Review: Therapeutic Storytelling

Teacher, parent and therapeutic storyteller Susan Perrow uses stories through direct work with children to help them overcome challenges in their lives, and disseminates her ideas widely through workshops for parents, educators and therapists.

Perrow’s premise is that our lives are the stories we tell, and we can all harness the ancient magic of storytelling to influence a child’s belief system. Although aimed at three- to 10-year-olds, the wisdom of Therapeutic Storytelling is readily transferable to different age and ability groups.

The author explains how storytelling is rooted in many traditions, how to understand the metaphor of a story and how to begin to create stories of your own to suit individual children and situations. The key to this is to understand and adapt traditional moral messages about good and evil so that they begin from a representation of the child’s own inner world and presenting dilemma. In this way, the child is seduced into the story and the message. 

The greater part of the book is taken from numerous real examples of stories written by Perrow herself and her followers. Stories used as examples are rich and varied, enticing the child to use their imagination, while also embedded in what is local and familiar so that they are easily referenced by the child to their own situation. The stories are grouped according to problem types. Chapters include unruly behaviour, grieving, intolerance, bullying and teasing.

The reader may need to suspend disbelief to go along with the precept that healing stories really can provide miracle cures for some very difficult behaviours. Perrow does state that in situations where there is clearly significant deep-rooted anxiety or trauma, storytelling should be used alongside and not in place of other interventions. 
 
Some readers may find the message repetitive. However, this does not need to be a cover-to-cover read. Hopefully, most will have picked up this book to try it out for themselves and will dip in and out as they work. The technique empowers children by having them think through and solve their own problems; much of the “story magic”, according to Perrow, works because myth acts on our unconscious as well as conscious mind. The text also shows how the use of story enables the adult storyteller to process what is going on for the child, and the naming and opening up of discussion about the issues through story is of value in itself.

It may not be possible to resolve all problems through “cure by storytelling”, but the great gift of this book is demonstrating that everyone can be a storyteller. It demystifies and makes very accessible the possibility of therapeutic storytelling for anyone who is a practitioner, parent or carer and as such is a great resource.   
 
Reviewed by Janet Rich, trustee, The Care Leavers’ Foundation