Real Life Heroes: Toolkit for Treating Traumatic Stress in Children and Families

Real Life Heroes: Practitioner’s Manual is an organized and easy-to-use reference for busy practitioners who provide therapy to children with traumatic stress. This handy step-by-step guide is an accompanying text to the workbook for children calledReal Life Heroes: A Life Story Book for Children, and provides professionals with structured tools for helping children to reintegrate painful memories and to foster healing from traumatic experiences. The book is a go-to resource for practitioners in child and family service agencies and treatment centers to implement trauma-informed, resiliency-centered and evidence-supported services for children with traumatic stress.

Real Life Heroes utilizes an activity-based workbook to help children with traumatic stress and caring adults build the skills and interpersonal resources needed to re-integrate painful memories and to foster healing after experiences of abuse, neglect, family violence, severe illness, losses, deaths, or abandonment. The model includes a developmental, attachment centered curriculum that uses the metaphor of heroes to rekindle hope, en-courage and em-power caring adults to help children overcome traumas, and enhance family and cultural strengths. The curriculum integrates nonverbal and verbal modalities and helps children and caring adults move step-by-step from trauma narratives to life stories highlighting mastery and moving through traumatic events to safety, helping others, and strengthening nurturing relationships.

The book, along with the Story Book for Children, is a rich resource for practitioners in child and family services. Utilizing the heroes metaphor of a quest as an overall framework for practitioners and caregivers to begin a therapeutic journey, grounded in research on traumatic stress and promoting resilience, the Manual is practice-focused with detailed guidelines and ready-to-use materials presented in an easily accessed format.