Bringing our histories into school-based therapy

sycamore seeds falling — Falling 2, courtesy of the artist, Neeta Madahar

Bringing our histories into school-based therapy: How therapists’ backstories enrich work with children and young people

23rd June 2023

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.

Emotional health comes with a roomy ability to bear a range of feeling states, to ‘fold into’ our being aspects of ourselves we might otherwise disown. This book is an important contribution to the field of child and adolescent psychotherapy, enabling therapeutic professionals to own our own ‘shadows’ in the interests of those we work with.
Graham Music, Psychotherapist, Trainer, Supervisor, Lecturer & Author

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Editors

Lyn French, Director of A Space

Lyn first trained in art (MA Goldsmiths) with a focus on conceptual art practice before completing an art therapy training followed by the Birkbeck MSc in Counselling & Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents and then a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. She was a staff member on the Birkbeck MSc course for over 10 years and has taught and supervised therapists at A Space as well as in the community. Along with Reva Klein, Lyn co-edited Therapeutic Practice in Schools: Working with the Child Within, Therapeutic Practice in Schools: The Contemporary Adolescent and Bringing our Histories into School-based Therapy: How our backstories enrich our work with children and adolescents, all published by Routledge.

Reva Klein, Senior Supervisor, A Space

Reva isa child and adolescent counsellor and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist who supervises therapists at A Space and sees clients and supervisees in private practice. Previously a freelance journalist, writer and editor, Reva taught journalism at Goldsmiths College for many years. She is the author of three books on education: Defying Disaffection, Citizens by Right and We Want our Say and is the co-author of Reluctant Refuge: The Story of Asylum in Britain. She twice won the Commission for Racial Equality’s Race in the Media Award for her writing in the Times Educational Supplement and she founded and edited The International Journal on School Disaffection, an Anglo-American publication now in its second decade. In the 1990s Reva sat on the Secondary School Reform Committee of Unesco. Along with Lyn French, Reva co-edited Therapeutic Practice in Schools: Working with the Child Within, Therapeutic Practice in Schools: The Contemporary Adolescent and Bringing our Histories into School-based Therapy: How our backstories enrich our work with children and adolescents, all published by Routledge.

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