E-Book Overview
<em>Nurturing Childrendescribes children's lives transformed through therapy. Drawing on decades of experience, internationally respected clinician and trainer Graham Music tackles major issues affecting troubled children, including trauma, neglect, depression and violence. Using psychoanalysis alongside modern developmental thinking from neurobiology, attachment and trauma theory and mindfulness, Music creates his own distinctive blend of approaches to help even the most traumatised of children.A mix of personal accounts and therapeutic riches,Nurturing Childrenwill appeal to anyone helping children, young people and families to lead fuller lives.
E-Book Content
‘Dr Music is certainly one of the best and probably the most deep thinking child psychotherapists in the world. This beautiful book distills decades of neuro-clinical thinking, interpreting children’s and young people’s experience and behavior in terms of the most applicable and scientifically credible models of mind. For those who wish to understand clinical phenomena and through this improve their clinical work, this book is a must. For those who want to marvel and learn from the writing of a master clinician, this book is amongst the best you are likely to encounter. And for the few who want to do both… this is an incredible opportunity. I could not recommend a book more strongly.’ – Professor Peter Fonagy OBE, Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL; Chief Executive of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, London, UK ‘Of all life forms on this planet human infants are by far the most dependent on the love and care they receive from their parents. The need for caring can extend well into the adolescent years and beyond. Not only do parents protect them but they shape the maturation of their brain development, the robustness of their immune system and even the expression of their genes. As an international, leading exponent of attachment theory and its applications in child psychotherapy there could be no better guide than Dr Music to reveal the role of attachment as both a source of trauma and its recovery. Bringing the reader many years of therapeutic insight and experience, with a clarity of exposition of fascinating and important case studies, this is a wonderful addition to the literature. All therapists and other professionals working with children would benefit enormously from this book.’ – Professor Paul Gilbert OBE, author of The Compassionate Mind and Living like Crazy ‘Graham Music has done it again. This is a much-needed book and the clinical work is profoundly moving. Music is able to blend his own deeply felt empathic capacities with a comprehensive grasp of the latest developmental and neuroscientific research in a highly readable form. He is a real thinker and all of us in the field of child mental health, and for that matter, learning disability, will be extremely grateful for it. He really gets, and uses, all the new work on the body, too.’ – Anne Alvarez, consultant, child and adolescent psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic; author of Live Company and The Thinking Heart ‘If you are looking for a book that tells you what attachment-based, neuroscience-informed psychotherapy looks like in practice, look no further. Graham Music’s wonderful book conveys the process brilliantly. It demonstrates how an attuned and compassionate relationship is the key to psychological growth, a process that might sound easy yet is in practice a demanding art that draws on all the psychotherapist’s resources to respond at the right level, at the right moment. He is particularly good on the psychotherapist’s own struggles to extend compassion to himself and to stay “alive and present” in difficult therapeutic relationships.’ – Sue Gerhardt, psychotherapist; co-founder of the Oxford Parent Infant Project; and autho