Commonly, these stories include information about where we were born, where we grew up, and so on. This knowledge tells others about who we are and informs our own self-understanding as we tell familiar stories and weave in new experiences. In childhood, in our everyday conversations with others and especially family members, information is given to us about how we fit into our family histories and carry on family characteristics. Children and young people who have had disruptive early life experiences may struggle to pull together information which enables them to create coherent life stories – that is, a story which they can easily understand. They may also have many significant questions about their early experiences to which they understandably want answers.
Life story work is often carried out with looked after children to fill in gaps in their self-knowledge and attempt to create a sense of coherence. The term is applied to a range of approaches commonly undertaken to aid the transition of younger children between short-term to long-term care and adoption placements. In this context, life story work seeks to help children to construct a story describing their own early life experiences and their relationships to those close to them. It is undertaken to assist children in establishing a keener understanding and acceptance of who they are, alongside how their past experiences have affected them.
Although there are a wide variety of approaches that fit under the umbrella term “life story work”, there are some common underpinning ideas. Firstly, all the approaches seek to work with the child, their records and, where applicable, previous carers and birth family members to produce an age-appropriate explanation of how the child came into care and how they ended up living where they live today. Secondly, this work is undertaken so that the child may come to terms with, or at least be helped to manage, complex feelings towards birth relatives and previous carers. Thirdly, work is usually aimed at younger children up to the age of 12. Finally, each form of approach aims to create, with or for the child, a coherent biographical story.
Due to the emphasis on working with younger children, many life story work approaches use activities that younger children are comfortable with, proficient in and, in the case of different media, already using. For instance, younger children enjoy painting pictures and cutting out shapes; by using such activities adults facilitating life story work can record artwork and writing in life story work books, which provide a place for the carer and child to store and organise information. Although these books can be created for numerous reasons, including to provide a record of the work undertaken with the child, more importantly their production is an end goal of a therapeutic process. In this way, life story books are viewed as a product created as a consequence of the process of doing life story work. The book needs to be continually updated and can be used to construct answers to the growing child’s questions about their past. The process of life story work includes discussions with and reflections by the child upon their story, supported by an adult in such a way that the child feels absolved of responsibility for their admission into care.
In the most recent edition of their book Life Story Work (2007), Tony Ryan and Rodger Walker sum up the benefits of undertaking life story work as a way of enabling troubled children to leave behind negative emotions that may have accumulated before and after moving into care. While life story work creates some form of resolution and aids transitions, when undertaken in childhood it needs to be continually revisited. From a psychological perspective, the benefits of being able to share one’s stories, particularly those which contain emotional disclosures, have been shown to strengthen immune functioning, lower rates of depression and increase communication with others. Having one’s story heard and understood by others can be a powerful and therapeutic experience; conversely, for those who do not feel their stories are heard or valued, this may lead to problems with emotional wellbeing and self-understanding, which in turn make for less than advantageous transitions to adulthood. Life story work can encourage reflection, aid self-knowledge development, identity coherence and sequential connections between important life events.
Despite the potential benefits of undertaking life story work with older looked after young people, it is generally thought of as something undertaken in childhood. The approaches used cater for younger children, which is not to say that older children do not enjoy activities such as making collages and drawing, but the resources which are produced to assist in life story work are designed to appeal to younger children and tend to be led by the professional.
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