Book of the Month January 2024 - Riley the Brave’s Big Feelings Activity Book

Riley the Brave’s Big Feelings Activity Book: A trauma-informed guide for counsellors, educators and parents by Jessica Sinarski, Illustrated by Zachary Kline (Jessica Kingsley)
 
Helping children to trust, express their feelings, get to know themselves, and learn to regulate, means having creative resources as well as being a playful, curious and empathetic safe person. And while it is important to adopt a coherent therapeutic approach you can never have too many tools for children whose defences enable them to outsmart your best strategies.

Having said that I’m always cautious about toolkits and fix-it approaches that require both child and adult to work too hard or stick too closely to a device at the cost of remaining present in the relationship.

So, I wondered where Riley the Brave’s Big Feelings Activity Book would fall on my resource barometer.  At over 150 pages packed with colourful content it is a BIG BOOK and at first flick it can feel like a lot. But if you start at the intro and work through in a considered way, it is clear that a coherent, trauma-informed approach underpins all of the content. Despite its childlike appearance this guide is for adults to help children in understanding the mind body connection and how to regulate using bottom-up and top-down strategies.
 
The book is divided into an introduction or basic primer for adults and a further eight sections – all of which are adult led. The first three sections focus on preparing safe ground for doing feelings work, becoming a feelings detective and understanding and befriending all the parts of the brain. I particularly like this section as it educates the reader and leads them safely through the rationale for all activities.  It feels safe! The book uses animal metaphors throughout – adults are “safe big critters”, which might not necessarily suit everybody’s lexicon, but a sensitive reader can check in with the child if they would prefer alternative language. The survival responses (known as protectors) in the downstairs brain also get animal identities. For example, the porcupine gets prickly towards others and the chameleon is, of course, compliant. These animal identities felt a bit awkward for me to begin with but as I became more familiar with the text I could see how they might work. Each of the next four sections is devoted to each of the big four feelings: happy, mad, sad and scared with workbook activities and an extended vocabulary for each emotion. The final section contains additional materials and throughout the book there is a code to use online for downloading activity templates.
 
For the theoretical basis, the author pulls together key aspects of trauma education and trauma-informed approaches such as:

• Education about early brain development using Dan Siegel’s concept of the upstairs and downstairs brain to encourage understanding of children’s feelings, thoughts, responses and regulation.
• Attachment, safe adults, and Dan Hughes’s PACE model of relational connection.
• Recognising survival responses and the concept of protector parts or defences as well as concepts of bottom up and top-down regulation.

 
There is a lot in this book that is useful, I think it might require the adults to do some extra reading around brain development and developmental trauma to maximise the potential of the activities and hopefully readers would feel inspired to do that. I think it is also important try out the activities before introducing them to a child. Rehearsals make the actual work so much easier and you can iron out quite a few glitches on a dry run. However, what is here is really clear, concise and user friendly. You may also find you want to lift out bits and leave others – it appears to have some flexibility in that regard. I also like the clarity and the accepting approach to feelings of all sizes and shapes and the importance of learning to be comfortable with discomfort, and it’s great to see suggestions for therapeutic boundaries in the “Try This” boxes.
 
All in all, there is a lot of useful content here, some of it can seem quite daunting to have to remember, and yet these are all ideas that you could adapt and personalise to the child that you know. It is a wonderful resource for school counsellors and anyone focusing on child wellbeing and a valuable addition to the existing library of Riley adventures. Riley fans will love it.

Sheila Lavery

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