St Luke's Innovative Resources' iconic card set for human service
workers, parents, teachers.
The
Bear cards express
a great range of emotions and are perfect for
social workers, psychologists, counsellors, teachers and chaplains.
The Bears is grounded on the principle that talking about feelings
is one of the cornerstones of emotional and mental health. This vibrant,
high-quality, card set is a poignant, simple and clever catalyst
for identifying and exploring emotions. The absence of text allows
the cards to be used with clients of all ages, settings and situations.
A novice can immediately imagine possible applications for The
Bears. In the hands of an expert, these cards can enable conversations
that lead to transformational insights.
The Bears actually started their life in the early 1990s
as The Bear Family which we thought might be a different way of creating ‘family
sculptures’, a well known family therapy technique. They have
become hugely popular as a conversation-building tool. The bear cards
can be adapted to a huge range of conversations. But the
other reason is their ability to give a voice to those whose voice
is often not heard or whose voices have been silenced. It is easy
for linguistically gifted people (as most human service workers are)
to assume that it is easy to express one’s feelings. But for
many of the folk we work with describing their smorgasbord of emotions
can be confusing and at times unattainable. People with intellectual
disabilities, learning disabilities and physical disabilities can
all struggle to put the words together to express their feelings.
Consequently many can feel silenced.
We can also assume that children
readily build a vocabulary to express their emotions but again this
is simply not so. It was when we began to hear stories about how
The Bears were used to allow sufferers of cerebral palsy to evaluate
their services, how they were used with inmates in New Zealand prisons
or how they were used with non-English speaking refugees, that we
realised that The Bears could indeed play a vital role in insuring
that those without a powerful voice in society could still be heard.
In more recent years The Bears have become pivotal in methods to
obtain clear and genuine feedback from both children and parents
who use a variety of family services.