Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [117]
And if refugees do show up in our offices, they are likely to come for practical advice, not help processing the past. They are likely to bring a form they need help filling out, or they'll come in with the classified ads and ask for advice on buying a washing machine. They bring up problems with a supervisor or a landlord, or they ask for help finding a used car.
PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology was founded in the late Victorian era by middle-class white men. There was no concept of cultural relativity. For example, at Ellis Island, the IQ tests were given only in English. In 1917 psychologists announced that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 80 percent of Russians were morons. About this time, Margaret Mead entered graduate school in psychology. She administered the Otis IQ test to foreigners and found that their scores were related to their English ability. However, her findings weren't accepted. She was out-maneuvered in a sea of powerful male psychologists and she left psychology because of its racism and sexism.
Fortunately, since then our field has worked to become less sexist, racist, and ethnocentric. While there is still resistance to dealing with culture in therapy and also a lack of sophistication about cross-cultural issues, many psychologists have devoted their careers to understanding diversity and increasing tolerance. However, in this time of transition to a multicultural society, psychologists often rely on models dusty with age. The field tries to fit people from all over the world into models developed for a very different time and place.
Psychologists ask, What does Gestalt theory or Jungian theory have to say about the Kurds or the Sudanese or the Vietnamese? These are the wrong questions. Better questions are, What models could we develop from our experience with refugees that would allow us to expand our knowledge of the human race? What are the universal components of healing? What are the aspects of resilience?
Sometimes psychologists have proselytized like missionaries. We have taught "Follow Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers and you will be saved." We have said, "Our system is better than yours. Trust us to know you better than you know yourselves." But we have had an abysmal conversion rate. Our Western mental health system is dependent on verbal expressiveness, self-disclosure, and a belief in individualism. It splits the personal and the professional, the sacred and profane, and the mind and the body. Our system is also expensive, hard to schedule, and involves sitting in small rooms baring one's deepest secrets to perfect strangers.
Our ideas about how to deal with pain do not seem relevant to many newcomers. Catharsis and self-analysis are by no means universally respected as ways to heal. Not many refugees can be persuaded they will feel better if they talk about trauma. Psychologists have a metaphor for healing—a wound must be washed, cleaned to heal. It may be painful but it is necessary. The Vietnamese also employ the wound metaphor for healing. But they say, "A wound will only heal if it is left alone."
COMMON REACTIONS TO LOSS
In his introductory psychology text, David G. Myers writes, "Most political dissidents who survive dozens of episodes of torture do not later exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder (Mineka and Zinbarg, 1996). And, although suffering some lingering stress symptoms, most American Jews who survived the Holocaust trauma, experiencing starvation, beatings, lost freedom, and the murders of loved ones, went on to live productive lives. In fact, compared to other American Jews of the same age, these survivors have been less likely to have seen a psychotherapist (18 percent vs. 31 percent) and more