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After trauma, a young Ukrainian boy lost his ability to speak.

Narrative therapy helped him regain the ability to speak.

Seeing a guitar and picking it up was the fist therapeutic step—the retun of a sense o agency.

Misha, 14, looked like a boy preparing to flee.

Three years ago, he was having tea with Valentina Owl, a family therapist in Western Ukraine. The meeting was meant to be a simple getting-to-know-you session, but the boy was perched on the edge of his chair, hands twisting together, eyes moving constantly from door to window to table—to anywhere but Owl.

His mother had brought him because he was struggling at school. Her concern was that he barely spoke. When he did, the sounds were so faint they were not recognizable as words.

In that first session, for the first 15 minutes, Misha said nothing.

Owl understood. Misha had survived the destruction of Mariupol. He had lost friends, relatives, his home, his school, the nearby public park where he used to hang out with his friends. Almost everything that had once made life feel solid and knowable had been taken from him. Owl knew that, “Young........

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