Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction 1. Not a Blank Slate: The Role of Our Own History in Our Therapeutic Work 2. Stepping into the Unknown: Reflections on Transitions 3. Shame, Guilt, Secrets and Lies: How Differentness Within and Outside the Family Shapes our Sense of Self 4. Feeling Dislocated: Some Personal and Clinical Reflections on the Experiences of Relocated Families 5. Mother and Other Tongues: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections 6. The Biafran War: A Transgenerational Legacy 7.Sibling Death: Mourning in Childhood and Beyond 8. Separation and Loss in Adolescence: The Impact of the Iranian Revolution 9. Holding on Tightly, Learning to Let Go: Personal Experiences and Clinical Reflections 10. Masculinity and the Male Therapist: The Internal and External Struggles 11. Suspended Animation: A Traumatic Family History Without a Context 12. My Story, Our Story: Co-Parenting Two Adopted Boys 13. One of Many: The Impact of Growing Up in a Large Family 14. The Search for Belonging: An Unfolding Story 15. The Meaning of Home: The Loss of the 'Motherland' and How This Shapes the Formation of Identity 16. Parenting a Child Through a Life-Threatening Illness: Then and Now Epilogue
