Helping Abused and Traumatized Children

Eliana Gil, PhD, is founding partner of the Gil Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education, a private group practice in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also Director of Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy. Dr. Gil has worked in the field of child abuse prevention and treatment since 1973. A licensed marriage, family, and child counselor; an approved marriage and family therapy supervisor; a registered art therapist; and a registered play therapy supervisor, she is a former President of the Association for Play Therapy, which honored her with its Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of The Healing Power of Play, Helping Abused and Traumatized Children, and Play in Family Therapy, Second Edition, among many other publications. Originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador, Dr. Gil is bilingual and bicultural.

"In this book, Eliana Gil skillfully shows how a well-selected repertoire of methods can be flexibly combined and adapted to facilitate the successful treatment of traumatized children. Through excellent, detailed case examples, she demonstrates ways to individualize treatment by attending carefully to the personal meanings and experiences of each child. The cases will be of benefit and interest to professionals experienced in working with children, as well as to students in all of the mental health disciplines. This is an excellent work."--Kathleen Nader, DSW, Austin, Texas "What a refreshing book! In the age of managed care, Gil provides a clear and compelling argument for the importance of experience, compassion, and insight. Clinicians know that each child is unique, and a flexible, multidimensional approach to healing is what we need to be able to provide. Gil discusses how she has drawn from various schools of thought and therapeutic models to build a clinical workshop with many tools, and how she has learned to use the right tool at the right time to help traumatized children. I highly recommend this book to anyone working with children."--Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, Senior Fellow, The ChildTrauma Academy; Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University "Gil artfully combines her own experiences as a play therapist with contemporary research findings to provide this practical, interesting guide. Beautifully told accounts of play therapy with young trauma survivors illustrate this thoughtful treatment approach, which integrates cognitive-behavioral, expressive, and family therapies. For practitioners as well as students, this book provides a helpful framework for individualizing treatment to fit the unique needs of each child."--Janine Shelby, PhD, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles"Gil brings more than 30 years of her rich and always evolving clinical wisdom, practice, and experience to this book. She offers us a truly timely and welcome overview of her insights on how to best help abused and traumatized children...Her approach is refreshingly integrative--a seamless blend of cognitive-behavioral therapies with interventions drawn from family, play, and psychodynamic modalities. The overarching emphasis is on the child's uniqueness, inner resources, and situational circumstances. Not only does she provide a sound theoretical context for each of the techniques she describes, but she also provides practical, detailed guidelines and extensive case illustrations as well. A must read for all child therapists!"--Leo Goldberger, PhD, Department of Psychology (Emeritus), New York University-

• I. The Context for Clinical Work 1. Basic Principles in Working with Abused and Traumatized Children 2. Guidelines for Integrated Assessments 3. Guidelines for Integrated Treatment 4. Expressive Therapies 5. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy 6. Family Therapy and Family Play Therapy 7. Special Issues: Posttraumatic Play and Problems of Dissociation II. Four Case Illustrations 8. Scotty, the Castle, and the Princess Guard 9. Carla's Search for Her Lost Mother 10. Danger in the Backyard 11. The Witch, the Baby, and the Bug, Sarah Stoudt Briggs Epilogue