventions inside will help kids:
Develop a sense of safety and security
Expand their window of tolerance
Cope adaptively with anger, anxiety, and other strong emotions
Enhance their emotional literacy
Strengthen social skills and self-esteem
Challenge and overcome unhelpful thoughts
Develop a coherent narrative around trauma and other difficult experiences
And more!
Whether you’re a therapist, teacher, doctor, caregiver, or trusted grown-up in a child’s life, the tools inside will allow you to become the co-regulating, nurturing, and consistent presence that your “small container” needs to remain grounded in the face of stress, big feelings, and difficult situations.
