Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [125]
Earlier we discussed the importance of family, friends, and community in the healing process. Just knowing that someone cares is therapeutic. Healing occurs when a real person connects to another real person, that is, when people are comfortable enough with each other to be who they truly are.
People who have been betrayed by the human race most need a person who asks, "What is your experience?" then listens closely to their answers. This person can be a family member, a friend, a cultural broker, or a religious leader. It can be a shaman, a curandero, or a therapist. The important thing isn't the label, but the relationship, which is nurturing, consistent, and respectful.
This healing relationship often relies on what psychologist Celia Jaes Falicov calls "the power of small gestures." When I visit Bintu, I take her flowers. In fact, whenever I visit people who have suffered, I try to take a small gift. When grief-stricken people visited my aunt Grace, she offered them pie. Sometimes what heals is as simple as a touch of the hand, a smile, or the expression of sympathy.
Relationships reintroduce people who have suffered to the community of love. If they have been dehumanized, caring can rehumanize them. Warmth and respect can rebuild a person who has been systematically humiliated and degraded by torturers. Many people have been pulled back from the precipice of despair by one person who let them know they mattered.
Linda Simon wrote of William James, one of our best psychologists, "He was a birthright member of the great society of encouragers." We can all be in that great society of encouragers. We can ask people about their feelings and allow them to cry and rage. And we can be what Donald Meichenbaum called "purveyors of hope."
Love and hope are necessary to keep people's heads above water when they are in dire straits. A truly good listener manages to convey, "You have lost a lot, but you have not lost everything." In the end, healing relationships are about finding dignity adequate to the sorrow. I think of the three Iraqi men from the prison camp in Saudi Arabia. The most important thing for them was to find meaning in their experiences, to understand what happened to them in a way that allowed them to see themselves as men, worthy of respect.
HEALING STORIES
All sorrows can be borne if they can be put into a story.
—ISAK DINESEN
People survive because they partake of the alchemy of healing. They turn their pain into a deeper understanding of themselves and of what it means to be human. As Pico Iyer wrote, "The final destination of any journey is not after all the last item on the agenda but rather some understanding, however simple and provisional, of what one has seen."
To say that people can grow and learn from any experience is not to justify their experience or even to say that they couldn't have learned from an easier life, but it is to say that healthy people learn and grow from everything, even trauma.
Almost all who become wiser and stronger after trauma do so because they develop a sense of purpose that transcends their immediate survival needs and allows them to focus on the future. They survive so that their children can become citizens and go to college, or so that they can become doctors or teachers and help others from their country, or so that they can bring their grandparents to America or write the truth about a bloody regime. This sense of purpose, as necessary to life as oxygen, propels refugees into the future
A woman from Colombia saw her husband shot by drug dealers. He was an honest judge who was unlucky enough to live in the wrong place and time. She was an educated woman who wrote books and worked all over the world. Afterward she spent her life writing and speaking about the problems of her country. She said, "I honor his memory by fighting for justice."
Healing stories might be about