ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a different perspective in approaching ‘refugee healing’ by shifting the focus from ‘the refugee trauma’ as a universal experience to the social and cultural trauma landscape, aiming to highlight the wounding of a social body that in consequence demands a socially competent model for healing – one that may also involve ‘dealing with’ the shared and communalised social distress.
The chapter is a reflective discussion that rests on broadly comparative data and relies on a cross-case analysis of different psychosocial challenges associated with the refugee experience. It builds on a longitudinal body of research focusing on coping strategies, resilience resources and healing practices, accumulated by the author during 15 years of academic and humanitarian work.
Arguments presented point to a reflection on the refugees’ healing process as being temporally and spatially transactional by nature. Illustrative cases demonstrate that such a process may take place in the dynamic exchange of the individual/personal and collective/social traumatisation domains, both across and beyond the displacement–stress spectrum. It is further argued that the healing process should therefore not be constrained only to an individual or even a particular group (ethnic), but rather be viewed as a complex societal undertaking that evolves over time (different generations) and between different populations (relational) right across the society’s different layers (processing of the socially embedded traumas).
The chapter calls attention to reconceptualisation of the personal level of healing for refugees as a process that relates to the collective one and vice versa, including both the displaced and the non-displaced, the perpetrators of expulsions and the expelled – all part of a particular social environment that was subjected to and/or generated high levels of violence leading to displacement of the civilian population on a massive scale.
