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What happens in psychotherapy? How does it help? As clinicians steeped in ideas of conflict and complexity, we take a certain pride in our capacity to manage uncertainty, to face the unknown. It is useful, then, occasionally to be reminded that those who come to see us may have some simple basic questions. The ability to talk about what we do in language that makes sense to others is particularly important when it comes to therapeutic work with children and young people, who generally don't initiate (at least consciously) their referrals and who have a legitimate need to understand - and be understood. ‘When a child arrives at the therapy room door’, Tamsin Cottis tells us in the introduction to her slim and delicate volume, ‘they may not know what therapy is, how it helps or what it will involve. They may have made an active choice to be there, or be reluctant to attend’ (p. xi).
This straightforward observation places the reader immediately alongside the child, at the threshold of their first session, and sets the scene for Cottis's approach both to the therapeutic work and to the way a therapist might convey what it is that they do. When she describes how in one session she was ‘trying to see things from Samina's point of view and to communicate to her that I was working hard to do this … reaching inside myself for the feelings that I imagined she might have, and finding the essence of those in my vocal and physical responses’ (p. 8), it is possible also to imagine her communicating these processes to anxious or suspicious parents, or, indeed to sceptical teachers or social workers. In lucid, compelling and unaffected prose, Cottis tells the stories of nine individual children and their experience of creative, play-based child psychotherapy. The guiding question in her own mind throughout their encounters is ‘How does it feel to be you?’
Cottis knows that, in reality, there are no simple answers to any of these questions. Indeed, as she points out, ‘Often, what we