PRACTICES OF FAIRY-TALE THERAPY

Fairy tale therapy is a young, modern and promising direction in practical psychology, which, using the metaphorical resources of fairy tales, allows people to develop self-awareness, become themselves, and build special trusting, close relationships with others. Fairy tale therapy is an actively developing direction in psychotherapy. A fairy tale helps the psychotherapist and his client to speak the same language, provides a common system of symbols. Sometimes a lot can be understood by simply asking a person what his favorite fairy tale is. Any fairy tale usually has the following elements: a hero or heroes, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution. But a fairy tale only becomes therapeutic when the child identifies with its heroes, can draw a parallel between the plot and his own life, and learns a lesson or understands a hidden message. Recently, psychologists have increasingly used therapeutic metaphorical fairy tales to solve children's psychological problems. Sometimes such fairy tales resemble folk or famous author's tales, and sometimes they have no literary value, and to a person not initiated into the process of psychotherapy, they seem vague and uninformative. But regardless of the specifics of the content, a therapeutic fairy tale is always aimed at helping the child organize his inner world, learn something new and make the desired changes. The child’s consciousness accepts the literal content of the fairy tale as fictional: the child feels for the fairy tale hero, identifies with him, and even when he learns about his problem, he still thinks, this is not about me, this is make-believe. The subconscious «believes» what it hears and sets the necessary program of changes in behavior, restructuring of values, views and positions.