A Safe Place to Grow (PDF)

Discover the effective group treatment strategies that help your school-aged clients!

A child immersed in a conflicted family life may be forced to cope with a multitude of trauma, including violence, abuse, and insecurity. In A Safe Place to Grow: A Group Treatment Manual for Children in Conflicted, Violent, and Separating Homes, highly respected experts give mental health professionals the tools to provide effective group treatment for children scarred by family environments of conflict and abuse. This easy-to-understand, step-by-step manual is a developmentally appropriate treatment curriculum for traumatized school-aged children. Age-appropriate sections separate therapy for big or little kids, focusing on efficacy while presenting a comfortable multi-ethnic, multi-cultural model.

A Safe Place to Grow has easy-to-understand descriptions of techniques, with each session in the curriculum containing games and activities that are therapeutic yet flexible enough to be modified whenever the situation warrants. A chapter is included to helpfully troubleshoot problems encountered when in session with either age group of children. Useful illustrations accompany the text, along with a comprehensive bibliography listing additional therapeutic resources for different types of family problems. Appendixes are included for instruction on psycho-educational groups for parents that enhance their sensitivity to their children's needs, as well as providing an evaluation study of the group model itself.

A Safe Place to Grow provides a sequence of activities within the group model aimed at each of these five goals:

• creating common ground and safety
  
• exploring the language and complexity of feeling
  
• defining and understanding the self
  
• defining and revising roles and relationships
  
• restoring a moral order
  
  

A Safe Place to Grow is an essential resource for social workers, psychologists, family and child therapists, school counselors, and battered women and children's advocates.