1st Edition

Resilience, Suffering and Creativity The Work of the Refugee Therapy Centre

By Aida Alayarian Copyright 2007
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    The trauma of refugee status is particularly corrosive. It does the usual harm of devastating our own self-image and sense of permanence in the world, but it does more. It is a dislocation from our familiar domestic geography and culture, and that must wrench from our grasp all the external markers by which we know ourselves and our worth. The threat of persecution, torture, and death is aimed at a complete destabilization. The result is a complex of anxieties that add up to far more than simple suffering. If therapy is primarily aimed at the gentle exposure of one's worst fears, then what purchase can it have on this most ungentle process of becoming a refugee?

    Foreword -- Introduction -- Trauma, resilience, and creativity -- Resilience: a case illustration -- Memory for trauma -- The therapeutic needs of those fleeing persecution and violence, now and in the future -- Does it matter how much can be put into words? -- Loss of network support piled on trauma: thinking more broadly about the context of refugees -- Hearing the unhearable, speaking the unspeakable: original wounds, trauma, and the asylum seeker -- How I became a psychoanalyst -- My experience of clinical work with refugees and asylum seekers -- Boundary problems and compassion -- Reflections on alternative organizational structures for charitable agencies

    Biography

    Alayarian, Aida