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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 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.
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.
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.
Learn to build the trust you need to help children in crisis! Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children: Healing from Losses, Violence, Abuse, and Neglect is a therapeutic guide to helping troubled children move beyond the traumatic experiences that haunt them. Author Dr. Richard Kagan, Director of Psychological Services for Parsons Child and Family Center in Albany, New York, presents comprehensive information on how to understand—and surmount—the impact of loss, neglect, separation, and violence on children’s development, how to discover and foster strengths in children and their families, and how to rebuild connections and hope for children who are at risk of harm to themselves and others. This unique book is designed to be used in tandem with Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children (Haworth), an innovative workbook that helps children develop the self-esteem they need to overcome the worries and fears of their past through a creative arts approach that fosters positive values and a sense of pride. Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children helps children move from negative or suppressed memories to a more positive perspective, not by denying hardships, but by drawing strength from the supportive people in their lives. Practitioners can use the book as a framework and detailed guide to assessment, engagement, development of service plans, and implementation of attachment and trauma therapy. The book is a comprehensive model for working to build the trust necessary before other trauma therapy approaches can be successfully initiated. Topics examined in Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children include: attachment theory and research types of attachment problems PTSD behaviors permanency work with children in placement ADHD, bipolar, and RAD cognitive behavioral therapies storytelling therapies the myth of perfection neuropsychological patterns and much more! Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children is a rich resource for practitioners, academics, parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, and anyone working to show troubled children how to learn from the past, resolve problems in the present, and build a better future.
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.
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.
Learn to build the trust you need to help children in crisis! Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children: Healing from Losses, Violence, Abuse, and Neglect is a therapeutic guide to helping troubled children move beyond the traumatic experiences that haunt them. Author Dr. Richard Kagan, Director of Psychological Services for Parsons Child and Family Center in Albany, New York, presents comprehensive information on how to understand—and surmount—the impact of loss, neglect, separation, and violence on children’s development, how to discover and foster strengths in children and their families, and how to rebuild connections and hope for children who are at risk of harm to themselves and others. This unique book is designed to be used in tandem with Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children (Haworth), an innovative workbook that helps children develop the self-esteem they need to overcome the worries and fears of their past through a creative arts approach that fosters positive values and a sense of pride. Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children helps children move from negative or suppressed memories to a more positive perspective, not by denying hardships, but by drawing strength from the supportive people in their lives. Practitioners can use the book as a framework and detailed guide to assessment, engagement, development of service plans, and implementation of attachment and trauma therapy. The book is a comprehensive model for working to build the trust necessary before other trauma therapy approaches can be successfully initiated. Topics examined in Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children include: attachment theory and research types of attachment problems PTSD behaviors permanency work with children in placement ADHD, bipolar, and RAD cognitive behavioral therapies storytelling therapies the myth of perfection neuropsychological patterns and much more! Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children is a rich resource for practitioners, academics, parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, and anyone working to show troubled children how to learn from the past, resolve problems in the present, and build a better future.
Help children overcome the pain of trauma and develop a healthy sense of self! Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children helps traumatized children move from painful or fractured memories to a more positive perspective, not by denying hardships, but by drawing strength from the supportive people in their lives. This innovative workbook uses a creative arts approach that encourages children to work with caring adults to develop autobiographies through a wide range of activities, including drawings, music, movies, and narrative. The results foster positive values and a sense of pride in children as they form a stronger bond with caring and committed adults as protection against the adversity and stressors that exist in everyday life. This unique book is designed to be used in tandem with Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children: Healing from Losses, Violence, Abuse, and Neglect (Haworth), a guide to attachment and trauma therapy from the same author. Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children is a therapeutic resource that helps children overcome the difficulties they may face, including divorce, separation, placement, learning problems, serious illness, and hospitalization. The workbook highlights and preserves for children the moments in their lives when “important” people—family, friends, and community—showed kindness, caring, understanding, and courage, giving the child a sense of value that can inspire the transformation from victim to hero. The life storybook is especially useful for work with children in foster and adoptive families and group care programs. Real Life Heroes is divided into eight chapters: “A Little About Me” helps children recognize and express feelings (affect management) and introduces the child to the book’s format “Heroes and Heroines” invites the child to draw, act out, and write a brief story of someone in his or her life who has acted like a hero “People in My Life” helps a child recall memories of adults who provided care “Good Times” helps a child remember strengths, skills, and supportive relationships that helped him or her “Looking Back” encourages a child to chronicle his or her moves between different locations and homes “Making Things Better” helps a child build self-soothing skills with imagery and magic “Through the Tough Times” helps a child process difficult memories utilizing skills, support from caring adults, and cognitive processing techniques “Into the Future” helps a child to develop a successful self-image for the future Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children is a rich resource for counselors, psychotherapists, teachers, parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, and mentors who are working to help troubled children to overcome traumas and to rebuild hope and a positive identity.
Real Life Heroes: Toolkit for Treating Traumatic Stress in Children and Families, Second Edition is an organized and easy-to-use reference for practitioners providing therapy to children and caregivers with traumatic stress. This step-by-step guide is an accompanying text to the workbook Real Life Heroes: A Life Story Book for Children, Third Edition and provides professionals with structured tools for helping children to reintegrate painful memories and to foster healing from traumatic experiences. The book is a go-to resource for practitioners in child and family service agencies and treatment centers to implement trauma-informed, resiliency-centered and evidence-supported services for children with traumatic stress.
