Counselling for Toads
by Robert de Board
If you are interested in mental health & Wind in the Willows, you’ll love this…
This book is a sequel to the famous story of “Toad” from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. Life on the river bank comes to life again as Toad’s good friends Rat, Mole and Badger note that he has withdrawn from the world and they are “worried that he might do something silly”. The book is written by a counsellor who draws on his own experience of practicing counselling.
Toad has regular sessions with Heron, the counsellor, who uses the therapeutic methods of a type of therapy called transactional analysis to help Toad to analyse his own feelings and develop his emotional intelligence and find his new path in life. Toad meets his inner “rebellious child” and his “adult self” during the ten sessions that make up the chapters of this book.
As the reader learns about Toad, the story sheds light on our own lives, psychological growth and development. It particularly highlights how to recognise depression, how talking therapy may benefit someone who is depressed, as well as what people can do for themselves.
This book will be appealing to children and adults of all ages, either as a continuation of life at Toad Hall or as an insight into being a student, client or counsellor and is respectful of the spirit of Kenneth Grahame’s original novel. It’s a must read for anyone interested either in the counselling process or in getting to know themselves a little bit better!
What I wanted: I was looking for an easy read for my first ever a weekend away on my own since my late husband died. I anticipated the same cheery bucolic spirit of the original riverbank story and this definitely delivered. It is a positive and uplifting read that is not afraid to highlight some of the challenges of the therapeutic process, and I read all 153 pages in the bliss of a seaside escape!
What I liked: Being someone who is fascinated in the counselling process, I loved the way a story that could be read to a child explained the counselling process as a method of dealing with psychological distress. Plus it’s given me an urge to re-read Wind in the Willows with new eyes!
“It had been an enormous relief to tell another person about his experiences, without being laughed at or rejected… What pleased him most was the way Heron seemed to be genuinely interested in all of it.”
- Robert de Board