The therapeutic treasure box for working with children and adolescents with developmental trauma – creative techniques and activities – by Dr Karen Treisman
Written for: therapists who treat traumatized children and adolescents. Also people working in foster care. Some exercises are clearly therapy work though and should only be done with a therapist present. People with DID are not the intended audience, a system with motivated caretakers could still profit from it a lot.
Special focus: relationship, creativity, practical activities
What it is not:
- a book about DID. All exercises and activities have to be adapted to use them for working with Littles.
- a book about adults. Most of the exercises can still be done by someone who likes creative approaches but we bet there are better books for adults out there.
- A book about PTSD in general. This is not for beginners.
Language: the book is not full of psychological terms that would make it hard to understand. It is easy to follow as it explains things in proper order and doesn’t repeat itself unnecessarily. The language is simple enough that you could understand it if you are not a native english speaker. There is no translation into other languages yet.
Book: it’s a big format to make it possible to simply copy the worksheets and have them in a workable size. The price is moderate compared to some other text books which makes it just affordable for the likes of us.*
Overview
Chapter 1
describes the basics of working with traumatized (young) people. This is an important reminder for hosts/ adult parts of a system on how to position themselves when helping younger parts. We really like how Treisman sums it up as “safe hands, thinking minds, regulated bodies“ as we have witnessed that in former Ts and it is indeed what our Littles remember about them most.
Chapter 2
This is about the assessment a T would do at the beginning of their work. Which is getting to know the child. We do the same with Littles when starting SystemWork, ANPs are often scared of this. The worksheets and ideas presented in the book make it more fun and reduced our fears. They offer small exercises that can be repeated over time and are not likely to get overwhelming. We were surprised by the multitude of idea, then learned that the whole book is like that: extremely creative.
We especially liked the idea of using the name to let the kids share things about themselves. Learning the history of some Littles’ names can be a whole revelation in itself.
Chapter 3
This chapter is all about developing a sense of safety. We consider that the foundation of all further trauma work, so it makes a lot of sense to do this first. The exercises in the book could help you learn more about your own and the Littles ideas about safety. It touches on staying within the window of tolerance, building a safe place, making a kids-friendly skill-kit for soothing, creating inner helpers, coming up with things that might be found in the magic store, how to play “same but different“ and even a safety plan specific for kids. While we do have a lot of that on the blog the ideas in the book are different, because they are shaped specifically to match the cognitive development and needs of kids.
Chapter 4
This chapter is all about emotions. It offers a good explanation why feeling, expressing feelings or sometimes even just recognizing them can be difficult for traumatized children. And Littles. Even the adults will get something out of it. Always be careful reading examples, as they are chosen close to reality and might well describe you. If you haven’t noticed it before then it becomes clear now: the chapters build on each other and skills learned in the former chapters will be needed here. Again, there are a multitude of creative ways to explore emotions, some of them interactive, some helping to create kids-friendly gauges for different feelings. Our Littles especially love the very expressive and funny emotion cards.
Chapter 5
is all about improving self-esteem and exploring personal strength and resilience as well as building hope for a better future. Resource work, another pillar of healing. The exercises in this chapter help to see through limiting beliefs and create more positive ones. They help to recognize the positive sides of the kid and support, highlight and grow them. It includes something similar to the happiness journal and a bucket list, just for kids. All this will slowly improve self-esteem and quality of life. The “Tree of Life“ technique (Ncazelo Ncube) is mentioned and it sounds like an incredibly useful and meaningful tool for SystemWork but it has a depths that makes it impossible to do this without a T (maybe we can inspire some Ts to learn this?)
Chapter 6
is all about the caretaker-child relationship. After we looked at the child for a few chapters this takes a closer look at the caretaker, their relationship with the child and their way of parenting. All of this needs to be adapted to systemwork, but it is surprisingly close already. Connecting to chapter 1 this chapter goes into depth of how to best re-parent a traumatized child and how to strengthen the relationship. For us this was the most challenging chapter, as our hosts are inexperienced in parenting. Here we could find a ton of small exercises that would lead us to be more openly loving and warm toward our Littles and share positive activities. The ideas presented are manageable for those whose own trauma has made them a less than ideal parent. This chapter is what we have been looking for when we bought the book. We personally believe that connection is the opposite of dissociation and how Treisman puts it “relational trauma requires relational repair“.
Chapter 7
continues the focus on the caregiver. It is all about establishing self-care and support. Taking care of traumatized kids (or Littles) takes a lot. The questions and worksheets in this chapter will help exhausted and depleted caregivers to create strategies to improve their own stability. I might have had a little tear in my eye reading it. Treisman shows a great understanding of the challenges that come with re-partenting traumatized kids while possibly being traumatized yourself.
Chapter 8
takes time to explain why anger can be such a tricky thing for traumatized kids (not much different for cPTSD adults really). It’s about understanding the message behind an outburst so that the problem can be solved at the root instead of just trying to control surface behavior. Learning how to work with the tools presented can help everyone in the system who struggles with out-of-control expressions of strong emotions (not just anger). Some is similar to our relationship-based behavior chain analysis. We would recommend reading material from “love&logic“ or “loving our kids on purpose“ for more practical ideas to expand on this.
Chapter 9
normalizes the experience of nightmares and difficulties with sleep. Apart from basic sleep hygiene there are helpful ideas like essential oils, weighted blankets, relaxation exercises, a super cool nightmare ninja and much much more. She further explains the use of strategies learned earlier in the book like the safe place or containment and more creative ideas that are just magic. (find our magic ritual for nightmares here. You can find more DID specific help with sleeping problems in negotiating sleep.)We have studied this topic excessively and still found new ideas in this chapter.
Chapter 10
is about transitions, endings and new beginnings, including the end of therapy. Most of it is clearly for therapists to help them lead through this sensitive time. Other ideas are most helpful for those involved in foster care to help kids through transitions. Some of it is about help for small transitions that happen every day, like the end of play time, changing locations etc and supporting the kid to be oriented in time/ create a timeline. Littles need tons of help with that. We wonder if some ideas could be used in phase 3 work, when it comes to topics like fusion. It seems ideal.
After reading:
This book could be a great support for phase 1 (stabilization) work for Littles if you are comfortable with adapting things to SystemWork.
It is practical and we love practical. It is creative and we adore that too. It teaches to ask good questions and we consider that true wisdom.
The sentence-completion cards drew our attention the most and, if we understood that properly, Treisman actually has more resources about that.
There are a lot of helpful pictures and we wish some of them were in color, as that would help to make the concepts easier to grasp. We like that the pictures of examples for the different creative tools are not originals from kids cause we honor protecting the kids privacy a lot.
There are a multitude of worksheets after every chapter and we discussed the fact that some are repeating several times, only used in a different context in each chapter. We guess it helps to have them there when you only re-read a specific chapter, but it makes the book look thicker without adding information.
It is not necessary to read Treismans other book to understand and use this one.
Examples are generally not describing sexual abuse, which makes this book a lot less triggering than others. Because physical and verbal abuse as well as neglect etc are described it is still good to read case examples with caution.
As this isn’t a book about DID Littles it doesn’t touch on specific DID problems.
It is strictly phase 1 work, not touching on working through traumatic memories.
No, we don’t get money for writing this review.
Read more at www.safehandsthinkingminds.co.uk
This book will stay in our minimalist bookshelf. We will get at least a year of intense work out of it (we have more than one Little). This makes it the best therapy book we read in 2017.
*if you are a T and you wrote an expensive text-book on PTSD, DID, dissociation or otherwise useful things, you can send us a free copy and we might review it here. You can find a contact form in the “about us“ section
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