Windows to Our Children: A Gestalt Approach to Children and Adolescents

Windows to Our Children: A Gestalt Approach to Children and Adolescents

64 ratings 4.7 out of 5 stars

Jan 1, 1978

Product Description With over 300 pages of methods, materials, techniques for working with children and adolescents, transcripts, case examples and discussion, this book filled a void in the child therapy literature. Counselors and therapists, in schools, mental health centers and private practice embrace this book. It is the largest selling book on the subject in the world. About the Author Violet Oaklander is the author of the book Windows To Our Children: A Gestalt Therapy Approach to Children and Adolescents (which is available in thirteen languages), several journal articles and book chapters for other people's books, as well as videotapes and audio tapes on psychotherapeutic work with children. She has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology; a Master of Arts in Marriage, Family and Child Counseling; and a Master of Science in Special Education with emotionally disturbed children. She completed three years of training with the Los Angeles Gestalt Therapy Institute and has been certified since 1973. She taught emotionally disturbed children in the Long Beach, CA school district for six years, and from 1972 until 1999 maintained a full time private practice in Long Beach, Hermosa Beach and later in Santa Barbara, CA. Since 1999, Dr. Oaklander has focused her work on training, teaching, supervision and writing. Dr. Oaklander spent many years as an instructor for the extension program of the University of California at the campuses in Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and San Diego and has been an adjunct faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute located in Carpenteria, CA as well as the California Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She has traveled extensively throughout the country and the world giving training seminars on her approach to working with children and adolescents. Dr. Oaklander's unique approach to working with children -- which combines Gestalt Therapy theory, philosophy, and practice with a variety of expressive techniques -- has won international recognition and she has received several awards for her cotribution to the mental health field.

As a clinical social worker, children love working with me and love coming back time and again. But I admit that I have much more of a knack for working towards change with adults, despite loving working with children. I am a relational/experiential psychotherapist in the camp of Dr. Fosha's approach, and I love Gestalt therapy as well. To try and find congruent approaches to work with youth and make what I do actually therapeutic has been a struggle.That is why I feel such a sense of coming home with this book. It is exactly the way I have been dying to find that I didn't know existed. I have studied the play and art methods outlined in this book but she has a particular Gestaltean approach that reorients these methods to be much more experiential, emotion and growth focused and fun. Gestalt therapy is simply made for children! It's so imaginative, spontaneous, and playful. Children just resonate with it fantastically!And the author's passion and love of children is profoundly heart warming and touching.The book is pretty process oriented and not always linear in presentation, which may put some people off. But feels like that off the wall Gestalt expression such as in the early Gestalt writings. Has many great transcripts with real sessions. Extremely helpful in learning the approach.I am in debt to this great human being for such a transmission of a lifetime of devoting to children's well being. I also bought her other book.Best approach I've come across since Daniel Hughes