Bringing Our Histories into School-Based Therapy

Book excerpt: 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.