The Performance of Practice

This book is about how to maintain an aliveness to the possibilities in therapy and practice and how to challenge ideas of orthodoxy in theory and methodologies that can become stale or followed like religions. The central metaphor is the performance of practice emphasized in the spoken word and expressed in all its non-verbal complexity. How practitioners use every aspect of their being to communicate with the other in practice, how they shape and mold their words through gesture and other non-verbal actions in response to the gestures and words of others is a continually recursive process. Therapy is an enactment, a performance that is created between all the participants. "This is Jim Wilson's second book in our series. He might call it his second act. His first book, Child Focused Practice, was very popular because it offered practical approaches to working with children for practitioners from diverse backgrounds. This current volume is written in the same spirit but takes his thinking and techniques into new areas. He is interested in two things: how therapists can release more of their own creativity when working with children and how they can use enactment to explore difficult family emotions. The influence of systemic thinking on the family therapy world has often led to theories and techniques that have often overlooked the value of simply talking to and playing with children. This book goes some way to redressing that balance. It is loaded with examples of conversations with children, playful metaphors, enacted scenarios of traumatic events, and discussions that connect children to the other relationships in the family. The sheer pleasure Wilson gets from working directly with children is evident throughout the book and he is clearly drawing on his personal style, yet the book does not neglect the theorizing that helps answer the question of why Wilson does what he does and why it is effective." ' David Campbell and Ros Draper, from the Series Editors' Foreword

Jim Wilson is a UKCP-registered Systemic Psychotherapist. He is also Consultant Systemic Psychotherapist for Foster Care Associates, an independent fostering organization