A Session by Session Guide to Life Story Work

A Practical Resource to Use with Looked After or Adopted Children

Gillian Shotton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367557874
• eBook ISBN: 9781000194791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Life story work is a term often used to describe an approach that helps looked after and adopted children to talk and learn about their life experiences with the help of a trusted adult. This book is an essential step-by-step guide for carers and professionals seeking to carry out life story work with a traumatised or vulnerable child in their care.

Underpinned by positive psychology and drawing on up-to-date research and real-life practice, the book offers a sound theoretical understanding of life story work as well as a practical and easy-to-use programme of sessions. Each session covers the equipment and information needed, a consideration of who is best placed to carry out the work, and answers to commonly raised questions. Also discussed are age-appropriate approaches and ideas for extending each session into other activities and methods to make it more feasible for life story work to be a shared activity between two or three adults who know the child well.

This book gives professionals and carers the confidence to carry out life story work in a way that is sensitive to the child's needs and positive for their self-perception and relationships.

Session 1: Establishing the ground rules and feelings cards

You will need:

• A range of pictures depicting different facial expressions. These can be cut out of old magazines, newspapers, and so on, or downloaded from the internet. The type and style of image – cartoon, photo and so on – will depend on the age and interests of the young person. Important emotions to include: happiness, relief, feeling peaceful, joy, anger, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, resentment, nervousness, panic. See Appendix 3 for feelings cards that you could use here if you don’t want to make your own with the young person
• Paper/card
• Coloured pens/pencils
• Pritt stick
• Scissors
• Life story workbook. This could be photo album style or a display book with transparent pockets. The young person can then do a picture for the front cover and useful documents – photos, certificates, maps, mementos and so on – can be stuck on to A4 paper to go inside each pocket.

Emotional demand: low to medium

Although you can never be completely certain, as you do not know what is going to come up or be particularly sensitive to a young person in terms of emotional sensitivity/emotional demand, this session should be towards the lower end of the scale.

This first session is designed to get you going in a safe way so that you and the young person know what the ground rules are for your sessions together and everyone feels safe and comfortable with them.

Establish a working agreement (ground rules) for the sessions

Explain that, in order for us all to feel safe, we need to have a working agreement. You may find that ‘working agreement’ is better than the phrase ‘ground rules’ as it does not sound quite so akin to school, with the mention of ‘rules’. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Breaks are OK
   
   It should be made clear that, if at any time during the session they need to have some time out or it’s all too much for them, it’s OK to have a break. Sometimes the young person may not return from the break, but this should be respected, and it should be accepted that they needed that time and can start again afresh on another day.
2. All questions are permitted
   
   Another important ground rule is that there are no stupid questions. We need to make it clear that it is fine to ask questions, but we may not have all the answers. If we don’t have all the answers, we will try to find out. Both you and the young person need to be aware that sometimes the information may not be available, and this can be frustrating.
3. Keep to time
   
   Both you and the young person need to start at the agreed time. The young person needs to know that the sessions will last no more than 1 hour. An ideal time frame is 50 minutes, and then you can use the final 10 minutes of the hour to make a few notes or use it for discussion with the carer/other professional involved.
4. Confidentiality
   
   You can let them know that things that are said in the sessions will be confidential; however, if there is anything that is said that indicates they are in danger, or have been in danger in the past, that information will need to be passed on. You’ll be checking with them what they’re comfortable with being written/shown in their life story workbook and who will be able to read it.
   Ask them for any suggestions they have for the working agreement or any questions they have. It’s a good idea to chart the working agreement in felt pens so that you can bring it along to subsequent sessions as a reminder.

Working agreement

• We’ll both try to get here on time.
• There’s no such thing as a silly question.
• It’s fine to have a break.
• What’s said here stays here, unless it’s something that indicates that you or anyone else may be in danger, either now or in the past.
• I’ll check out with you what is ok to share and how to word your book.

Make a feelings chart

Many young people do not talk about how they are feeling on a regular basis. It is not something they are used to. They may have a limited emotional vocabulary; other than happy and sad, they may not be familiar with expressing other emotions or understand what they feel like. During the life story work sessions, it is likely that the young person will experience a number of emotions, some good, many uncomfortable. Some common emotions that might be experienced during life story work are sadness, anger, worry/fear, nervousness, confusion, rejection, resentment, jealousy, happiness, relief, a sense of calm, joy, peace.

It should be made clear to the young person that it is OK for them to express how they are feeling in the sessions and that it is permissible. To help them to do this, you can collaboratively make a feelings chart that displays a range of emotions, and they can then have this to hand in the life story work sessions. The young person can then simply point to the emotion when they experience it. Depending on the confidence of the young person in drawing and their propensity to get involved in art and craft activities (some love it, some don’t), you can roll out this activity in different ways.

Bring along images of a range of emotions from the internet, magazines or other picture resources. If they like drawing, the young person can have a go at drawing their own version of these emotions. Get them to draw them on a chart or on small cards. If they do not wish to draw, they can simply stick the images on to a chart or download them from the internet directly. In this way they can search for celebrities or cartoons that they are particularly keen on.

Ending each session

It’s important to end each session by agreeing the next time and date for the next session and giving the young person a little bit of positive feedback for anything they did well in the session. Descriptive and specific praise is most effective in this context. Where possible, try to start your sentence with ‘I notice’, rather than the more valuative ‘I like’ – for example, ‘I notice that you chose blue for the sad picture, that really gives a sense of someone who is feeling sad’, rather than the more general, ‘Great drawing!’

Session 2: The Tree of Life (Part A)

You will need:

• Images of different trees. You can download images of famous trees from the internet, or use photos, magazines, and so on
• Paper (A4 or A3, or lining paper, if you want to give them the freedom to draw a much bigger tree)
• A photocopy of the outline of the Tree of Life (see Appendix 1)
• Strength cards (see Appendix 2)
• Coloured pens and pencils.

Emotional demand: low to medium

Although you can never be completely certain, as you don’t know what is going to come up or be particularly sensitive for a young person, in terms of emotional sensitivity/emotional demand, this session should be towards the lower end of the scale.

The Tree of Life

Throughout the sessions, you are going to use the Tree of Life as a tool for bringing together many different aspects of the young person’s life story, their past, present and future. The Tree of Life has been used within a narrative approach as a tool for facilitating conversations that strengthen, or thicken, stories about positive aspects of a person’s life, as well as acknowledging and clarifying the past. The tree also serves as a metaphor that will be useful to refer to in subsequent sessions. The young person can see where the other sessions fit in terms of their Tree of Life. It’s a great starting point for life story work as it acts as a map showing where you are up to. The methodology balances a focus on the past with stories of the present and hopes and dreams for the future. This balance between past, present and future tends not to be found in other accounts of life story work that I have researched. The tendency is to view life story work as just being the story of what happened to you in your past.

Another advantage of the Tree of Life is that, if you don’t know the young person very well, it gives a good insight into their character and their ideas for the future. It helps you to get to know them and them to get to know you without yet venturing too much into their past and the stories it contains.

The different parts of the tree represent different aspects of an individual’s life:

• Trunk: the strengths you see in yourself; others can add to this too
• Branches: hopes and dreams for the future
• Leaves: people who are important to you now
• Fruit: the gifts that people give you, perhaps of encouragement or love rather than material gifts
• Roots: the people who have influenced you in your past
• Ground: the activities that you enjoy doing.

All trees experience storms at some point or other, and this analogy allows you to explore together the storms, the difficult times, a young person has experienced, emphasising the strengths and resilience they have shown during th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• A narrative approach to life story work
• Research around the effectiveness of using a narrative approach
• How to use this book
• Session 1. Establishing the ground rules and feelings cards
• Session 2. The Tree of Life (Part A)
• Session 3. The Tree of Life (Part B)
• Session 4. A map of all the places you have lived
• Session 5. Birth certificate
• Sessions 6 and 7. Co-constructing the story so far
• Session 8. Stones in a jar: acknowledging different types of memory
• Session 9. Origami hearts Celebrating people who have had a positive impact
• Session 10. The Team of Life, part 1: values
• Session 11. The Team of Life, part 2: identifying their team and goals
• Session 12. The Team of Life, part 3: tackling problems
• Session 13. Therapeutic stories
• References
• Appendix 1: Tree outline
• Appendix 2: Strength cards
• Appendix 3: Feelings cards
• Appendix 4: Jar of stones activity
• Appendix 5: Team of Life, football pitch outline