Bridging the gap between the way the health sectors and faith communities deal with the effects of trauma, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
THE EUROPA Hotel in Belfast – once notorious as the most bombed hotel in Europe – last week played host to a groundbreaking international conference on trauma recovery. Organised by the faith-based organisation, Journey Towards Healing, the conference brought together health professionals and faith leaders to look at developing a holistic approach to understanding and moving beyond trauma.
It is rare for health workers and faith practitioners to enter into this kind of dialogue. As Peter McBride, chief executive of the Niamh Group ((Northern Ireland Association for Mental Health) and chairman of the Journey Towards Healing committee, pointed out, “the health sectors and faith communities tend to deal with trauma in very different ways”.
McBride said: “The medical world responds to physical and psychological trauma in terms of treatment and medication, while the faith community tends to respond to the spiritual impact of trauma through a theological context. For too long, trauma has been addressed from either a health or a faith perspective.”
The conference – Trauma and Spirituality: An International Dialogue – provided an opportunity to strengthen relationships, networks and infrastructure between the “trauma” world and the “spirituality” world, both in Northern Ireland and internationally.
Local psychotherapist Bobby Moore said that “on many occasions over the years, health, emergency and security professionals have relied on the support of faith-based workers when dealing with trauma, for example in the ways communities manage the trauma of suicides. It would be much easier to join up these approaches if each had a more profound understanding of what the other has to offer. This conference provides a unique opportunity to deepen respect and mutual acceptance among professional caregivers and faith-based workers.”
But neither was the conference a comfortable process of mutual congratulation: the four-day event challenged both sectors, urging the health sector to consider the important role faith and spirituality can play in helping those traumatised by violence, and encouraging faith workers to recognise the vital role of medical treatment for those suffering from trauma-related illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Much of the discussion centred on the post-conflict trauma of the Troubles, asking whether Northern Ireland is now ready to begin to investigate the hidden layers of trauma in the community, and whether people are able to start talking openly about the pain they have suffered.
Many participants shared their own experience of trauma, including one of the keynote speakers, Father Michael Lapsley. He suffered personal injury in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, losing both hands and an eye in a parcel bomb because of his support for the cause.
Later, conscious that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would allow only a minority of South Africans to share their stories, Fr Lapsley established the Healing of Memories workshops, with the aim of healing psychological wounds, facilitating reconciliation between racial groups, and opening paths to reconstruction.
Speaking ahead of his keynote address, he said his faith helped him to make sense of his own trauma. “It helped me not to be a prisoner of it,” he said, adding that both South Africa and Northern Ireland have had their share of “tribal theology” which was used to justify oppression, and that insights from other sites of conflict can be a source of inspiration in dealing with trauma.
“No one has a monopoly on the right way to heal. Each context is unique. But at the deepest level, we are one human family. I hope that as a result of the conference, people will have a more multidisciplinary, more holistic approach to understanding suffering. Pain is transcendent – that is what connects people,” he said.
The other keynote speaker was Kaethe Weingarten, associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, who drew from her personal experience working with groups who have witnessed chronic community violence in Kosovo and South Africa. Weingarten is interested in the idea of “witnessing” violence, rather than looking at it from the perspective of victims or perpetrators.
When it comes to recovery from trauma, Weingarten likes to distinguish between what she calls “reasonable hope” and “unreasonable hope”, otherwise known as “rainbow hope”. Unreasonable hope is the ambitious, unrealistic conviction that there will be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: an impossible dream that pain and trauma can be entirely erased.
In contrast, she advocates a model of reasonable hope, where communities saturated with chronic violence take moderate and, thereby more effective, steps to begin the process of healing.
Weingarten said the discussion event between healthcare workers and faith practitioners was the first dialogue of its kind she had encountered in 35 years of practice, and a model that she hoped to see exported to other post-conflict zones.
“This conference is providing us with the very situation in which to practise empathy and dialogue, and the means to bring together communities,” she added.
