A Session by Session Guide to Life Story Work


Book Description

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.




Skills and Knowledge for Life Story Work with Children and Adolescents


Book Description

Life story work allows care-experienced and adopted young people to understand their histories and come to terms with their feelings about the past. This accessible guide helps therapists and social care professionals to develop their skills to support children and families through their life story journey. It builds on the fundamental 6-step model for practice to incorporate elements from a variety of therapeutic approaches, from DDP to creative therapies. Theoretical explanations, case vignettes, and practical suggestions provide guidance on practice-based issues in life story work, such as working with parent/carer-child dyads, incorporating a birth family perspective, talking about traumatic stories, managing endings and constructing the life story book. Essential reading for anyone undertaking life story work, this guide enhances a time-tested model with up-to-date research and new ideas for overcoming the most common challenges practitioners face when delivering life story work.




Handbook of Therapeutic Life Story Work


Book Description

'Life Story Work is something we do all the time, be it reminiscing with friends or family about a particular event or period of our lives, or keeping memorabilia, photographs, and written records. Reflecting on and re-examining past events and experiences helps us to make meaning of them in the present.' As a certified play therapist and a qualified social worker, Karla and Suzanne have come together as independent Therapeutic Life Story Work practitioners to explore their experiences and the challenges they have faced to guide other practitioners entering this important area of practice. They share journeys they have taken alongside the many families they have supported; drawn from completing Professor Richard Rose's Diploma in Therapeutic Life Story Work (TLSW). The authors take the reader through the process of Therapeutic Life Story Work from beginning to end, linking theory with practice. They identify areas to consider in preparing to do this work and the referral process, give practical first steps in information gathering, and provide a wealth of activities and techniques that can be undertaken in sessions. Written during the time of a global pandemic, it includes working on-line and the many creative ways of supporting children and adults in making meaning and creating a more coherent narrative of their lives. They share the complexities of working with birth families, neurodiversity, measuring outcomes and the recent strong evidence base for this intervention, as well as a unique model of creating therapeutic stories in therapeutic life story work. They highlight the importance of self-care and supervision when working with trauma, consider what to do when things go wrong, and the importance of creating emotional safety within this work. The content is drawn from many hours of work, challenges faced within the work, and an idea that it could be beneficial to others undertaking or interested in Therapeutic Life Story Work. Therapeutic Life Story Work is an area of practice that Karla and Suzanne are passionate about. They decided to write this book in response to the questions they are frequently asked about setting up as independent practitioners and how they work in practice. Their aim is to continue to support children and young people in their journey to make sense of their lives, as well as supporting practitioners and developing Therapeutic Life Story Work worldwide. The Handbook of Therapeutic Life Story Work is essential reading for those working with children, young people and adults, including social workers, therapists, family support workers, residential care staff, teachers, adopters, foster carers, special guardians, connected carers, students, psychologists and any other professionals involved in working with traumatised children.




Reminiscence and Life Story Work


Book Description

Previously published under title: Reminiscence and recall.




Theraplay® – The Practitioner's Guide


Book Description

The Definitive Guide to Theraplay® for Practitioners, officially endorsed by the Theraplay® Institute Theraplay is an intervention that focuses on enhancing the connection, trust and joy between a child and a parent. It involves interactive, playful activities using simple face-to-face reciprocal interactions, and involves using all of the senses, including rhythm, movement and touch. This comprehensive guide outlines the theory, reflection, and skill development of the practitioner - the true power house of Theraplay. By maintaining a focus on practice throughout, embedding theory into practice examples, it brings the spirit of Theraplay to life. Part 1 covers the key principles of the intervention; Part 2 addresses Theraplay in Practice: how to use the Marschak Interaction Method (MIM), how to set up a room and choose activities and considerations for working with different client groups; Part 3 encourages the reader to engage in their own development and the stages involved; and Parts 4 and 5 provide a wealth of useful resources, checklists, handouts, sample sessions and an up-to-date list of Theraplay activities. Whether you are a Theraplay practitioner, or simply want to find out how this remarkable intervention works, this book is essential reading.




Innovative Therapeutic Life Story Work


Book Description

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.




Real Life Heroes


Book Description

The essential manual for the updated classic Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual is an organized and easy-to-use reference for busy practitioners who provide therapy to children with traumatic stress. This handy step-by-step guide is an accompanying text to the workbook for children called Real Life Heroes: A Life Story Book for Children, Second Edition, and Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children: Healing from Losses, Violence, Abuse, and Neglect (both from Haworth), and provides professionals with structured tools for helping children to reintegrate painful memories and to foster healing from traumatic experiences. Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual provides an essential guide for practitioners using the Real Life Heroes Workbook as a therapeutic tool. This resource includes premises and strategies from trauma research adapted into a practical format that helps to engage and empower children and caring adults. The manual includes a session summary/progress note that provides an easy-to-complete check-off for key components of each session, progress in the workbook, and targets critical issues, safety plans, trauma triggers, and constructive vs. dysfunctional beliefs. This guides practitioners to help children to deal with experiences of abuse, neglect, family violence, severe illnesses, deaths, or major losses, building on strengths and resources in the the child's family, their culture and their community. Each chapter in Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual includes sections explaining: objectives overview step by step key points and sequence problems that can undermine therapy troubleshooting for challenges and their solutions essential elements for each exercise The Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual is a rich resource for practitioners in child and family services including psychologists, child care workers, school counselors, psychiatrists, CASA workers, and adoption specialists who work with troubled and troubling children in home-based family counseling, foster family care, bonding programs, adoption and post-adoption programs, mental health clinics, residential treatment centers, crisis residences, respite centers, and psychiatric hospitals. This manual is also valuable for educators, students, foster parents, kinship foster parents, adoptive parents, and teachers able to work individually with students within curriculum units designed to foster self-esteem.




International Perspectives on Reminiscence, Life Review and Life Story Work


Book Description

Examining recent research and practice on reminiscence, life review and life story work, this book offers critical accounts of the rapidly growing and extensive global literature, and highlights the continuing relevance and effectiveness of these therapeutic methods. The book includes examples of international practical projects, involving people of all ages, life circumstances, and levels of physical and cognitive functioning. Contributions from contemporary practitioners and researchers give a nuanced appraisal of the methods of engagement and creativity arising from the purposeful recall of our personal pasts. Chapters include reviews of technology, ethical issues including end of life care, working with people with mental health conditions, and working with people with dementia.




EMDR Solutions: Pathways to Healing


Book Description

Practical therapeutic strategies and clinical insights from EMDR practitioners who serve diverse clinical populations. In EMDR Solutions you will find fifteen exemplary EMDR solutions, each of which develops the Standard Protocol in creative and highly effective ways. These solutions move EMDR forward and expand the application of this powerful therapeutic approach. In this source book of therapeutic strategy and clinical insight, each chapter presents step-by-step instructions for implementing a particular EMDR solution with clients. Each intervention is enriched with relevant case histories that bring to life new targets for and variations on the standard EMDR protocol. Concrete and specific, the clinical work illustrated here will add to you fund of knowledge and broaden your practice. Robin Shapiro has gathered a stellar group of EMDR practitioners. Each of the contributors offers key therapeutic insights in an easy-to-digest form: - Maureen Kitchur presents her Strategic Developmental Model, a meta-model for EMDR practice that encompasses all phases of the Standard Protocol, Ericksonian utilization language, and attachment-enhancing practices. Kitchur's model gives a clear order for EMDR processing and a way to process wordless or implicit experience. - Roy Kiessling offers his Resource Development strategies. Easy to learn and very helpful for clients who are disorganized or in crisis, Kiessling's methods turn resources into cognitive interweaves and ego states into resources. - Sandra Wilson and Robert Tinker demonstrate an effective treatment for phantom limb pain that encompasses treatment from history taking through processing to "It's gone!" - A. J. Popky turns the Subjective Units of Distress scale (SUDS) on its head by targeting inappropriate positive affect. Popky also shares his DeTUR protocol with its Level of Urge to Use (LOUU) for the treatment of addictions and compulsive behavior. - Jim Knipe builds on Popky's work with the SUDS and presents techniques for clearing love-sickness, procrastination, avoidance and codependence using the Level of Urge to Avoid (LOUA). - Joanne Twombly and Ulrich Lanius teach two very different preparations for doing EMDR with people with dissociative disorders. Twombly's applies techniques derived from hypnosis and ego-state work while Lanius shows how to use opiate-inhibiting medication to allow EMDR to work with dissociated clients. - Robin Shapiro addresses the Two-Hand Interweave, a simple but widely applicable exercise of discernment. Shapiro also contributes chapters on using EMDR with anxiety disorders, in differentiation-based couple's therapy and with generational and cultural introjects. - Elizabeth Turner engages children with art therapy, play therapy, and story telling in all phases of EMDR. Her chapter is the delightful cherry on top of this informative, easy-to-use book. Additional chapters by Carole Lovell, Andrew Seubert, Jim Cole, and Susan Schulherr address EMDR with dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) with borderline clients, working with mentally retarded clients, a reenactment tool from guided imagery, and the binge/starve cycle of eating disorders. Whether you read EMDR Solutions cover-to-cover or peruse one chapter that speaks to a particular technique or client population, you will be adding crucial skills and knowledge to your EMDR toolbox.




Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse and Interpersonal Trauma


Book Description

Now revised and expanded with 50% new content reflecting important clinical refinements, this manual presents a widely used evidence-based therapy approach for adult survivors of chronic trauma. Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR) Narrative Therapy helps clients to build crucial social and emotional resources for living in the present and to break the hold of traumatic memories. Highly clinician friendly, the book provides everything needed to implement STAIR--including 68 reproducible handouts and session plans--and explains the approach's theoretical and empirical bases. The large-size format facilitates photocopying; purchasers also get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials. First edition title: Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse: Psychotherapy for the Interrupted Life. New to This Edition *Reorganized, simplified sessions make implementation easier. *Additional session on emotion regulation, with a focus on body-based strategies. *Sessions on self-compassion and on intimacy and closeness in relationships. *Chapter on emerging applications, such as group and adolescent STAIR, and clinical contexts, such as primary care and telemental health. *Many new or revised handouts--now downloadable. *Updated for DSM-5 and ICD-11.




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