Once Upon a Time in Therapy
Why Fairytales and Stories Are One of the Most Powerful Tools in Psychodynamic Work with Children and Teens
Think back to a story that moved you as a child.
Maybe it was a fairytale — a character lost in a dark forest, a beast who was not what he seemed, a girl who had to complete an impossible task with nothing but her wits and her courage. Maybe it was a book you read under the covers, or a film you watched so many times you could recite it by heart.
Now ask yourself: what was it really about? Not the plot — but what it felt like inside. What it touched in you.
Chances are, it wasn't just a story. It was a mirror.
Why Children Cannot Always Just "Talk About It"
We often assume that if a child is struggling, the way forward is to sit down and talk — to name the feeling, explain the situation, find the words. And while that matters enormously, it assumes something that many children simply don't yet have: the ability to observe their own inner world from a safe enough distance to describe it.
Emotional experience and emotional language are not the same thing. A child who is frightened, grieving, angry, or overwhelmed is inside the feeling — not standing at a helpful remove, looking at it. When feelings are that immediate and that large, direct questions can feel threatening. "How are you feeling about what happened?" can shut a conversation down before it begins, because the feeling itself has nowhere to go.
This is not resistance. It is developmental reality.
But give that same child a story — a hero who has lost their way, a character who is invisible to everyone around them, a world where something precious has been broken — and something shifts. They lean in. They engage. Because the story is close enough to be felt, and far enough away to be bearable.
Therapists call this the safe distance of metaphor. The story holds the feeling on the child's behalf, at just enough remove that it becomes thinkable — and eventually, speakable.
What Fairytales Already Knew — Long Before Psychology Did
Here is something remarkable: fairytales have been doing this work for centuries.
Long before Freud, before attachment theory, before developmental neuroscience, cultures around the world were telling stories to children that mapped the landscape of the inner life with extraordinary precision. The details differ — the names, the settings, the magical objects — but the underlying themes recur across time and culture in ways that are anything but coincidental.
The child abandoned or sent away. The parent who is lost, absent, or transformed into something unrecognisable. The journey through a dark and dangerous forest. The beast who is unloved until someone chooses to truly see him. The youngest, smallest, least regarded sibling who turns out to carry something no one expected.
The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, in his landmark work The Uses of Enchantment, argued that fairytales speak directly to the deepest psychological struggles of childhood — dependency and separation, the fear of abandonment, the wish to be chosen, the terror of one's own aggression, the longing to be truly known. They do not soften these struggles or pretend they don't exist. They walk straight into them. And in doing so, they offer the child something profoundly reassuring: this darkness is real, others have faced it, and it is possible to come through.
From a Jungian perspective, the figures of the fairytale also carry a symbolic richness that speaks to the unconscious. The wicked stepmother is not simply a plot device — she can represent the frightening, withholding side of a mother that a child cannot consciously acknowledge in the person they also love and depend on. The shadow, the wise elder, the trickster, the wounded hero — these are not characters. They are aspects of the inner world, given form.
Children are drawn to these figures instinctively because they recognise something true in them. Something that resonates before it can be named.
An Invitation for Parents: Remember What Stories Did for You
If you are reading this as a parent, I want to invite you to pause for a moment and think about your own relationship with stories — not your child's, but yours.
Was there a character whose loneliness you understood better than you could explain? A story that made you cry in a way that felt like relief? A fairytale that frightened you, and yet you returned to it again and again?
Stories reach us at the level beneath logic. They bypass the part of us that is careful and defended, and they speak directly to the part that is still — in some way — the child in the forest, wondering whether they will find their way home.
When your child becomes obsessed with a particular story, or insists on the same book night after night, or identifies fiercely with a character from a film — they are not simply being entertained. They are doing something psychologically important. They are finding a container for something they cannot yet carry alone.
Understanding this can change the way you sit with your child in those moments. Not as a spectator, but as someone who recognises the territory — because you have been there too.
How I Use Stories and Fairytales in My Work
In my practice, stories enter the therapeutic space in many different ways — and not always because I introduce them. Children often bring their own: a book they love, a film they keep returning to, a character they want to play out again and again in sessions.
I pay close attention to these choices, because they are rarely random. A child who is drawn obsessively to a story about a hero who must face danger entirely alone is communicating something. A child who always wants the villain to win, or who keeps returning to themes of betrayal and abandonment, is offering me a way into their inner world that no direct question could reach.
With younger children, stories and fairytales become part of the session itself. We might tell a story together, with the child guiding where it goes — who the characters are, what dangers they face, whether the ending is hopeful or unresolved. I follow the child's lead carefully, and I listen to the story the way I would listen to a dream: not literally, but symbolically. What feelings are living in this story? What does this child need the hero to find? What is the child trying to work out through the fate of these figures?
Sometimes I introduce a story deliberately — one that mirrors, at a gentle distance, something the child is working through. Not to point directly at the parallel — that would collapse the safe distance — but to quietly open a door. Children usually walk through it in their own time, in their own way.
With teenagers, the work shifts in form but not in principle. Adolescents are often dismissive of what they experience as "therapy talk" — direct emotional inquiry can feel intrusive or exposing at an age when vulnerability feels so dangerous. But a teenager will frequently engage with passionate intensity around a character they love or a story they find themselves unable to stop thinking about.
Why does this character make the choices they make?
What were they really afraid of?
What did they need that they could never bring themselves to ask for?
These conversations are not a detour from the therapeutic work. They are the therapeutic work — approached through the back door of fiction, where the emotional stakes feel just manageable enough to enter.
When the Story Slowly Becomes Their Own
One of the most quietly moving aspects of this way of working is watching a child arrive at something true through the world of story — and gradually, over time, bring it home to themselves.
A child may return to the same theme week after week: a figure who is always left behind, a character who pushes everyone away and is then devastated by the loneliness that follows. The repetition is not meaningless. The story is being worked through — processed at a depth that words alone rarely reach.
As the therapeutic relationship deepens and trust grows, something begins to shift. What could only be approached as the lost princess or the monster no one understood slowly, carefully, begins to become something the child can speak about as their own experience. Not because we pushed them toward that connection — but because the story held it safely until they were ready to hold it themselves.
This is the unhurried nature of psychodynamic work. We do not rush toward insight. We create the conditions in which it becomes possible.
For Parents: What to Know if Your Child is in Therapy
If your child's therapist mentions that sessions have involved storytelling, imaginative play, or conversation about fictional characters, please know that this is not a sign that "nothing real is happening."
It is often a sign that something very real is happening — just in the language your child can actually use.
Children process their inner worlds indirectly, symbolically, and through the safety of relationship. A story that gets told and retold, a character who keeps appearing, a theme that resurfaces week after week — these are rarely arbitrary. They are a child finding a way to approach something that feels too large or too frightening to name head-on.
And if you find yourself curious about the stories your child loves — ask about them. Not to analyse, but to enter that world alongside them. You may be surprised by what you discover about your child, and perhaps about yourself.
For Teenagers
You might find it strange — or even a little embarrassing — to think of fairytales as having anything to do with therapy, or with you.
But think about the last character you truly connected with. The one whose choices made sense to you even when they seemed to make no sense to anyone else. The one whose pain felt oddly familiar, even if you couldn't explain why.
That recognition is not accidental. It is telling you something about your own inner world — something that may be easier to approach through a character than through a direct question.
In therapy, we follow that thread. Not to be clever, and not to reduce a story to a diagnosis. But because stories so often take us somewhere true — somewhere we might not have been able to find another way.
Why Stories Have Always Mattered
Fairytales have survived for centuries not because they are comforting — many of them are not — but because they are honest. They do not pretend that the forest is safe, or that every loss has a tidy resolution. They hold fear and hope in the same breath. They say to the child: this is hard, and others have found it hard too, and you are not alone in the dark.
In psychodynamic therapy, we work from the same foundation: that the inner world, however frightening or confusing, can be approached — given shape, given language, given room to breathe.
Stories have always known this.
Once upon a time, someone sat with a child in the dark and began: let me tell you something true.
That is still, at its heart, what therapy is.
