‘Play therapy’ helps troubled children

After eight years of working for someone else, psychotherapist Danah McGrath decided to start a practice of her own.

On Tuesday, McGrath, who specializes in child and family services, opened Monarch Counseling and Play Therapy at 15 Alexandria Pike, Warrenton, in the building that also houses the flower shop Designs by Teresa.

McGrath, who lives near Orlean, established a practice in Warrenton because she believes the area needs one like hers, which offers “child-centered play therapy.”

“As far as family therapy, that’s been around a long time,” said McGrath, 64, who previously worked for a private practice and three state agencies. “Not everybody’s heard about play therapy. But it’s growing.”

Child-centered play therapy helps children with self-esteem, emotional, behavioral, academic and social problems, she said.

McGrath’s office includes a playroom equipped with an array of toys. Play therapy sessions typically last 60 minutes, during which a child, under McGrath’s supervision, plays with the toys of his or her choice.

“The child decides what they want to play with,” she said. “It’s their time. They choose.”

Meanwhile, she talks with the child at play, providing supportive and encouraging comments.

“It helps them to feel good about themselves and their environment and feel like they’re in control,” said McGrath, who worked almost 24 years as an administrator for the CIA before returning to college to get a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology and a master’s degree in counseling psychology.

“The whole idea is the relationship I form with the child. That’s the most important thing. I want the child to feel I’m really interested in what they’re doing.”

McGrath said she’d initially been skeptical about the effectiveness of child-centered play therapy.

“I would say ‘How do you know it’s working?’” she recalled, adding that a supervisor once told her: “There’s a saying: ‘Trust the process’.”

In other words, if the process produces positive results, it works.

“Parents see improvement,” McGrath said of play therapy. “That’s how you know it works.”

But she stressed “it doesn’t happen in two or three weeks. It usually takes three to four months” of weekly one-hour sessions at $100 each.

John Borgens, director of Family Focus Counseling Services in Warrenton, said McGrath is a welcome addition to the community, providing another mental health treatment option for residents.

Borgens, who has known McGrath professionally for about three years, said she brings plenty of experience and a “love for the work.”

“She really has gone out of her way to get training to make sure she’s on the cutting edge in working with” clients, he said.

Other treatment approaches McGrath offers children, adults and families include “expressive art” (drawing, painting and coloring); sandtray therapy (in a tray of sand, clients arrange miniature figures, including people, houses, vehicles and trees, as means of self-expression); puppet therapy (a family engages in dialogue that helps reveal the way members treat one another); and cognitive behavioral therapy (changing clients’ perspectives to change how they feel about things).

McGrath said she also welcomes veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

A licensed professional counselor in Virginia and Maryland, she also is a registered play therapist with the Association of Play Therapy and has a post-graduate play therapy certificate from Johns Hopkins University.

McGrath, who keeps Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday hours, can be reached at (843) 384-9226 or danahmc .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  .

To visit her website, go to monarchcounselingand-playtherapy.com .