children
Posted by Dulwich on Sep 22, 2016 in | 0 comments
Showing 1–16 of 30 results
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A Child’s Voice: Narrative Family Therapy— Lisa Johnson
$9.90This article recounts an approach to working with a seven-year-old girl in response to a problem that had muted her voice. The narrative practices employed included absent but implicit questions, therapeutic documents, re-authoring conversations, definitional ceremony, and the use of an ‘Anticipated Petitioner’ to support a ‘consulting your consultants’ interview.
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Bedwetting in times of trouble: Narrative therapy, enuresis and trauma— Sue Mitchell with illustrations from Julienne Beasley
$9.90Dulwich Centre Foundation is involved in projects aiming to assist children living in vulnerable circumstances, including children who have experienced or witnessed violence. During these projects we hear about how children and young people in such distressing circumstances are increasingly vulnerable to experiencing bedwetting. We particularly hear about children in immigration detention centres, children who are living with their mothers in domestic violence shelters, and children in contexts of war or natural disaster, who are having to deal with wet beds in times of trouble.
We also hear about the effects of this bedwetting on the children’s sense of identity, on relationships within the family, and on the relationships children have with other children. We found that bedwetting can also impact on family members, especially if the family is dealing with a lot, like coming to a new country.
While wetting the bed can be a completely normal part of growing up, and is often experienced without any influence of distress or trauma, this handbook aims to offer hopeful and creative ways of responding to children who have experienced trauma and/or witnessed violence and in the midst of dealing with these tough experiences are also finding themselves in wet beds. We hope this resource will be helpful for workers and for parents/carers. Down the track we are also hoping to produce a storybook that children and young people can read.
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Children, Parents and Mental Health— The Dulwich Centre
$9.90This article presents initial material generated by the Children, Parents and Mental Health Project. It contains a collection of stories from children of parents with mental health difficulties, and serves not only as collective therapeutic document and a document of alternative knowledge about this topic, but also as a source of questions for those working with people whose parent has experienced mental health problems.
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Discovering Children’s Responses to Trauma: A Response-based Narrative Practice— Angel Yuen
$9.90Modern discourses of victimhood, which are often present in instances of childhood trauma, can contribute considerably to establishing long-term negative identity conclusions. However, focussing on children’s responses to trauma can aid in conversations that contribute to rich second story development, without re-traumatising children or young people. These kinds of enquiry can focus on children’s acts of resistance, places of safety, and other skills of living. This paper gives examples of therapy informed by this approach, and provides a map of four levels of enquiry for conversations with children and young people which elicit and build upon responses to trauma.
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From Isolation to Community: Collaborating with Children and Families in Times of Crisis— Elizabeth Buckley and Philip Decter
$9.90This article offers a narrative and anthropological framework for working with children and families in crisis. Psychiatric crisis can invite practitioners to prioritise their own ideas about problems and solutions above collaboration. The article argues that practices of collaboration are crucial when responding to these kinds of crises, and offers a framework for remaining in collaborative and hopeful positions. A range of clinical examples are also provided.
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Sharing Stories: The Work of an Experience Consultant— Ellen Walnum
$9.90This paper introduces the concept of Experience Consultant. Ellen Walnum is a Norwegian woman with the experience of growing up with a mother who had psychiatric difficulties. She has also had the experience of a mental health crisis. Determined to put these experiences to work for the benefit of others, Ellen is now employed as an Experience Consultant working with professionals, with mothers who have psychiatric difficulties and with their children. This paper describes some of the key skills involved in the work of Experience Consultants. It also offers a vision for re-thinking mental health services as partnerships built on a combination of ‘professional knowledge’ and ‘experience knowledge’. This paper was crafted from an interview1 and was delivered as a keynote address at the 8th International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference, which was held at Agder University College in Kristiansand, Norway, June 2007.
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What the Wildman, the Dragon-Arguing Monster and Camellia the Chameleon taught me about externalising conversations— Maggie Carey
$9.90In this paper, Maggie Carey relates three engaging stories about her use of externalising conversations with children. In doing so, this paper illustrates the diversity of metaphors that are engaged with in externalising conversations and the ways in which the knowledges, imagination and stories of children can be an intricate part of therapeutic conversations and how these can be shared between families.
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Children, Trauma and Subordinate Storyline Development— Michael White
$9.90In this paper, Michael White emphasises the importance of subordinate storyline development in consultations with children who have been subject to trauma. This subordinate storyline development provides an alternative territory of identity for children to stand in as they begin to give voice to their experiences of trauma. This affords children a significant degree of immunity from the potential for retraumatisation in response to therapeutic initiatives to assist them to speak of their experiences of trauma and its consequences. This paper includes illustrations of the implications of these ideas for consultations with children who have been subject to trauma.
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Conversations with Children with Disabilities and Their Mothers— Maksuda Begum
$5.50This paper from Bangladesh presents an overview of narrative approaches to work with mothers and their children who have intellectual disabilities. In what can be traumatic contexts, this work is based on mothers’ and children’s skills, knowledges, values, and connections. Through the course of both individual and group work, blame and stigma are externalised, and the love and care mothers have for their children – as well as their children’s ‘special abilities’ – are brought more to the fore. This paper also presents an alternative intake questionnaire that can help to diminish the effects of pathologising language, and elicit accounts of care and connection.
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Growing up with Parents with Mental Health Difficulties— Ruth Pluznick and Natasha Kis-Sines
$9.90This paper documents a project with young people who are growing up with a parent with mental health difficulties. The authors discuss how they are able to employ the narrative practice ‘double-listening’ to stories by the young people – listening not only to the challenges that this experience brought, but also asking about the skills, knowledges and opportunities the young people used to respond to these. This and the other narrative principles that informed the project – such as co-research and ‘enabling contribution’ are demonstrated by the inclusion of a therapeutic document from work with a young man, and a transcript of a conversation with a young woman and her mother.
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Picturing stories: Drawings in narrative family therapy with children— Anik Serneels
$9.90This article illustrates how drawings can be implemented in narrative family therapy with children. This work primarily draws upon the narrative family therapy framework, but other family therapy ideas are also integrated. It will be argued in this article that non-verbal media, more specifically drawings, can contribute to alternative story development and the co-creation of joint family actions, whereby the family can achieve their preferred ways of living. First I explain how drawings can assist externalising conversations. This is followed by a detailed description of the stance I take as a family therapist, questions I ask, and how I focus on relationships and interactions during the co-creation of drawings. I also describe how positively implicating family members and enabling their active participation during this drawing process reinforces the change process. If family members have experienced problems similar to the ones the child is now struggling with, intergenerational and sibling alliances can also be created. Finally I put theory into practice by providing the reader with a case example.
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We don’t give up: Developing family and community responses to adolescent-to-parent violence— Ben Shannahan
$9.90This paper explores the use of narrative therapy practices in developing a community response to a young man’s use of violence towards his family. Opportunities and ethical tensions experienced in incorporating principles and methods of nonviolent resistance (Omer, 2004) are discussed along with opportunities narrative therapy might offer as a response to these tensions. Different conceptions of responsibility and accountability, and the pushes and pulls of dominant aspects of men’s culture, are considered in relation to how these factors might shape responses to adolescent-to-parent violence, and how multi-generational men’s meetings were incorporated as part of this work.
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From print to e-books in therapeutic story writing: A mother’s tale— Nikki Evans
$9.90This paper describes how narrative therapy provided the background for developing a resource for troubled children and young people. The resource, Eloise’s excellent experiment, is the result of combining the professional with the personal as the author and her daughter used their storytelling, writing, and illustrative skills to tame ‘The Worries’.
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Linking Families Together: Narrative Conversations with Children, Adolescents, and Their Families— Jodi Aman
$9.90This paper explores ways of responding to the problems children and adolescents face in ways that include and honour the contributions of other family members. For example, parents and care-givers can be enlisted to help with scaffolding and outsiderwitnessing, as well as providing what the author refers to as ‘comemories’. The paper also discusses specific ways of working with children, such as keeping therapeutic conversations fun, regarding children as ‘story listeners’, opening space for conversations about difficult problems, and using therapeutic documents. How these considerations are put into practice is then documented in three accounts of working with children and adolescents on issues of anxiety, the death of a pet, and a parent’s diagnosis of cancer.
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Seeking treasure beneath the ruins: Stories of narrative practice with children and their loved ones— Ross Hernandez
$9.90Children with multiple challenges such as emotional, behavioural, mental, social, developmental, and educational difficulties, often experience constant hardship in their daily lives. These problems also impact their parents or carers. This paper shares stories of narrative practice with children and their loved ones. These stories include the use of externalising conversations, photographs, and the audio recording of outsider-witness responses.
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Talking with Mothers and Children: An Intake Questionnaire
$5.50Developed by David Denborough (Dulwich Centre Institute of Community Practice) in conjunction with Maksuda Begum (Bangladesh Protibondhi Foundation).
This questionnaire is designed as a supplementary intake tool. It has been developed in recognition of the particular experiences of mothers of children with disabilities. This intake tool has two purposes. Firstly, it enables the counsellor to learn about the particular skills and knowledge of mothers and children that can later become a focus for therapeutic conversations. Secondly, it is structured in a way that assists mothers to get in touch with their own skills and knowledges, and provides a healing way for the counsellor to respond.
Thank you to Tileah for a wonderful presentation. I love hearing the word “yarn” used in this powerful way (Americans also have that term). The practice of “translating”, of shifting concepts into language that can be more usefully heard, is very powerful. As coaches we can make good use of this to help clients uncover their hidden or forgotten resources.
These stories are amazing examples of what we can discover when we hold onto our “beginner’s mind” and remember that the other person (client, patient) has the information and understanding, not us. We talk a lot in leadership development about “co-creating” and I think this is a beautiful example of two very complementary roles: the person who has the story and the person who helps to explore and shape it.
I like the idea of narrative – there is something about giving people the power to create a narrative, rather than simply appearing in a story told by someone else. Within the narrative metaphor, I especially enjoy the fabric metaphor – the idea of strands. These may touch each other, or not, may go well together in tone or color, or not. But again, there is some power in creating and weaving the narrative.
In my own work with coaching and leadership development, I find that the emphasis on narrative(s) helps make things more tangible, and therefore brings them to their true scale, instead of letting them take on imaginary and unclearly described proportions.
I love this. Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. Such a powerful sentiment. Sometimes through trauma, it is hard to access the words that really encapsulate that experience – though using the written word does help us access those hard to utter parts of our memories … in those cases though perhaps the story we tell ourselves is not one that makes us feel strong in the first instance – so finding a way to tell that story in a way that focuses on the strength of surviving to tell that story is just amazing!