WHO SHOULD READ THESE BOOKS?
These books work with pictures as well as words, so children from as young as three can get something out of Ryan O’Brien. The older age limit is a little harder to determine. Given that Ryan’s themes and emotional work remain relevant across the lifespan, I’d suggest there is no upper limit. Grown men have been known to shed a tear for Mimi La Boom. The only requirement is that the “old” person, have enough of the child left in them to want to learn from a little Shetland pony.
The Ryan O’Brien books are not just “therapeutic”, they have educational value, their content meeting many of the requirements for the Kindergarten/Infants syllabi in the subjects of Health, History and English. For an educationalist’s perspective on the classroom use of these books, the reader is referred to the Ryan O’Brien website (see Educational Tools) However, it is for children who have lost, or have never found their narrative voice, that the Ryan O’Brien books were originally written. In fact, the very first book –“Ryan O’Brien- The Smallest Horse of All” – was written ten years ago now for a little girl who, due to a hormonal problem, was indeed the smallest girl of all. Like Ryan, she needed to discover the many, many ways she could be “big”.
Helping children find their ‘whinny’ and talk about their life story is at the heart of narrative therapy. Too often, in a medical paradigm hell-bent on diagnosis and miserly with time, children don’t always have the space to speak up. In the reductionist medical model, one patient can end up largely resembling the next. Symptoms are extracted, questionnaires answered, boxes ticked, brain waves measured, criteria met and treatment prescribed. Patients are depersonalized to diagnoses and the child’s voice is often not heard. Of course, getting the diagnosis right is important and does not demand that the patient be a willing participant. However, it is common clinical experience that treatment will falter if a therapeutic relationship, based on some exchange of story, is not established.
All therapists will have encountered the scenario in which a young patient is referred with a stack of files, sometimes weighing as much as the child, documenting years of the clinical history, whilst the child curls up, disengaged and silent. The clinician gleans the story from the file and gets no communication from the child.
Tuxedo Junction
Breezy McCue
Love Thy Horse Magazine 35