Seriously Playful: The Intentional Use of Humor in Adlerian Play Therapy

Humor can create connection, soften difficult moments, and help clients approach experiences that may otherwise feel too vulnerable, overwhelming, or discouraging. However, therapeutic humor involves more than simply being funny - it requires intentionality, responsiveness, and a clear understanding of when humor supports the client and when it may distract, minimize, or cause harm.

This experiential four-hour workshop explores practical ways to integrate humor into Adlerian Play Therapy with children, adolescents, adults, and families. Participants will examine different forms of therapeutic humor, including playful exaggeration, absurdity, storytelling, character work, movement, wordplay, deliberate mistakes, and collaborative joking. Through demonstrations, experiential activities, clinical scenarios, and intervention practice, participants will learn how humor can strengthen the therapeutic relationship, reduce defensiveness, externalize concerns, illuminate relational patterns, make insight more approachable, and encourage clients to experiment with new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

The workshop will also address important clinical considerations, including developmental readiness, neurodiversity, trauma, culture, identity, and the use of sarcasm, teasing, dark humor, and potentially offensive jokes. Participants will explore how to distinguish humor that promotes connection and courage from humor used to avoid vulnerability, seek power, manage discomfort, or conceal discouragement. Particular attention will be given to recognizing when humor is not landing as intended and responding through therapeutic repair.

Rather than focusing heavily on Adlerian theory, this workshop keeps humor at the center while using the four phases of Adlerian Play Therapy as a practical framework for deciding why, when, and how to use it. Participants will leave with adaptable humor-based strategies and interventions they can intentionally incorporate into their clinical work.

4 Non-Contact CE Hours (includes 1 hour on Play Therapy Seminal or Historically Significant Theories and 2 hours on Skills and Methods and 1 hour on Cultural Diversity)

APT Approved Provider 99-055.

League of Extraordinary Adlerian Play Therapists (LEAPT) has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7402. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. League of Extraordinary Adlerian Play Therapists (LEAPT) is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

1. Identify four forms of therapeutic humor appropriate for Adlerian Play Therapy.
2. Differentiate between humor that promotes connection in Adlerian Play Therapy and humor that contributes to avoidance or discouragement.
3. Demonstrate two humor-based Adlerian Play Therapy interventions.
4. Analyze how developmental, cultural, neurodiversity, trauma, and identity factors influence humor in Adlerian Play Therapy.
5. Design a humor-based Adlerian Play Therapy intervention with a defined therapeutic purpose and implementation strategy.