Book Review

Connecting with Kids through Stories – Using Narratives to Facilitate Attachment in Adopted Children – Denise B. Lacher, Todd Nichols and Joanne C. May

This clear and helpful book outlines how parents and therapists can use story to change the inner working model of children who have experienced trauma.

“The child’s experiences of attachment relationships, life events, course of development, and core beliefs are collectively referred to in this book as the inner working model.”

The book covers three different types of narratives: Claiming; Trauma and Developmental and Successful Child which work together to help our children shift the meaning they have attached to their experiences.

“Children deprived of a nurturing, attuned relationship early in life with a caregiver tend not only to construct a chaotic life narrative but also form mistaken, destructive conclusions about personal value and the meaning of experiences. Fortunately, children also possess the ability to embrace an alternative or the deserved ideal, and construct new narratives. The key to constructing adaptive life narratives is discovering the child’s inner working model.”

“Once a hypothesis is formed, narratives are constructed that target the negative and erroneus conclusions formed in early childhood. New beliefs develop that can change the child’s inner working model.”

The book is user friendly and clearly laid out – each chapter has a helpful summary (from which both the above quotes were taken) and lots of examples and case studies – one of which flows through the course of the book and therefore goes into more detail. It is more practical and less theoretical than some of the other books I have reviewed as it is outlining a therapeutic method and it does so in such a way that gave me the confidence to have a go.