Innovative Therapeutic Life Story Work

Life story work is an approach designed to enable traumatized children to explore, question and understand the past events of their lives. It aims to secure their future by strengthening attachment with their carers and providing the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of self and a feeling of wellbeing. This new edited volume documents innovative ways in which life story work has been developed. It draws on the work of nine life story centres based around the world and provides understanding and guidance for those working with children who have experienced trauma. The book illustrates current theory and practice and looks at how the approach is being used in a variety of settings including schools, intensive services, youth justice, and post-adoption support, highlighting its versatility. The importance of trauma-informed practice when working with vulnerable children is emphasised throughout, to help practitioners provide the best for the children in their care.

A comprehensive overview for professionals working with traumatized children, which outlines the theory and practice of life story therapy, a method which helps children and cares to question and resolve issues and events within a child's life.

Life story work is one of the key therapeutic approaches to working with adopted or fostered children. While it sounds simple, there is much more to this work than producing photo albums or memory boxes for children. This accessible book is full of tried and tested activities and creative ideas for professionals, parents and carers who may have little time and few resources, but who need to carry out life story work that works for children. The authors describe the optimum conditions in which to carry out life story work and feature activities to accompany each of the necessary stages: creating a sense of safety, emotional literacy, building resilience, exploring identity, sharing information and looking to the future. This book will be a vital tool for social workers, foster carers, adopters, students and any frontline practitioners involved in working with traumatised children.

Life Story Therapy is an approach designed to enable children to explore, question and understand the past events of their lives. It aims to secure their future through strengthening attachment with their carers and providing the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of self and a feeling of wellbeing. This comprehensive overview lays out the theory underlying life story therapy, including an accessible explanation of contemporary research in neurobiology and trauma. Featuring tried and tested ideas, with tools and templates illustrated through instructive case studies, the author identifies how life story therapy can be implemented in practice. Finally, the relationships between life story therapy and traditional 'talking' therapies are explored. Life Story Therapy with Traumatized Children is essential reading for those working with children and adolescents, including social workers, teachers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term carers, psychologists and other professionals.

Helping traumatized children develop the story of their life and the lives of people closest to them is key to their understanding and acceptance of who they are and their past experiences. The Child's Own Story is an introduction to life story work and how this effective tool can be used to help children and young people recover from abuse and make sense of a disrupted upbringing in multiple homes or families. The authors explain the concepts of attachment, separation, loss and identity, using these contexts to describe how to use techniques such as family trees, wallpaper work, and eco- and geno-scaling. They offer guidance on interviewing relatives and carers, and how to gain access to key documentation, including social workers' case files, legal papers, and health, registrar and police records. This sensitive, practice-focused guide to life story work includes case examples and exercises, and is an invaluable resource for social workers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term foster carers and other professionals working with traumatized children.

Life story work is a term often used to describe an approach that helps looked after and adopted children to talk and learn about their life experiences with the help of a trusted adult. This book is an essential step-by-step guide for carers and professionals seeking to carry out life story work with a traumatised or vulnerable child in their care. Underpinned by positive psychology and drawing on up-to-date research and real-life practice, the book offers a sound theoretical understanding of life story work as well as a practical and easy-to-use programme of sessions. Each session covers the equipment and information needed, a consideration of who is best placed to carry out the work, and answers to commonly raised questions. Also discussed are age-appropriate approaches and ideas for extending each session into other activities and methods to make it more feasible for life story work to be a shared activity between two or three adults who know the child well. This book gives professionals and carers the confidence to carry out life story work in a way that is sensitive to the child’s needs and positive for their self-perception and relationships.

Using Stories to Build Bridges with Traumatized Children is full of creative ideas for how you can use stories therapeutically with children in counselling, life story work or direct work. Psychologist Kim S. Golding shows how you can use stories to build connections with children aged 4–16 and support their recovery from trauma and stress. She illustrates the techniques with 21 stories adapted from her own clinical work with children and families, and explains how you can expand or adapt them to make them more relevant for a particular child. Advice and stories are arranged into sections dealing with common psychological issues, including looking back and moving on, lack of trust and need for attention. Golding also gives invaluable tips for planning stories and life story work, and for storymaking with children. She also describes how stories can be used therapeutically with parents of traumatized children and as a tool for self-reflection by counsellors. Imaginative and practical, this book will be enormously useful for counsellors, psychologists, therapists and social workers working with traumatized children, and will also be helpful for parents and carers involved in therapeutic parenting.

This innovative guide brings the benefits of life story work - traditionally undertaken with younger children - to young people and adolescents. It describes how to use computers, free software, smartphones and camcorders in a range of contemporary and exciting ways. With an intensely practical approach it outlines a series of fun and engaging projects on which the practitioner and young person can work together, including photo collages, making soundtracks, creating cartoons, and filming guided walks, all designed to help young people make sense of their history.