What the Mid Atlantic Play Therapy Conference 2023 Actually Was, From Someone Who Went
It was a three-day gathering for play therapy professionals, mostly centered around child-centered play therapy frameworks with some filial therapy and trauma-informed work woven through. It was held in the Baltimore area, typically at a hotel near the interstate where the air conditioning was always too cold and the Wi-Fi kept dropping during live demos. Nothing groundbreaking about the venue. That's just how these regional conferences go. Attendance runs about 200 to 350 people depending on the year. The crowd is a mix of LPCs, LCSWs, school counselors, and a handful of PhD candidates who just want their continuing education hours. You learn pretty quickly over the first hour who's a novice and who's been doing this for twenty years. The novices hover by the vendor tables. The veterans spread out and take up entire rows in the back.
Mid Atlantic Play Therapy Conference 2023
The 2023 edition ran late April into early May, which is the traditional window these conferences keep using. It offered about 18 hours of CEUs for those holding APT credentials, plus a few hours that counted toward other state licenses depending on your paperwork. The keynotes were solid. One was on relational trauma in adopted children, another on parent coaching through filial therapy models. The workshop tracks split into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, which is something most regional conferences don't do as cleanly. The practical value of the conference comes down to the workshop selection. Pick your tracks carefully. The beginner rooms are useful if you're transitioning from talk therapy to play therapy, but if you've been doing this a while, you'll find yourself tuning out the basics of the play therapy room setup. I've seen experienced clinicians sit through a 90-minute session on how to arrange toys in a sandbox and leave quietly disappointed. It happens every year. Here's a specific thing I ran into at the 2023 conference that most people don't prepare for. There was a workshop on non-directive play therapy techniques for children who display aggressive play themes. About halfway through, the presenter asked participants to pair up and role-play a scenario. I was paired with someone who had never done a live demonstration in their life. They were stiff, they over-narrated every response, and they broke character constantly because they were anxious about being watched by the rest of the room. I ended up guiding the whole thing without making it obvious, which took a level of patience I didn't realize I still had. The workaround was simple: I acknowledged their discomfort right away, said "we can go slow," and let them sit out the second round while I demonstrated the counter-response with the presenter. That's something the handout didn't cover. You just have to read the room and adjust in real time.
A counter-intuitive thing about play therapy conferences like this: the most valuable sessions aren't always the ones advertised as "advanced." Some of the early morning workshops with smaller attendance — usually the ones on documentation practices, ethical boundary cases, or consultation modeling — end up being more useful because everyone who's genuinely struggling with real cases shows up. The big keynote rooms get padded with people collecting CEUs. The small rooms get the people who need the material. Go to the small rooms first. You can always check the big sessions later. Another nuance that beginners miss: the networking in the hallways between sessions is where the actual training happens. Not the structured peer consultation, though that exists. I'm talking about the 15-minute conversations where someone tells you how they handled a parent who refused to participate in filial therapy, or how they documented a child's play themes without violating confidentiality. That information doesn't show up in any workbook. You have to be present and ask the question. I've collected more practical strategies from asking a stranger at the coffee station about their approach to sibling play therapy sessions than from any formal panel. The downsides are real. The registration fee for the three-day pass plus the hotel rate adds up fast, usually pushing the total to between $600 and $900 depending on how late you book. The lunch options are limited and expensive. The schedule is dense enough that you can't attend everything you want, and you'll leave wishing you'd picked differently. Some of the workshop descriptions are written by people who think "fascinating" is a valid descriptor for a session outline. Read past the hype and check the presenter's actual credentials on the APT registry before registering for anything.
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If you can't make it in person, recordings aren't officially released by this conference the way some larger national events do. There have been informal attempts at sharing materials, but nothing official. So attendance is effectively required if you need the CEUs for your license or APT certification. There's no good substitute for being in the room. The registration process itself is straightforward. You go through the organizing association's website, pick your tickets, select your workshop preferences during signup, and pay. You get your schedule confirmation within 48 hours. I recommend locking in your workshops at registration rather than waiting. The popular sessions fill up, and by the time you see the room change a few days before the conference, the trauma-informed filial therapy workshop is already at capacity and you're stuck with something you're less interested in. One more thing worth noting: the conference has a strict Code of Conduct policy that was reinforced in 2023 after a couple of incidents the year before. No recording devices during sessions. No approaches to attendees for business promotion outside the vendor area. If you're a vendor, the booth space is expensive relative to what you'd get at a national conference, so manage your expectations there. The foot traffic past vendor tables is moderate at best.
For people considering whether to attend, the answer depends on where you are in your practice. If you're early in your play therapy journey and your state requires regional continuing education, this conference covers it efficiently. If you're a seasoned practitioner looking for new intervention models, you'll get some solid refresher material and the hallway conversations will carry most of the weight. If you need specialized training in areas like sandplay therapy or EMDR integration with play therapy, you'd be better served by a national conference or a dedicated training institute. This conference is regional by design, and that means it's focused on breadth rather than depth.
