On-demand PlayShop recordings
Trauma Through a Child's Eyes
Interweaving Somatic Experiencing®, play, art, movement and attachment
Children often show us what cannot yet be spoken.
Through play, movement, behaviour, imagination, gesture and connection, children reveal how their bodies are responding to the world around them. In this four-day PlayShop, Maggie Kline invites us to listen differently - not simply to manage symptoms, but to recognise the meaningful communication of a developing nervous system seeking safety, connection and completion.
These recordings bring together Maggie's decades of clinical and educational experience with Somatic Experiencing®, art, movement, attachment and breathwork in an approach that is practical, creative and deeply respectful of children, teenagers and families.
EXPERIENCE THE PLAYSHOPEnter Maggie Kline's practical, playful and deeply embodied approach to supporting children and families.
Seeing the world through a child's eyes
Maggie invites us to become curious about what lives beneath behaviour. A child who is anxious, aggressive, restless, withdrawn or struggling to concentrate may be expressing a nervous system organised around protection. When we learn to notice sensation, rhythm, movement, connection and the body's small impulses, new pathways towards regulation become visible.
The ordinary miracle of resilience
At the heart of Maggie's work is a profound trust in children's natural movement towards healing when the right conditions are present. Rather than beginning with what is wrong, she helps us notice what is already alive: curiosity, imagination, relationship, choice and the impulses that support a nervous system to return towards balance.
The work is playful, but never superficial. Beneath the games, art and movement is a sophisticated understanding of trauma physiology, attachment and the developing nervous system.
Listening to what behaviour communicates
Across the recordings, Maggie explores practical ways to support:
- 01
sensory and interoceptive awareness through art, games, breathing and movement
- 02
cycles of activation, discharge, settling and integration
- 03
healthy attachment and social-emotional development
- 04
boundaries, choice and empowerment following experiences of violation
- 05
shock, grief and loss arising from death, divorce, separation and abandonment
- 06
the use of Somatic Experiencing® principles, art and movement in individual, group and classroom settings
Learning through play
This is not a training that asks us to stand outside the child's world and analyse it. Maggie invites us into that world.
A drawing can make an internal experience visible. A game can restore boundaries and agency. A breath can create enough space for a child to notice sensation. Movement can allow an impulse held in the body to find expression and completion. What looks simple from the outside can carry enormous therapeutic intelligence.
The 8 Essentials of Healthy Attachment
Maggie also brings attention to the relational foundations through which a child's nervous system develops resilience. Her 8 Essentials of Healthy Attachment offer a way of understanding how safety, attunement, connection and shared regulation can be cultivated in therapy, at home, at school and in everyday relationships.
The emphasis is not on perfect parenting, teaching or therapeutic practice. It is on creating enough moments of safety, contact, repair and successful completion for new possibilities to emerge.
Who these recordings are for
This collection will be especially valuable for:
- psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists and Somatic Experiencing® practitioners
- child and family practitioners, social workers and youth workers
- educators, school wellbeing teams and allied health professionals
- professionals supporting parents, carers, children and adolescents
- practitioners wanting to integrate more play, creativity and embodied awareness into their work
For the children we work with - and the younger parts of ourselves
Although the PlayShop is grounded in work with children, young people and families, Maggie's teaching also offers a gentle doorway into understanding the younger parts of ourselves. Sensation, play, protection, boundaries and completion can illuminate how early experiences continue to live in the adult nervous system long after childhood has passed.
Meet Maggie Kline
Maggie Kline, LMFT, has worked in education since the 1970s, as a Family Therapist and School Psychologist since the 1980s, and as a Somatic Experiencing® International Faculty Member since the 1990s.
She is the creator of Conscious Connections PlayShops and co-author, with Dr Peter A. Levine, of Trauma Through a Child's Eyes and Trauma-Proofing Your Kids. Her work brings together a lifetime of clinical experience with a remarkable ability to translate complex understandings of trauma and the nervous system into practices that are accessible, creative and deeply human.
Participant reflections
Reflections from the PlayShop
I highly recommend it, especially to anyone working in education
Practical, practical, practical advice for working with trauma impacted kids.
An invitation to see differently
These recordings invite us to look beneath behaviour and become curious about the nervous system underneath: to see play as communication; movement, imagination and sensation as pathways into healing; and resilience as something that can be supported through safety, relationship and understanding.
Watch slowly. Try the practices. Notice what comes alive.
Allow Maggie's warmth, creativity and decades of experience to deepen how you see the children you work with - and perhaps the child within yourself.
EXPERIENCE THE PLAYSHOP