Once Upon a Time

TEMA Magazine In Dianas world The Little Red Riding Hood is a teen fairy tale. No kidding! Cinderella has hundreds of versions and Pretty Woman is only one of them. The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain is also a fairy tale. In fact the Producer Jean-Pierre Jeunet confessed it ten years ago. What about Harry Potter? He is Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, but from the XXI century Fairy tales are all around us, says Diana Petrova and underlines Im not a day dreamer! Just look around yourself. And I bet shes right. In the mall where we meet its full of Cinderellas with boots and fairy dresses. Their boyfriends have long passed by the princes age from the fairy tale, but they have golden chariots of 500 horsepower. Harry Potter makes his way holding the hand of his father and missing the school classes in Hogwarts because of a cold. Here can be seen also the three brothers gathered around the golden apple of Steve Jobs and looking for princesses. In different periods of their life people like different fairy tales. No matter how old we are, all of us wear the Wolf, the Little Red Riding Hood within us. It depends on our behavior. Today we are Cinderella, tomorrow we are the three evil sisters. These are human characteristics, behavioral models and directions that we follow unconsciously throughout all our lives, not just any characters in a fairy tale., makes it clear Diana. She is a computer specialist tests software from 9 to 6 oclock, a mother of two kids and writes therapeutic fairy tales. These are rather stories that became helpful for psychologists, but I didnt mean it when I started writing, laughs out Diana. Ten years ago she wrote a story about the Wheat Beetle, who learned to fly meant to go on a literary contest. She won it. They published her fairy tale in a popular website and one day the telephone rang.

This day a woman from the Association of Adopters and Adopted called and started apologizing for quite a time, but at last she let the cat out of the bag. They found the Wheat Beetle story, printed it, have been reading it in the context of therapeutic storytelling during their meetings. The story helped them introduce children gently to the topic of adoption., remembers Diana. After the conversation her thoughts flew in another direction. At that time I hadnt heard about this kind of therapy. I wrote for fun. I opened the big books, rang a fellow psychologist and found out what Ive done, shares with us Diana whose stories already are being read in the Institute for Positive Psychotherapy, in the Centers for Community Support (in the town of Dobrich), Open World (Haskovo), etc. Today therapeutic storytelling is part of art therapy that is used by psychologists along with music therapy, drawing, doll therapy, theater and dance therapy, etc. The method helps not only children, but the adults as well to find ways to cope with their problems, to overcome their fears and to start speaking an universal language between parents and kids by means of the fairy tales. There are two kinds of therapeutic storytelling when stories are targeted to a certain problem purposefully or when in classic fairy tales we find out concrete moral models and behavioral styles which the child is to follow. I imagine it like serving dishes between which the child chooses. If you dont give it everything, it wont know that mozzarella does exist, for instance., laughs out Diana. And she tried writing fairy tales in conjunction with a psychologist. The specialist gave her tasks about problems violence, adoption, insolence, fear of the dark, of loneliness, and she made up the characters. Today she compares her writing with the Bowmans job she shoots the words, but whether they hit the problem, its not always sure. If the written gets to the child and starts poking its thoughts, the kid 2

will want the fairy tale again and again until one evening it says its no more interesting. This is a very important step meaning the child is at the threshold of overcoming the problem. Of course, fairy tales dont always help, admits Diana. She calls the Vitamin C for the soul they only strengthen the immune system, so that it does it all alone. She reads often Carl Gustav Jungs books who she calls the father of therapeutic storytelling as well as those of Vladimir Propp, the Russian folklorist. The last one in his book Morphology of the Folk Tale says its already made up all. There are a certain number of fairy tale characters that we repeat in one way or another in our lives. A good and evil character, swindler, donor, a princess, a magic assistant, etc., tells Diana. The fairy tales in her first book Wise Fairy Tales for Children And Parents she attacks directly the problems. The most successful character is Mr Loathe, who smokes cigarettes, is mischievous and lives in the stomach of boy. Often mothers share that thanks to him their kids have overcome the unpleasant feeling. The most important for me is the childs world. The stories that impress the adults are either boring or scary for the offspring. Therefore the fairy tale for kids should be compliant with their world and problems about the Teddy Bear that the child hugs, about mummy that is late from work, about the other kids in the kindergarten. Adults frequently say that their kids dont have childhood nowadays. Just the opposite, the little ones just dont share it with their parents anymore says explicitly Diana whose greatest critics are the kids at home. When she started writing stories, her son preferred playing computer games to the stories starting with Once upon a time The ingenious mother came in the role of the swindler (Propps) and cheated him. I offered to read to him a fairy tale in the evening and if its not interesting, I stop reading. And we went on like this evening after evening, but it wasnt him the one who said: Stop!, but I. Always at the most interesting moment. Today he goes to sleep with a book., says Diana obviously pleased. Anyway she thinks its better if the stories meant for therapy are being read during the day, not in the evening. Then they should be discussed, even analyzed, read over again. She has already seen the curing effect of some of them. A time ago she gave a fairy tale to a woman to tell her opinion. She was an alcoholic and at the end she burst in tears. I dont know where exactly did I hit her, but she wanted more texts. Then I saw a psychologist crying and a girl that said: The end is happy, but makes me sad. Most of the people go through tears although I want very much to make somebody laugh., dreams Diana. One of her surprises was an youtube piece displaying a man reading her book in his apartment. Probably for his kid that is far away It also happened that she went under self treatment. When I started the book with fairy tales I was to undergo an operation. Writing did help me very much. Its probably a kind of therapy too. Then I realized that at this time I wrote the funniest stories in my life. She doesnt deny that some of the new fairy tales are computer gamed. But from the Transformers to the Facebook Farms they repeat the behavioral models from magic stories again, Diana is convinced. Therefore they do not harm. The Wolf is already Hulk and the Little Red Riding Hood Lara Croft for example, concludes she.