Approaching care together—a compass to guide us

Abstract

Everyone involved in caring for Looked After Children, the foster carers, the children themselves, the professional and non-professional networks around them, engage daily with diversity and they hope to hold and at times, weave together many different worlds. This paper discusses the experience in a consultation/training group for foster carers from the perspectives of Systemic and Art Psychotherapy; the group took place within the context of an action research project. We will consider how art and poetry introduced a different quality of involvement to the thinking about caring for Looked After Children, and helped us to hold the diversity of ideas and perspectives within the group and between our different therapeutic perspectives. We explore metaphor and a ‘systemic mind’ as two key themes within the group.

Keywords:

• Art psychotherapy
• systemic psychotherapy
• looked after children
• metaphor
• poetry
• systemic mind