Christina Chan shared her experience using Life Story Board with a youth in play therapy February 23, 2026 LSB Practice Group meeting
Christina is a LSB practitioner and child play therapist …. She uses LSB in her assessment with many of her clients. Here she describes the value of have a dedicated board for a given client
” I acquired an extra LSB board so that I can now dedicate a life storyboard to my work with one child. He is 10 and he was adopted and his parents passed away, biological parents passed away. In the beginning, he just told me everything, so we used the life storyboard and kept adding people. He even picked some figures to represent his biological parents and grandparents. But then at some point, and because I’m also a play therapist and work on a lot of things instead of talking, I felt that this was too heavy for him, to continuously explore the life story.”
“So we kind shifted to play therapy, we just play. I still keep the board in the room, while we play. And at the end, I found that it’s also something new?”
I have two set of cards. One set is only pictures with a few words. Sometimes I ask kids or teenagers to pick a card and look at the picture: “Is there anything related to you recently, or anything happened to you?” And then they would share their stories about that picture.
Then I have another another card, a small tiny card, the “Angel card”. It’s kind of like fortune telling, something like that. I said “okay, you can ask a question in your mind and then pick one card and then to see, does that answer your question?”
he can ask “why am I alive”, “what’s the meaning of life”? And then it’s all about his thoughts or some frustration about something.
So after the play, at the end, he picks some cards and then talk about something he would like to talk about based on the cards. And then I said, oh, that’s interesting. And every time I told him I will photocopy those images of the card and then put them on the Life Story Board.
And I use the Questions magnet, because I found that that’s also something related to him. So every session I just keep adding things on the board. Then sometimes we look at the collection on the board, the images, the questions , and follow up that way. It’s really helpful,
Q: So the board becomes a repository for different sessions and different conversations?
Yes, I have used the LSB for several years, but for the first time, I can pull it out as a kind of record, capture it on the board, because most of the time we forgot which card we pick and what questions we ask in the session, but now I can put it there and then we can always come back, and then think about “why I asked that question”.