ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a whole host of ideas to enable children to speak about their feelings of low self-worth in unthreatening, child-friendly ways. Children often cannot speak clearly and fully in everyday language about what they are feeling, but they can show or enact, draw or play out their feelings very well indeed. The child may be enabled to appreciate that he is not stupid, rubbish, etc, rather that he has swallowed whole the verbal or non-verbal messages from the grown-ups in his life. Children can realise that the cruel and harsh voices in their head saying 'How silly and selfish!' are not in fact their own, but their father's. Children may not want to throw out their inner critic entirely. Grown-ups are far better at telling children off than they are at giving them praise. Other grown-ups just don't like children very much.
