Biography
Dr. Eliana Gil is in group private practice at Gil Center for Healing and Play in Fairfax. Virginia and she provides therapy, consulting, and training services. Dr. Gil is also Director of Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy where she provides three and four-day trainings on family play therapy and specialized therapy with youth (and their families) who experience childhood trauma. In the last decade Eliana has directed two child sexual abuse treatment programs in Northern Virginia (Inova Kellar Center and Childhelp Children’s Center of Virginia) and she has worked in the field of child abuse prevention and treatment for the last thirty-eight years.
Dr. Gil also consults and trains locally and across the country and she is an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Tech’s Family Therapy Department. She is a Registered Play Therapy Supervisor, Registered Art Therapist, and a licensed Marriage, Family, Child Counselor who received her doctorate in family therapy from the California Graduate School of Family Psychology in San Rafael, California. She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children and the National Resource Center on Child Sexual Abuse. She is also a former President of the Association for Play Therapy. She has written numerous materials on child abuse and related topics and has a number of educational videotapes that feature her work available through Guilford Press, as well as a self-published videotape on Family Play Therapy.
Her most recent books are Helping abused and traumatized children: Integrating directive and non-directive approaches and Helping Children Heal from Interpersonal Trauma: The Power of Play. Other books include Cultural issues in play therapy (with Dr. Athena Drewes); Treating abused adolescents; Systemic Treatment of Families who Abuse; The healing power of play; Play in family therapy; and Sexualized children: Assessment and treatment of sexualized children and children who molest (with Dr. Toni Cavanagh Johnson). Several of her books have been translated to other languages, including Spanish.
Dr. Gil is a well-known lecturer, author, and clinician. She is bilingual and bicultural, originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. Dr. Gil conducts intensive trainings through Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy in Northern Virginia. Eliana has three grandchildren under the age of four.
