Reading and Expressive Writing with Traumatised Children, Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Unpack My Heart with Words

Marion Baraitser

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857007476
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Unpack my Heart with Words explores how literature can be used to help young victims cope with their experiences. The process of reading, discussing and rewriting carefully selected texts can have a significant therapeutic impact, as the young person identifies his or her own experience in the narrative. This book guides readers through all aspects of implementing biblio/narrative therapy with children and adolescents, from the importance of cultural sensitivity and understanding the psychological needs of the child to providing more practical information on how to choose the right text and encourage expression through the spoken and written word. It includes exercises for use in sessions, an analysis of the importance of symbol when working therapeutically with children, and a complete account of the ethics of good practice. Drawing on the author's innovative work with young asylum seekers and refugees, and with an overview of the latest research in creativity, language and memory, the book provides a comprehensive and practical resource on the use of literature to help young victims regain their dignity and overcome the overwhelmed hurt self.

This book will be of immeasurable value to students and practitioners world-wide in arts and health care who work with traumatised young people, including counsellors, clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, teachers, psychotherapists and social workers.

PART 1

Terror and the Telling

Entering the Young Asylum Seeker’s World

CHAPTER 1

War Trauma, Abuse and the Interrupted Narrative

The exceptional moments of ‘peculiar
horror and physical collapse’… It is
only by putting it into words that I
make it whole. This wholeness means
that it has lost its power to hurt me.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, Moments of Being (1978)

When they reach ‘another country’ young asylum seekers must face the present first, the future next, and the past last of all. Yet it is from the past and their harsh memories that they need to find a way of freeing themselves. Because memory can ‘split off’ what is painful to remember, or cut off feelings, thoughts and meaning within the memories of terror, the traumatised young person becomes fragmented. They need to discover how to construct a symbolic universe, giving ‘meaning’ to their past through expression in the language of individual consciousness.

LEARNING ABOUT THE PAST LIVES OF TRAUMATISED YOUNG ASYLUM SEEKERS

I discovered the terrain I was about to enter by raiding journals, articles, newspapers, the internet and refugee associations for information. I read personal accounts such as Dave Eggers’s story of his fury and helplessness at being orphaned and solely in charge of hiseight-year-old brother when Eggers was barely out of his teens himself. He describes his ‘telling of the world of suffering as means of flushing or at least diluting of pain aspect’ (Eggers 2000). In What is the What he ‘voices’ young Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese traumatised young asylum seeker, taking us through the young boy’s dangerous and exhausting journey after a forced separation from his family in his country’s war against extremists (Eggers 2008). Deng finds himself alone and running for his life across hundreds of miles of terrifying terrain, with a host of other lost and abandoned children, crossing rivers, starving and attacked by militia and wild animals. ‘When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories’, says the young boy, ‘I would tell them [of those], who died after eating elephant meat, nearly raw, or about Ahjok and Awach Ugieth, twin sisters who were carried off by Arab horsemen and, if they are still alive today, have by now borne children by those men or whomever they sold them to’ (Eggers 2008, p.29). I read Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone that gives a graphic personal account of the trauma and abuse experienced by a child soldier. His parents and brothers were killed and he joined a band of boys foraging to survive in the surrounding countryside, until they stumbled on the army base. Terrified, they were given guns and drugged and told to kill (Beah 2008). In a news report, Beah stated:

If you didn’t do what you were told you were badly beaten or even killed… You lose your mind because you are already fighting and traumatised by the things you are seeing. You cannot even feel your own skin. That’s how much you are removed from yourself. (Beah in Poole 2013)

I asked myself if, and how, reading and writing their stories could reach or change such horror.

THEIR PRESENT LIVES IN ‘ANOTHER COUNTRY’

As victims of violence and abuse, the young people’s personal and social narratives have been interrupted by terror, a deliberate strategy that destroys all they have known – religious buildings, houses, schools and food crops. When they reach ‘another country’, they do not knowwhere they belong (Eisenbruch 1988). They feel disconnected and confused about their identity. They can only face the present first, the future next and the past last of all (Kohli and Mather 2003, p.201). The trauma remains with them. ‘[This trauma] does not get better by itself. It burrows deeper under the child’s coping mechanisms’ (Terr 1990, p.238). To help to prevent this, they need to find the words to tell their stories.

If you ask young traumatised asylum seekers and refugees what they perceive as their greatest need, they will most likely answer: an education, a job to be ‘someone’ in the future and to have enough English to be understood. They also need to belong to a community, to have practical support and guidance from adults and to be treated kindly. They have lost a perception of the world as meaningful or comprehensible – they find themselves in a world that seems all-powerful, in which they are without a sense of autonomy. ‘Their will and boundaries are overwhelmed’ (Janoff-Bulman 1985).

They are also lonely – they most likely have few friends and are often without family, and feel they are without a mentor. At first, they may find themselves sharing a room with people who are much older than they are, who may take drugs or drink, or use forms of racial or sexual abuse. They may wait, sometimes years, for permission to stay (many are repatriated). They are confused by a new society and some may not even be able to express themselves to carers unless they have an interpreter (see ‘Recognising hidden abuse’ later in this chapter). They have to deal with psychological and physical health problems. They struggle with moral and ethical challenges related to injustice and human rights abuses.

For many of these young people, the trauma is cumulative. Many struggle with psychological stress, and when this is overwhelming, the individual’s personality may break down, so they feel out of control and regress in their functioning skills such as being able to think clearly and to concentrate. As their defences collapse, new ones form – defences that may inhibit access to ordinary life – they regress and become stuck in their development and some may return to the ‘magical thinking’ of childhood. They are further confused and traumatised by problems of immigration and the inhumane asylum process they are subjected to after terrifying journeys that ofteninvolve walking for hundreds of miles or being packed into lorries for long intervals with little food or water and, for some, even holding on to the underside of lorries. They often bear within themselves unspeakable memories of extreme violence. They may have feelings of ‘going mad’ or of being inadequate or bad, flooded with shame, guilt and anxiety and paradoxically as victims carrying the responsibility for the actions of the perpetrators (Melzak 1992). They may be in a state of frozen watchfulness. They need to be supported through the process of mourning their losses and of acknowledging the feelings connected with this – rage, love, anxiety, ambivalence, shame, guilt – in order to come to terms with what has happened to them.

To counteract all this, they are surprisingly resourceful (Masten 2001), and though a minority are deeply troubled and need therapeutic interventions, the majority are not as ‘psychologically dishevelled’ (Kohli 2001). They need to relearn what Amartya Sen calls the ‘valuable states of being’ (Sen 1993). Welfare professionals find the young people want to succeed and to settle (Richman 1998). The intervention of therapeutic writing is one of several processes that can help to achieve this.

SOLVING THEIR PROBLEMS: PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS

Providing a safe place

The young people experience the world as threatening because they have been forced to trust those who were untrustworthy. A place of safety must be provided where they can eventually learn to trust their own judgement (Sutton 2013). They need to re-establish a sense of a protective home (Papadopoulos 2002). They need a safe community in which they can slowly begin to piece themselves together again. As part of this community work, literature as a form of therapy is brought into play as a bridge between the traumatised young people’s inner and outer lives as a way of connecting their memories of what they endured in the past with the reality of their present lives.

Finding the words to tell their story to a listening carer

The psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz talks about the therapeutic telling of a story, which comes into play when we are disconnected from ourselves and in denial of loss. He quotes Karen Blixen: ‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story, or tell a story about them’ (Grosz in Henley 2013, p.10). Grosz adds that not everyone can achieve this: ‘The most important stories sometimes can’t be talked about directly. People don’t have the words…[or] they have a story they cannot tell [because] the past is alive in the present…[and] the future is an idea alive in our mind now’ (Grosz in Henley 2013, p.11). I have found this to be true of many of the traumatised young asylum seekers who may need to voice their stories indirectly, that is, through other people’s stories that mirror their own in some way that is important to them. This may allow them to confront their past that is still with them in the present, so that they may face the future.

Finding the lost narrative

The writer Jeanette Winterson’s adoption as a young girl by a mentally unstable person left her abused and deeply wounded. In her autobiography Why Be Happy when You Could Be Normal? she writes that ‘the wound is symbolic and cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. But wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human’ (Winterson 2012, p.42). She struggled with the wounded self given to her by her adoptive mother, discovering that she could not ditch this self for another – the wound had formed her. Her wounded childhood self coped by reading books and discovering hope from them. Her adoptive mother burned her books, so Jeanette had to keep them in mind to soothe and inform and make herself with words, poems and stories:

I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost. (Winterson 2012, p.221)

This is the journey on which the therapeutic intervention of literature hopes to take the young asylum seekers and refugees.

Dealing with memories of terror using words

Terrorised young people may experience intense feeling but at first have no memory of the event because they dissociate from their memories of the terror, or they may remember the event without feeling anything, so they are in a constant state of high alert or irritability but do not know why.

Their memories return suddenly, unexpectedly as flashbacks or nightmares, vivid and emotional, triggered by small reminders that are frozen and wordless images. Their actions may change too – the play of children who have experienced trauma is obsessive, literal and humourless (Terr 1990) – an example of Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’ linked to the death instinct, which can also be seen as a way of attempting to integrate the trauma that is stored in the active memory but that needs to be changed (Herman 1997).

At first, severe trauma often leads to a loss of voice or ‘speechless terror’ that is both a psychological and physical response so that the sufferers are unable to identify, regulate or express themselves. The traumatised young people are disempowered and grieving. The security, trust and optimism on which their self-narrative depends has been undercut. Even when they are able to ‘speak’, the words they use cannot capture traumatic events.

Yet, in time, the act of mourning needs to be given a meaningful account to preserve a sense of continuity and to control feelings. The young survivors have been denied the grieving process not only communally and culturally, but also psychologically. Their distress is exacerbated because the deaths they are mourning were a violation of the natural order – caused by political punishment or murder, using victimisation and humiliation (Van der Kolk 1994).

They need to reconstruct personal meaning in a coherent self-narrative that allows them ‘re-learn’ the self and the world. They make sense of the horrific world they have witnessed by finding some ‘life lesson’ i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Sheila Melzak
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Terror and the Telling: Entering the Young Asylum Seeker’s World
• Part 2 Mapping the Terrain
• Part 3 Derring-do: Entering the Symbolic World
• Part 4 Social Dynamics
• Part 5 Brain Works: Putting the Mind to It
• Part 6 Mapping the Research: The Efficacy of Writing on Trauma: An Evaluation
• Further Information
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Also available