Teddy Bear Training

ON DEMAND | 25 CLINICAL | 5 ETHICAL CEU’S

What: Teddy Bear Therapy
Why: An incredible brain based hypnotherapeutic play therapy technique
How: This on demand CPD can be completed in your own time
So what: 25 Clinical and 5 Ethics CEU’s (you are CPD sorted for 12 months) | includes one page treatment planning, uncle owl, and between session Teddy Care guides | Discover the absolute magic of TBT!🧸 What is Teddy Bear Therapy (TBT)?

Teddy Bear Therapy (TBT) is an interactional hypnotherapeutic play therapy technique developed by Charl Vorster in the 1970s. It is typically used with children between the ages of approximately 3 and 7 or 8 years, depending on developmental maturity.

In TBT, the child selects a teddy bear that becomes the main character of a story. The teddy symbolically represents the child, allowing the child to project experiences, feelings, and relational patterns into the narrative in a safe and indirect way. The therapist guides the process as the narrator of the story and introduces a symbolic wise helper character, such as Uncle Owl or Grandma Owl, who offers guidance and support within the story.

Through this structured storytelling process, the child provides the content of the narrative while the therapist maintains the therapeutic frame, introduces helpful perspectives, and embeds post-hypnotic suggestions. Because the story format bypasses the critical faculty for selective thinking, it allows therapeutic suggestions to influence the nervous system more directly.

From a brain-based perspective, TBT supports regulation and change through three processes. It helps create safety and connection (recharge), allows difficult emotional experiences to be processed symbolically (reset), and introduces new relational scripts and behavioural possibilities (rewire).

The use of metaphor reduces defensiveness, expands the child’s role repertoire, and allows corrective emotional experiences to occur in a developmentally appropriate way. At the end of the process, the child usually takes the teddy home, shifting from the position of “identified patient” to the helper role, which strengthens agency and competence.

TBT Level 1 is a 13-hour foundational CPD training that teaches practitioners how to implement the method safely and competently. Participants learn the theoretical foundations, session structure, ethical considerations, formulation of presenting complaints, and the design of effective post-hypnotic suggestions.

Level 2 develops greater clinical sophistication, exploring complex trauma, survival styles in children, advanced suggestion design, and the integration of TBT within the broader brain-based Recharge–Reset–Rewire framework.

Together, the two levels provide a structured and clinically elegant approach to working with young children through story, metaphor, and relational play.

On demand courses do not expire