Unravelling Trauma and Weaving Resilience with Systemic and Narrative Therapy

Unravelling Trauma and Weaving Resilience with Systemic and Narrative Therapy is an innovative book that details how clinicians can engage children, families and their networks in creative and collaborative relationships to elicit change within the context of trauma and violence. Combining systemic, narrative and dialogical theoretical frameworks with clinical examples, this volume focuses on therapeutic conversations that can help children, and those involved with them, deconstruct their experienced difficulties, and create more hopeful stories and alternative ways of relating to one another through a sense of play. Vermeire advocates for serious playfulness as a way of directly addressing trauma and its effects, as well as along 'trauma-sensitive' side paths. Puppetry, artwork, interviews and theatre play are used to weave networks of resilience in ever-widening circles and this approach is informed by the awareness that individual problems are always to be seen as relational, social and political. This book is an important read for therapists and social workers who work with traumatised children and their multi-stressed families.

Sabine Vermeire is a systemic and narrative psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer. She works at Interactie-Academie, Antwerp, Belgium.

Introduction  1. Dis-covering a web of complexities  2. A collaborative therapeutic journey  3. First meetings  4. The tentacles of trauma and adversity  5. Performing new relational narratives  6. Injured relationships and 'broken homes'  7. Engaging with parents, carers and professionals  8. Laying down a path in walking