Engaging Resistant Children In Therapy

As every child therapist knows, the hardest part of helping resistant children is engaging them in therapy. Their anger on the surface, fear underneath, difficulty expressing themselves verbally, and inability to trust interfere with establishing a therapeutic relationship. Dr. David Crenshaw developed projective techniques to overcome all of these obstacles. He found common themes and used them to design drawing and storytelling techniques to engage children in meaningful therapeutic dialogue. Dr. Crenshaw developed these techniques for engaging resistant children during over three decades of observing play and fantasy productions of angry, defiant and anxious children. But you don't have to spend three decades developing these techniques. Dr. Crenshaw's directives for the Child's Drawing and Storytelling activities are clearly described along with follow-up questions or issues for the therapist to consider in the first in a series of Child and Family Therapy Guidebook Series.This first uidebook, pictured above, explains in detail how to use ten original projective drawing and storytelling strategies with angry, defiant, oppositional, and anxious children to engage them in meaningful therapeutic dialogue. The stories consist of:·THE MISUNDERSTOOD MOUSE ·THE WHAT IF ALRUS ·ALL THE ANIMALS LISTEN WHEN THE WISE OLE OWL SPEAKS ·THE TREE ON TOP OF THE HILL ·BLOW-UP BERNIE ·THE BALLISTIC STALLION ·BEHIND THE CLOSED DOOR ·THE BUMBLE BEE WHO OULDN'T STOP STINGING ·THE ANIMAL THAT NOBODY WANTS TO HUG ·THE PIGLET THAT DIDN'T FIT These strategies are very practical and usable ways to engage 7-12 year-old kids in therapy who don¿t want to talk, don't want to play!"This book is Volume One in a Series of Child and Family Therapy Guidebooks to be published by the Rhinebeck Child and Family Center Publications. The Guidebooks will phasize practical and clinically useful techniques that the busy practitioner can easily incorporate into their work in the child or family therapy room. The series editor John B. Mordock, Ph.D., ABPP, has published extensively on child and family therapy topics over his distinguished career. The Guidebooks will contain contributions from other experienced child and family therapists as well as from Dr. Crenshaw.