In my job we are often asked to include some life story/journey work as part of our intervention with a child. There is a commonly accepted view that all children looked after probably have a need for this kind of work somewhere along their journey of childhood. Recently, a colleague came to speak with me about how she might go about some such work with a child. Our discussion got me thinking about the spirit of life story work and what it is there to achieve. I asked my colleague what her thoughts were on the matter: ‘It’s really exploring the question of who am I? isn’t it?’ she remarked. What a good way of putting it.

How do we ordinarily find out who we are? British Paediatrician and Psychotherapist Donald Winnicott proposed that babies discover who they are in the eyes of their mother (forgive him, it was the 1950s). This theory has always struck me as profoundly important. We discover ourselves in the experience of the other person with whom we are intimately connected. If the other person loves us, we discover that we are loveable. If the other person understands us, we discover that we are understandable. If the other person accepts us, we discover that we are acceptable. This being so, then relationships are the very making of us. Crucially, it is through feedback from people and experiences that we construct a self that we recognise as ourselves. Experience by experience, layer by layer, our self is constructed.

So what happens if a child’s primary caregiving relationships are disrupted time and again? If they are moved from home to home, school to school, place to place? If they lose touch with people and places that were their world, their definition of who they are, and their very way of keeping a coherent sense of this over time? When life is so fragmented, how could a child keep the thread of who they are?

After having been uprooted and moved on so many times, some children seem to be able to find no coherence, no reliable pattern of who they are. They tell us that feel more like a set of states that continually shift and change than a someone who is recognisable to themselves as ‘me’. Without this reliable ‘me’ for guidance, it is understandable that these children struggle to know what they want, know why they did something, know what they should do to get it right next time. Things are a jumble. It is hard to make sense of things and organise a response to the world when there is no stable recognisable ‘me’ to look to as a guide. This, of course, is one of the many reasons why it is so very harmful to children’s development to move them again and again.

At its most misunderstood, life story/journey work is seen as facts and memories in a scrapbook. Actually though, it involves a child coming to understand who they are through a process of developing coherence, continuity and reflection, experienced in a secure relationship. With this secure sense of themselves, children have what they need to deal with the world and what life brings.

Jael 2021