Helping children explore their emotional and social worlds through therapeutic stories

Abstract

Story telling has universal appeal as the oldest medium through which to pass on knowledge in a way that engages the interest of others. A type of story telling based on therapeutic principles is especially accessible to children as it uses the natural language of metaphor and dreams. Therapeutic stories are a powerful intervention in the lives of children who have experienced abuse, neglect, loss, bereavement or rejection. Using casework examples, this paper demonstrates how an educational psychologist can effectively use therapeutic stories to enable children either individually or in groups to have their feelings of hurt acknowledged through carefully constructed and co-constructed stories. This technique provides an evidence-based resource for educational psychologists to use, enabling the damaged identities of children to begin to be repaired.