July, 2026
In May 2025 Christina Chan RSW RPT-S presented to the LSB Practice Group about her sessions with a young client, a 9-year-old girl.
She moved to a new school, because there was bully in the old school. Before she moved to a new school, she had a lot of stress anxiety about the new situation, whether it will be good or not. My first LSB session with her was to scope out her past events, and current situation. I opened that Yellow Zone is related to her, a place where she can put something to talk about, about why she came, her presenting issues. I invited her “would you like to create something there to tell me why you come to therapy?” She loves doing craft, so she created some craft as she talked about, say, her nightmares, and her panic attacks. This she placed in the Yellow Zone. Because she brought the craft home with her, I cannot show it here.
This photograph is some my fourth session number with her, and the second time with Life Story Board.
In the session, I used a timeline to invite her to talk about her disturbing memories and also some good memories. She is very creative- she used black glass beads to describe her traumatic memories. She used the hexagon cards to write her age at the time, and how disturbing the memories are, on a scale of 10 on the diamond cards. The white beads were for the years that were more stable, happy. And the red heart is the greatest moment, such as ‘Meeting Ben’
As we storyboarded the timeline, I could see a lot of emotions come up. To support her to express her feelings, the Green Zone became the place for her too “add your Team of Helpers, people who make you feel safe and calm, feel happy, or people that support you”… the Green Zone of Support.
She put Person Cards for her classmates and teachers and so on, which is useful to know too. She used the animal figurines and the Person Cards- square, circles and triangles, and other cards, creatively. I explain about the cards in my opening comments, but they often do not follow the instructions, she randomly chose the cards, but she knows what it means for her. In the middle, she drew herself on the Body Card, with the red heart, feeling the positive energy from the helpers.
To create something that “makes you feel calm and relaxed”, she put a big dragon unicorn there to talk about, because she enjoys reading fantasy stories. And she depicted ‘nature’ to the left, it also helps her to feel calm. Visualizing the Green Zone helps her to calm and calm down. A major benefit of using LSB is they can control it by moving the magnets.
In a later session, I asked how she felt when creating this Life Story Board. She described how it represented her, that she had experienced all that was on the timeline, but that the centre is really her. She said “what’s happened in the past that didn’t define me because in the middle is myself in the centre, with my team of helpers. “ I found that amazing- that she can look at her life experience, that here in the centre is the real Self externalized, together in a coherent, bigger picture.