Bringing Our Histories into School-Based Therapy How Therapists' Backstories Enrich Work with Children and Young People

This is a book that delves into the relationship between therapists’ sometimes fraught engagement with their own emotional histories and those of their clients, offering a creative template for opening up important conversations. Each of the chapter authors contributing to this volume focuses on seminal life events that inflect the emotional tenor and quality of attunement in the consulting room. A broad range of subjects is covered, which either highlight themes around identity or reflect the kinds of challenges that bring young people to therapy, including bereavement, the experience of otherness, dislocation and migration, disrupted family relationships and life-threatening illness. With compelling clinical vignettes illuminating the resonances between therapists’ stories and those of the clients they present, this book is an engaging and insightful read for all practitioners in the field, especially those working in child and adolescent mental health.

Introduction Lyn French and Reva Klein 1. Not a Blank Slate: The Role of Our Own History in Our Therapeutic Work Sue Kegerreis 2. Stepping into the Unknown: Reflections on Transitions Lyn French 3. Shame, Guilt, Secrets and Lies: How Differentness Within and Outside the Family Shapes our Sense of Self Reva Klein 4. Feeling Dislocated: Some Personal and Clinical Reflections on the Experiences of Relocated Families Angie Doran 5. Mother and Other Tongues: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections Stefania Putzu-Williams 6. The Biafran War: A Transgenerational Legacy Angela Ike 7.Sibling Death: Mourning in Childhood and Beyond Josephine Evans 8. Separation and Loss in Adolescence: The Impact of the Iranian Revolution Farah Bajull 9. Holding on Tightly, Learning to Let Go: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections Melanie Light 10. Masculinity and the Male Therapist: The Internal and External Struggles David Trevatt 11. Suspended Animation: A Traumatic Family History Without a Context Gwendolyn Rowlands 12. My Story, Our Story: Co-Parenting Two Adopted Boys Tony McLeod 13. One of Many: The Impact of Growing Up in a Large Family Margery Craig 14. The Search for Belonging: An Unfolding Story Mihoko Arayama 15. The Meaning of Home: The Loss of the 'Motherland' and How This Shapes the Formation of Identity Martina Nalesso 16. Parenting a Child Through a Life-Threatening Illness: Then and Now Marta Alonso Epilogue

Lyn French is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and author with over 25 years’ experience in the field of school-based psychotherapy. She is the Director of A Space, a psychotherapy service running in partnership with the London Borough of Hackney. A Space and the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) have co-published numerous sets of emotional learning cards which use contemporary art along with commentary and questions by Lyn designed to open up conversations in and outside of therapy sessions. Reva Klein is a child and adolescent counsellor and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She supervises therapists at A Space, and sees clients and supervisees in private practice. Reva has written extensively on children’s mental health issues.