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The beauty of the therapeutic story is that it does its work, resonating in the child’s mind at a deeper level, while the child goes about his daily business. Our therapeutic stories are full of strong imagery and description so that the child’s imagination can be completely captured. They are written to be read aloud individually to children and young people by the adults around them, which is also a therapeutic activity in itself.
These stories arose from a combination of years of clinical work and a desire to help children and young people with disrupted backgrounds who are unable to live with their birth parents to find one way of processing and understanding their histories and their personal stories. All of them have been inspired by Dr Evans’ direct work with children and their foster, kinship or adoptive families. She has personally witnessed the stories working away in children’s minds and making a difference to their lives. The manual is to support their use. It is aimed at the adults in the young people’s lives – foster parents, adoptive parents, filial parents, social workers, therapists, teachers and professionals in the many caring capacities who form the teams that are so vital around children and young people unable to live with their birth parents.
We have arranged the stories into three groups: one is for young or non-verbal children, one is for primary age children and one is for teenagers. Some of the stories are in the form of fairy tales. Like fairy tales, they use metaphor to represent a young person’s reality, making them easier to digest than reality itself. With each hearing, the deeper message behind the metaphor helps the listener begin to make sense of inner thoughts and feelings that have been confusing or unprocessed. The stories for teenagers use metaphor less and are more hard-hitting in many ways. This is exactly what some young people need.
Children with experiences of trauma are one of the forgotten members of the population. They have suffered from not being able to see their birth parents, from not being able to see their friends and from experiencing the world as a place not to be trusted. This view of the world is exactly what we want to change in these young people. We want them to learn to be able to trust adults more.
How exactly do therapeutic stories help to achieve this? This manual is designed to help you understand the process and what this means for how to use them. In Chapter 1 we summarise the stories, with possible conversation openers with your child after you have read them. In Chapter 2 we tell you how to bring about the safe space between you and your child so that the therapeutic stories can work their magic. We tell you a little about the writing of the stories, the meaning behind them and how to deliver them. We explain why they are written to be read more than once – like all stories with meaning, they gradually seep into one’s consciousness, so that the listener begins to recognise their own story in that of someone else.
In Chapter 3, we share with you the research we did with the stories and the invaluable feedback we received from foster and adoptive parents, and from the children and young people themselves. Chapter 4 goes into some of the theory behind the lives of traumatised children. It summarises their inner worlds. It should help further understanding of the importance and impact of the stories.
