Real Life Heroes

The essential manual for the updated classic 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 called Real Life Heroes: A Life Story Book for Children, Second Edition, and Rebuilding Attachments with Traumatized Children: Healing from Losses, Violence, Abuse, and Neglect (both from Haworth), and provides professionals with structured tools for helping children to reintegrate painful memories and to foster healing from traumatic experiences.

Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual provides an essential guide for practitioners using the Real Life Heroes Workbook as a therapeutic tool. This resource includes premises and strategies from trauma research adapted into a practical format that helps to engage and empower children and caring adults. The manual includes a session summary/progress note that provides an easy-to-complete check-off for key components of each session, progress in the workbook, and targets critical issues, safety plans, trauma triggers, and constructive vs. dysfunctional beliefs. This guides practitioners to help children to deal with experiences of abuse, neglect, family violence, severe illnesses, deaths, or major losses, building on strengths and resources in the the child's family, their culture and their community.

Each chapter in Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual includes sections explaining:

• objectives
• overview
• step by step key points and sequence
• problems that can undermine therapy
• troubleshooting for challenges and their solutions
• essential elements for each exercise

The Real Life Heroes: Practitioner's Manual is a rich resource for practitioners in child and family services including psychologists, child care workers, school counselors, psychiatrists, CASA workers, and adoption specialists who work with troubled and troubling children in home-based family counseling, foster family care, bonding programs, adoption and post-adoption programs, mental health clinics, residential treatment centers, crisis residences, respite centers, and psychiatric hospitals. This manual is also valuable for educators, students, foster parents, kinship foster parents, adoptive parents, and teachers able to work individually with students within curriculum units designed to foster self-esteem.