Therapeutic Engagement of Children and Adolescents Play, Symbol, Drawing, and Storytelling Strategies

This book addresses the challenge with which child and adolescent therapists struggle most: how to meaningfully engage with children and teens who are unwilling participants at the outset and who regard any allowed influence by the therapist to be a competitive defeat. This book, written partially to help the therapist engage with these particularly reluctant children, offers choices and a range of tools to involve them in a meaningful collaborative therapeutic process. The book begins with a research review and a rationale for the therapeutic use of symbols, drawing, and storytelling in order to create portals of entry to reach disconnected children. The book is organized in chapters along major therapeutic goals with specific tools described to meet the objectives: the challenge of therapeutic engagement with reluctant children; relational strategies to engage heart and mind; the therapeutic use of symbols to access the internal and relational worlds of the child or teen; building the therapeutic alliance with strategies that honor strengths; strategies to strengthen the self-observer; facilitating empathy for self and others; strategies to access the pain of social rejection; tools to address grief and traumatic loss; the "quest for home" strategies; and the delicate operation of facilitating hope. The strategies described were chosen and developed based on and informed by a vast developmental psychopathology research literature. Book jacket.

David A. Crenshaw, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist, board certified in clinical psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP), and fellow of the Academy of Clinical Psychology. He is a registered play therapist-supervisor by the Association of Play Therapy and cofounder and current president of the New York Association for Play Therapy