Narrative Therapy and Alternative Healing
Narrative Therapy Approaches with School-Aged Children
How Expressive Arts and Bibliotherapy Help Children Heal from Trauma
Oct 21, 2025
The purpose of this post is to explore the effectiveness of creating storybooks as a therapeutic medium for helping treat traumatized school age children. I will investigate the collaborative nature of the storybook process by looking at post structuralist narrative
therapy, expressive arts therapy, and bibliotherapy. In doing so I will convey that the unique nature of this medium may be useful for most children suffering from trauma, since it acts as an externalized product for the child to reflect on while in therapy and at home.
II.Working with Traumatized School-Age Children:
Eliana Gil defined trauma as an intense emotional or psychological response to an event that was very stressful (Gil, 2006). It is what Van der Kolk describes as a “debilitating loss of control that individuals, especially young children, experience.” Children that have experienced trauma at an early age, oftentimes develop post-traumatic stress symptoms (Van der Kolk in Gil, p.5). Post-traumatic stress can be apparent to caregivers as the child’s behavior, temperament, and play revolves around the experienced trauma.
One example of this manifestation is when a child exhibits the phenomenon of post-traumatic play. Post-traumatic play or art is defined as high-energy, repetitive, literal, or highly structured and the problem theme is not resolved. Post-traumatic children’s play or drawings are engrossed on one particular theme or feature that oftentimes have violent undertones.
The child may expend more energy into the embodiment of the violent character or force in the play or artwork. This may be apparent in children’s drawings when a “monster” or a “bad-guy” have more elaborate features and the other characters appear smaller and more insignificant. In post-traumatic play, more sounds and behavioral features are projected onto “villain” toys or characters as the play is symbolic and “traumatically inspired” (Gil, 2006).
In most cases children’s state of mind and perception of the world is communicated through play and artistic activities. It is the therapist’s responsibility to re-integrate the child into a more realistic perception of himself/herself in relation to the world. Inviting new themes into the play, such as: an “unexpected hero,” a positive alternative outcome, or re-drawing a picture where a “young child slays a dragon.”
However, unlike play therapy, art therapy is a medium in which children have a product to work from in and out of the therapeutic setting. Where children can learn to play differently over time, a storybook format may help children conceptualize their progress within a couple of sessions, and invite children to take challenging roles as craftsmen of their personal stories or narratives as a way of achieving agency through change. Narrative storytelling through the medium of scrap booking allows the client to retell a more reflective and empowering story about surviving a traumatic experience.
III. The Evolution of Storytelling Through Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy was developed by psychologists David Epston and Michael White, and inspired by the postmodern approach of philosopher Michel Foucault. Narrative therapy holds that our identities are shaped by the accounts of our lives found in our stories or narratives. A narrative therapist is interested in helping clients reclaim their stories in descriptive terms. Though it may appear to be problem focused, narrative therapists are interested in investigating a problem’s many influences, including: on the person and or his/her families (Eron, 1996). By focusing on problems’ as effects on people’s lives rather than on problems as essential to one’s sense of being, there is a metaphorical shield that is formed, separating the person from their problem. This externalization or objectification of a problem makes it easier to investigate and evaluate the problem’s influences. Narrative therapy attempts to help families and individuals “reauthor” their lives through the process of externalization.
IV. Collaborative Art Therapy Techniques
Art therapists have collaborated with poststructuralist influenced thinkers to come up with ways that individuals can take back ownership of their present experiences without having to be burdened by maladaptive behaviors that have manifested as a result of trauma (Carlson, 1997). Until recently therapeutic practices have been conducted for parents and family members while young infants and toddlers would be passive receivers in the treatment process. Hanney summarized the developmental process of infants and toddlers by saying that young children have “image memory” in which a child’s first sounds, tastes, and visual images are encoded and retrieved as a part of their long-term memory storage (Crittenden in Hanney, 2002, p. 39).
It is the therapist’s responsibility to encourage the child to recreate the trauma story only asking the child to externalize their abuser by exploring possible metaphors to describe the trauma. Explore a different perspective for looking at an alternative reality in the trauma story. Through the process of “externalization” the trauma becomes a separate entity from the individual, in that it has a name and a form, as opposed to a part of them.
The creation of storybooks is compatible with family interventions that foster a safe family context, strengthen attachment relationships, insure appropriate structure and boundaries, and enhance parenting capacity as well as those interactions that facilitate understanding and dialogue between family members.
The structured fantasy approach incorporates the use of symbolic play and group dynamics, which are central to traditional group treatment. Yet, in recognition of the need for structure many children have, this approach includes elements of social problem-solving and videotape feedback. The participants must learn and practice basic social skills, because they are essential to successful group enactments of collective fantasies (Walsh, 2000). The first step to the narrative therapeutic process is to help the client develop their creative voice.
