Play2heal Therapies
Play Therapy
Therapeutic Life Story Work
What is Life Story Work?
Traditional Life Story Work is usually a short book prepared for a child who is adopted /fostered to help them to gain an understanding of why they came into Local Authority care. This workbook often contains inaccurate/confusing information for the child, leaves too many unanswered questions, does not deal with the child’s traumas and fails to tell the story from the child and birth parents perspective.
Therapeutic Life Story Work goes much further; it is a Therapeutic “process” undertaken in a sensitive and gentle approach facilitated by a trained therapeutic life story practitioner working with both child and Carer as a triad. This impartial direct work provides the child with vital information about their past, works through traumas, helps them to make sense of current behaviours and feelings whilst making links with their history. This approach also helps the Carer to understand the impact a child’s history has on current behaviours and throughout the process this will help strengthen attachments, build up trust and support the child to make positive change for their future
How is Therapeutic life story work delivered?
The Life Story Worker researches the young persons life so that they can provide accurate information, accessing children’s service files and other necessary documents to build up a picture of the child’s history, this usually includes interviewing birth family and previous Foster Carers.
Direct work sessions with the child and Carer using the child's researched history and their own memories creatively recorded on rolls of wallpaper using drawings, eco maps, fact and fiction exercises, time lines etc. The wallpaper will also include “feelings/loss/change” work. The end stage is the creation of a Life story Book, but the most important part of the process is what is recorded on the wallpaper
My Approach
A pioneer of “therapeutic Life Story” work is Richard Rose; his work is world renowned and this is the approach we use. It involves the child’s primary carer from the beginning to the end of the process, helping to strengthen the relationship between child and their Carer by exploring the child’s history through wallpaper work. It is anticipated that such an approach working with both child and Carer on a regular basis will help create a positive sense of which they are and secure a stable, consistent, and caring environment in which the child can learn that a traumatic experience doesn’t have to dominate their life.
Life Story Work is a way to help care experienced children to make sense of their past and understand the journey of their identity.
Research by Dr Dan Hughes, a clinical psychologist working with children who have experienced trauma, has shown that Life Story Work can help children to develop a ‘coherent story’ which is ‘an autobiographical narrative involving both past adverse experiences and current experiences in safe relationships’.
“It is difficult to grow up as a psychologically healthy adult if one is denied access to one’s own history.”
Fahlberg, 1991
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play2heal.therapies@gmail.com
