What is Mending Me?
Mending Me is specifically developed with the child at heart and is dedicated to helping children who suffer from trauma, abuse, or limiting birth conditions. Mending Me provides tools to help toward this end:
- Therapeutic toys
- Therapeutic story books
- A therapeutic process
It is challenging for children in difficult situations to articulate their feelings verbally, and so there is a reliance upon non-verbal communication with the adults around them. Mending Me tools help to facilitate and elicit communication of the child’s emotional state without using words, thus making it easier for the practitioner to reach the child and guide him or her on to the path of healing.
Mending Me Tools
Communication is so vital that we as adults often take it for granted. As children, we are just learning how to communicate. Combine that learning curve with trauma, abuse or birth conditions and often children can only conclude that they must have done something wrong to hurt so much. This can result in closing up or lashing out at the adults trying to help.
Consequently, Mending Me designed three therapeutic toys in an attempt to make the process of interaction as supportive as possible. These toys provide the practitioner (physician, psychologist, counselor, teacher or therapist) an opportunity to observe the child’s interaction with these toys, providing an environment for the child to play out what they might be feeling. It also allows the therapist to evaluate at what point of the healing process the child has attained, providing important knowledge on how to engage with the child in the child’s psychological space at the most appropriate point of entry.
The therapist provides the child with an opportunity to select one of three toys. After the selection, the child or therapist reads a letter from the toy with the child. It also shares with the child that it is with them throughout the healing, mending process. This simple action is a way of giving the child the ability to displace some of their hurt on an inanimate object rather than a human form. The child then has an opportunity to bond with the toy through play, while at the same time receiving comfort, enjoying and embracing the softness of the toy.
How are Mending Me Therapeutic Dolls different?
- These plush therapeutic toys are not human like. There is a heart space for housing the heart, a Velcro pocket which holds the letter for the child or can house the heart. The pocket gives the child options to play with or not.
- The heart was created with two sides, a broken side and a mended side and is encased to represent the walls which can form when a child undergoes trauma.
- The therapeutic toys also provides an opportunity for a child to alert the provider asking for help, which can be concealed to the unknown observer.
- The pocket also provides a place for a child to insert a piece of paper and write messages to the therapist or others, which again can be their safe hiding place to the unknown observer. This unique feature of the toy allows the practitioner to gain additional clues regarding how the child currently is feeling about him/herself.
- Each one of the plush toys was designed to promote healing for children of all ages.