Adopted children, or kids in foster care, have a HUGE need to know why they are living with someone else. When they leave foster care, they often have little information to make sense of having been there. They struggle to explain their life history to new friends and to themselves. Help them to put together their experiences by providing them with a life story book that can be added to over the years.
I first heard about Life Story Work in 1997. I was working with children who had been sexually abused. Some of the seminal writers from the U.K. were talking about a process called “Life Story Books” for children who would never be returned to their abusive families. Whilst it sounded interesting, I had little time or energy to put into finding out about something that would not be beneficial to the children I worked with. Out statutory system did not adopt children out just because they may never go home to their natural parents. Why would they need a Life Story Book? Our Child Protection system had all the information that was needed and most of the kids I worked with had regular contact with their families. No…all too hard. I didn’t need to know about it because I’d never use it. It was someone else’s job.
Then I became a foster carer! How arrogant were my assumptions about it being someone else’s job! Some years following my first arrogant and wrong assumption, I worked as a Child Protection Worker in the U.K. I saw the absolute change in a child knowing their history AND healing through the process of facing a lifetime of rejection and neglect.
Life story work is not merely an elaborate photo album or a fun thing to do. It is a three part therapeutic process of integrating and healing past pains with a view toward moving to a positive future.
The process is:
1. Information collection,
2. Integration of the information by the child, and
3. the making of a book that can be added to (or even subtracted from) throughout the years.
It is the child’s book: the sum of their life, of who they are and where they came from.
It is a book that is a therapeutic tool, written by someone other than the child – the Life Story worker. It contains the good and the bad, the truth and the myths. It is everything that has impacted upon the child.
We are all part of the child’s story and we cannot afford to keep expecting that someone else will begin the child’s Life Story Work. Do we expect the child’s schoolteacher to engage in solution oriented therapy because that’s what we assess the child requires?
Confessions of a Life Story Worker is a two part article. The second article looks at how to create the book for the child in your care. It is also full of links to other sites to assist your knowledge base and to help you gain competency in creating a lasting memory for either your fostered or adopted child.