Date of Award
Spring 5-16-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling
Major
Expressive Therapies
First Advisor
Nicholas Suchecki
Abstract
This literature review explores the use of expressive arts therapy and play therapy in therapeutic spaces for grieving children. The author seeks to investigate how elements of expressive arts therapy and play therapy might be integrated to offer more effective support. Research was conducted using search engines to gather literature about historical and contemporary bereavement theories, play therapy, and expressive arts therapy, with a focus on children’s experiences. Two primary insights gleaned from this review are that the cognitive understanding of death is multifaceted and changes as children mature, and that children grieve in ways unique to their developmental stages. Children’s tendency to dip in and out of their grief, sometimes fairly rapidly, is a key pattern of their experience, and one which is supported by both play therapy and expressive arts therapy. Both approaches go beyond verbal expression, which helps capture the complex grief experience. The literature from these two schools of thought indicates that there is a lot of overlap between them, and also that each discipline has unique attributes. Many clinicians use both play and the arts when working with children who are grieving; however very little appears to have been written about the intentional integration of the two therapeutic approaches. The author concludes that more interdisciplinary work between the expressive arts therapy community and the play therapy community would be invaluable in building new therapeutic approaches for children who are grieving, and that these interventions should be responsive to the diverse needs of different communities.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Marcus, Joanna, "Grief Journeys: A Literature Review on Integrating Expressive Arts and Play in Grief Therapy" (2026). Expressive Therapies Theses. 104.
https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/expressive_therapies_theses/104
