This Child of Mine: A Therapist's Journey

About this book

Martha Wakenshaw shares her experiencing of the children who come to her for healing. This Child of Mine is a deeply personal account of the authors fifteen years of practice as a child therapist. Using play and expressive arts therapy Wakenshaw deals with emotionally traumatized children and presents the healing relationship that occurs between therapist and patient on a human rather than clinical level. The authors career spans a therapy center for pre-schoolers where she is too quickly made Director a group home for young teenagers never adopted an elementary school of high-risk children to her own private practice. Each raise memories from her own childhood which intersperse the story of her personal and professional development. Wakenshaw shares all the experiences of a child therapist from struggling with her own feelings about parents only trying to cope to therapist burnout to her struggles over referrals to Child Protective Services to the imposition of insurance companies who give her ten session to "fix" a traumatised child. There are the children. The Raymonds and Jacksons and Canadaces in whose lives she makes a difference whose resilient little spirits cannot long be bent. This Child of Mine is about the hurt child in us all and our own journey of personal uncovering.