The Real Life Heroes Life Storybook for Children has proven to be a highly regarded tool for engaging troubled children and caregivers to begin (and continue) work on reducing traumatic stress. The resiliency-centered format and structure of the Life Storybook coupled with the Real Life Heroes treatment and session structure outlined in the Practitioner's Manual help practitioners to broaden each child and caregivers' "therapeutic window" for skill development and desensitization. Use of the Life Storybook promotes safety and trust and provides a flexible structure for practitioners to address core components of evidence-supported treatment for children with complex trauma. This thoroughly updated edition uses a creative arts approach that encourages children to work with caring adults to develop autobiographies through a wide range of activities, including drawings, music, movies, and narrative. The results foster positive values and a sense of pride in children as they form a stronger bond with caring and committed adults and protection from adversity and stressors that exist in everyday life. Real Life Heroes can be utilized as a comprehensive framework for trauma and attachment-centered therapy or as an easily adaptable resource within other comprehensive treatment programs for traumatic stress to facilitate engagement, affect modulation, attachment, desensitization, or life story work. Chapters of the Life Storybook can be selected to match specific components of complex trauma therapy targeted by treatment teams. The book is a therapeutic resource that helps children overcome the difficulties they may face, including divorce, separation, placement, learning problems, serious illness, and hospitalization. The workbook highlights and preserves for children the moments in their lives when "important" people-family, friends, and community-showed kindness, caring, understanding, and courage, giving the child a sense of value that can promote transformation of troubled children from victims into tomorrow's heroes. The life storybook is especially useful for work with children in foster and adoptive families and group care programs. Real Life Heroes: A Life Storybook for Children is a rich resource for counselors, psychotherapists, teachers, parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, and mentors who are working to help troubled children to overcome traumas and to rebuild hope and a positive identity. Reviews “Real Life Heroes Storybook is a resiliency masterpiece. Built on the historical Hero Archetype, Dr. Kagan invites traumatized children to acknowledge their courage, express their sorrow, and embrace the hero’s path to healing. Real Life Heroes Storybook provides creative resiliency based interventions that guide traumatized children through their pain into recovery by discovering and utilizing their internal strengths and significant personal relationships to overcome adversity and become the real heroes of their own lives.”—James Henry, PhD, director, Western Michigan University Children's Trauma Assessment Center “The third edition of the Real Life Heroes Storybook is an impressive continuation of Dr. Kagan’s already long list of contributions to supporting stronger, healthier, and more resourced outcomes for young people who have experienced traumatic stress. Through the use of ritual, psychoeducation, expressive strategies, skill-building, narrative, and relational engagement, the workbook provides a powerful tool to promote healing in trauma-impacted youth. The language in the workbook is child, caregiver, and provider-friendly, and the facilitated process of self-examination is empowering rather than pathologizing. Dr. Kagan truly believes that every child and every caregiver has the potential to be a hero—and that “heroism” is often found in every day actions—and this vision shines through in his work.”—Margaret Blaustein, PhD, co-author, Treating Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents; The Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute “Real Life Heroes Life Storybook and Toolkit provides an effective step by step process for clinicians and caregivers to guide children and family members in making sense of the pain in their lives that is due to past trauma. The process provided in RLH is comprehensive in its treatment components. However, what strikes me most is how RLH very tenderly and carefully enables the survivor to recognize that their memories and the subsequent resulting emotions move / fluctuate and will need some anchoring based in the reality of their innocence. In addition, RLH enables practice for survivors in how to effectively handle the sensory based triggers that will assault them in the future. I unequivocally recommend both Real Life Heroes Life Storybook and Toolkit for practitioners.”—William E Painter Jr, MS, senior director, Clinical Practice, Child and Family Center of Excellence, Institute for Family Centered Services / The Mentor Network Table of Contents Preface Introduction for Parents and Caring Adults Cover Sheet The Pledge About the Author 1. The Heroes Challenge 2. A Little About Me 3. Heroes 4. Power Plans 5. My Family 6. Important People 7. Mind Power 8. Changing the Story 9. Looking Back 10. Through the ‘Tough Times’ 11. Into the Future 12. My Story About the Author: Richard Kagan, PhD, is the author and co-author of 10 books on treatment and services for children and families with traumatic stress and has published over 30 articles, chapters, and papers on practice and research issues in trauma therapy, child welfare, foster care, adoption, professional development, program evaluation, and quality improvement in family service and behavioral healthcare programs. |