Helping traumatised children develop a narrative about 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.Explaining the concepts of attachment, separation, loss and identity, the authors use these as a context to describe how to use techniques such as family trees, wallpaper work, 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 is an invaluable resource for social workers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term foster carers and other professionals working with traumatised children.
Foreword, Mary Walsh, founder and Chief Executive of SACCS. 1. Who am I? The Importance of Identity and Meaning. 2. A Tale of Two Children. 3. The Truth and Something Other Than the Truth. 4. Interviewing: Art not Science. 5. Safe at Last: Providing a Safe and Stable Environment. 6. Internalisation. 7. Making the Book. 8. But Does it Really Work Like This? 9. Life After Life Story. Appendix: The Story of SACCS. References.
his book gives us solid reasons why abused children usually need therapeutic work, without which there is a great risk of the abuse continuing to the next generation. The authors feel that traumatised children, who may have had several foster-parents or institutional placements in their lives, need to be offered a special kind of life story work. This is much more than a simple explanation of their placements or basic information about their birth parents as is used in adoption. It includes full explanations about race, culture and religion which may even extend to children being given tapes of their parents' voices to demonstrate their accents. The authors begin with a very full explanation of attachment including the latest information about how the brain is affected by abuse... Condensed case histories are highlighted throughout the book and this adds clarity and interest to what is undoubtedly a good idea that will benefit children.
