TRAINING 

Clarifying personal, professional and organisational perspectives on how we might approach
therapeutic story writing with children and young people (this approach can also be useful
with adults).

Q. What do we do with an unbearable story? If the adults can’t bear it – how can the child?

• Identify ways of working in partnership with professionals and parents to prepare a story
appropriate and accessible for a child or young person given these pressures and
difficulties.

• Integrating and building on good practice. Remember that there can be a great deal of
resistance to integration, joining everything together or getting connected because it
means having a good look at what is there and what isn’t.

• Writing a trauma story is not a short cut but can help to ease the level of acting out and
process something which feels impossible to know and make sense of. It can also be helpful
when there just isn’t the opportunity to do longer term work with the child or YP.

My 3 Ps - Personal, Professional, Patients


• Setting realistic and achievable goals for ourselves in complex and sensitive work given
our own stories. This includes: managing distress; understanding how trauma affects us
and other people and recognising risk.

• Incorporating a model which allows space for creativity and hope into therapeutic
practice. Wworking with others in a professional network to bring stories together that
hold meaning in terms of the past, present and with realistic hopes for the future.

• Developing a better understanding of the obstacles and challenges in the gathering up
and telling of a story which can be difficult to bear for parents and professionals. It may
not always be possible to write a story but noticing patterns and finding ways to speak
about them is important.

Adoption and Trauma stories – an overview

This is one way of approaching this difficult work in order to help you as clinicians make sense
of trauma and to bring back the child or young person to the centre and it’s a way of making
sense of stories that can feel “just too painful to think about” as one adopter put it. This
method of story writing combines psychodynamic principles of working with the unconscious
but draws from EMDR techniques and other trauma approaches.

Writing trauma stories then is a way of gathering together aspects of the child’s story in a more manageable or “bearable” way for children who have experienced “unbearable” - overwhelming and often persistent

distress or trauma in their history. It is different to the gathering together of historical
information from records in a systematic way such as through therapeutic life story work.
For only when can there be a way of bringing the story together and sharing it more openly
will an individual have the sense that their experience is meaningful and it can come to life
for them, or at the very least, it can be understood and processed through its telling.

According to Dr Daniel Siegel (2001):


“Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our
awareness....storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate
to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly
remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our
implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us.”

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