Art, Play, and Narrative Therapy shows mental health professionals how the blending of expressive arts, psychotherapy, and metaphorical communication can both support and enhance clinical practice. This book illuminates the ways in which metaphorical representations form who we are, how we interact, and how we understand our larger environment. Author Lisa Moschini explains how to couple clients’ words, language, stories, and artwork with treatment interventions that aid empathic understanding, promote a collaborative alliance, and encourage conflict resolution. Chapters include numerous illustrations, exercises, and examples that give clinicians inspiration for both theoretical and practical interventions.

Showcasing approaches as creative and playful as young clients themselves, the book presents therapy as a dialogue of discovery. Through transcripts and compelling case examples, contributors illuminate how drama, art, play, and humor can be used effectively to engage with children of different ages, and to honor their idiosyncratic language, knowledge, and perspective.

This best-selling book is an easy-to-read introduction to the ideas and practices of narrative therapy. It uses accessible language, has a concise structure and includes a wide range of practical examples. What Is Narrative Practice? covers a broad spectrum of narrative practices including externalisation, re-membering, therapeutic letter writing, rituals, leagues, reflecting teams and much more. If you are a therapist, health worker or community worker who is interesting in applying narrative ideas in your own work context, this book was written with you in mind.

FirstPlay Kinesthetic Storytelling Practitioner Training ManualBy Dr Janet a Courtney

Narrative Therapy provides an introduction to the theory, history, research, and practice of this post-structural approach. First developed by David Epston and Michael White, this therapeutic theory is founded on the idea that people have many interacting narratives that go into making up their sense of who they are, and that the issues they bring to therapy are not restricted to (or located) within the clients themselves, but rather are influenced and shaped by cultural discourses about identity and power. Narrative therapy centers around a rich engagement in re-storying a client's narrative by re-considering, re-appreciating, and re-authoring the client's preferred lives and relationships. In this book, Stephen Madigan presents and explores this versatile and useful approach, its theory, history, therapy process, primary change mechanisms, the empirical basis for its effectiveness, and recent developments that have refined the theory and expanded how it may be practiced. This essential primer, amply illustrated with case examples featuring diverse clients, is perfect for graduate students studying theories of therapy and counseling, as well as for seasoned practitioners interested in understanding how a narrative therapy approach has evolved and how it might be used in their practice.

Starting from the assumption that people experience emotional problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not represent the truth, this volume outlines an approach to psychotherapy which encourages patients to take power over their problems.

The authors describe their success with narrative therapy, a lighter, playful approach to the serious problems encountered in child and family therapy. They provide case vignettes in the first two sections which show how children who might have been labeled belligerent, hyperactive, anxious, or out of touch with reality are found to be capable of taming their tempers, controlling frustration, and using their imaginations to the fullest. They address the helpful role of family members, as well. The third section of the text offers five extended case stories. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR