Creative Interventions with Traumatized Children In Stock Now

Meeting a key need for practitioners, this volume presents a range of creative approaches for facilitating children's emotional reparation and recovery from trauma. A child may come to therapy for a variety of reasons related to trauma, such as losing a parent, surviving a serious accident or natural disaster, or enduring chronically stressful situations such as abuse, bullying, or multiple foster care placements. While not all children are permanently affected by these experiences, many suffer lasting, distressing symptoms that interfere with their healthy development. Creative therapies provide unique and powerful means for helping them heal. Contributors include well-known practitioners of play, art, music, movement and drama therapies; bibliotherapy; and integrative therapies, who describe step-by-step strategies for working with individual children, families, and groups. Rich with artwork samples and clinical vignettes, chapters vividly demonstrate how creative interventions give children the opportunity to experience mastery over the events that have disrupted their lives, and to express ideas and feelings they may not be able to put into words. Broader approaches to promoting resilience and preventing posttraumatic problems in young people at risk are also detailed. Beyond spelling out the how-tos of assessment and treatment, the book provides a neurobiologically grounded model for understanding how trauma affect children's functioning, and why creative therapies can be so effective in getting development back on track.