Reading and Expressive Writing with Traumatised Children, Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Introduction. Part 1. Terror and Telling: Entering the Young Asylum Seeker's World. 1. War trauma, abuse, and the interrupted narrative. 2. Linking external and internal worlds. 3. Self-narration and identity: therapeutic writing that reconstructs and connects. 4. 'I am neither here nor there': living in two cultures. Part 2. Mapping the Terrain. 5. Healing words have history. 6. Approaches. 7. Processes. 8. The key: selecting books. 9. Core competencies: training and organisations. 10. Ethics and good practice. Part 3. Derring-do: Entering the Symbolic World. 11. Trauma and word-play. 12. Accessing trauma through images, symbols, and metaphors. 13. Dreams and fantasies in trauma. 14. Fairy tales and myths: therapeutically 'storied pain'. 15. Using poems and stories in developmental reading/writing. Part 4. Social Dynamics. 16. The value of commonality and community. 17. Group skills. Part 5. Brain Works: Putting your Mind to It. 18. The creative brain: trauma, memory, and narrative. 19. The brain, literature and trauma. Part 6. Mapping the Research: the Efficacy of Writing on Trauma: an Evaluation. 20. Controlled laboratory studies and 'real world' projects. 21. Interapy: therapy online, future research.

This book has a sense of straddling continents of theory and practice... Marion Baraitser has been working at the Baobab Centre as a writer-in -residence. She details her work, experiences and a critical perspective on many aspects of using words with young people who have had unique early lives, involving some or all of the following: warfare, receiving and/or perpetrating violence, abandonment, racism, identity crisis, dislocation, poverty and surviving without parents or carers. Baraitser visits relevant areas of consideration when working with this client group, including the nature of trauma and its effects on brain development; culture, age, gender and reading level of participants; sensitive choice of materials; many examples of world literature and exercises, which will be useful to other practitioners and topics such as collective cultural identity, groupwork, incorporating drama, 'performed language' and music... There is much that is transferable within this book for all 'words for wellbeing' practitioners...The particular stories and voices of the children are valuable in this volume... It is worth taking time with this complex and deep examination, not least as a reflexive tool to measure ourselves as facilitators against Baraitser's experienced account of a writer practicing with a traumatised and vulnerable client group.