Watch video trailer here!!
Opening remarks by Convisero mentor Mike Niconchuk:
Good morning and welcome.
I want to thank each of you for being here. And I want to thank the Trauma Research Foundation for opening this space. Bruce, for his new and exciting leadership of TRF. Wendy, for her work on this event and globally-recognized leadership in the field of trauma, and Carrie, who puts so much effort into this event. Of course I also want to thank Bessel for deeply considering the relationships between trauma, social unrest, violence, and social repair and suggesting this topic feature prominently at the very start of the event.
And you—you chose to be here, in person or online, to engage with content that is explicitly emotional, sensitive, and likely personal for many of you. Conflict, violence, trauma, and social division. This topic is imminent and painful for so many reasons. By virtue of our location today on historically stolen lands, police brutality against student protests here in Boston, the anguish of Palestinian families watching their families killed daily in Gaza, the daily arrival of hundreds of persons fleeing rampant violence in Haiti, rising anti-Semitism, the intersection of trauma and violent conflict is evident here in this city—and the world over. The line between the “here” and the “there” has broken, and many of you probably interact with the tendrils and legacies of displacement, war, and social rupture in your work.
And we must speak into the room Gaza. We will not focus intensely on it, as it is not mine to speak about, but it is naturally something on the mind and in the heart, as it is a trauma that speaks to the intergenerational and collective, to identity, the metastatic pain that dismantles dichotomies between victim and perpetrator.
I am confident that feelings of unsafety, anger, or fear emerge even at its mere invocation.
And know, from the bottom of my heart, that I wish for each of you a life of safety, just as I wish the same for the people Gaza, of Sudan, of Congo, Haiti, Ecuador, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Ukraine, Los Angeles, incarceration facilities in this country, and elsewhere.
And we take a breath together. Find those safety resources within yourself as we go through the day. Invoke them, use them.
It is my true desire that each of you in this room and online live a life of safety. A life of safety in which your own and your policymakers pursuit of your safety is not at the expense of the life of less desirable others. And today we are not here to adjudicate blame, but to elevate trauma and the necessity of exploring trauma healing contexed within broader social and political issues.
I wish for you a life of safety, because that is what it is all about—as a species, as mental health workers, as advocates. We work to create safety in the self, in relationships, and in the world around us. For those who have experienced trauma, opportunity without safety is a false gift. Decades of violence in communities can impact health outcomes for generations, can rupture families and social cohesion, and can exacerbate inequities. Safety in the body and mind, in such adverse circumstances, is wildly difficult, and we must continue innovating in the creation of safety in mind, body, relationships, land, and material circumstances.
Today is highly personal for me.
The act of centering myself on this stage could be construed as a gross act of privilege, but my intention is to bring us immediately to a critical point that Justine Hardy, Homeboy Industries, and the Violence Intervention Project will investigate in great detail: trauma and violence are personal. And only by elevating the urgency, dignity, and beauty of persons will we be able to couple our pursuit of healing and our pursuits of justice.
To be blunt, I am enraged at the actions of this country’s government in sustaining active conflicts and adding embers to situations where they could easily as add water. In many ways, there is something particularly infuriating about working on conflict-related trauma, because violence is not an act of God; it is an act of mankind. Often I find myself incredulous at the reality of global mental health financing; as the same actors involved in the harm of populations then ask for bids to go innovate on dealing with the trauma left behind. It is akin to cigarette companies funding heart disease interventions in the communities with the greatest sales.
One of my best friends is at the moment on a perilous and criminalized journey to safety for himself and his family. He, a refugee who first fled war in 2012, is somewhere in a Russian, or Belorussian, or Polish forest. Perhaps frostbitten, perhaps about to get shot, perhaps soon to be attacked by police dogs, perhaps totally safe—smuggling himself into Europe because that—the decaying heart of empire—is the only place that he can fathom safety. Foreign aid money, which has historically been used as a form of soft power and influence, has all but dried up for refugee camps in greater Syria (bilad ash-Sham), and he has struggled for 9 months to make enough money picking tomatoes, in order to feed his children, including one with specific health needs. My heart breaks that he feels there is no easier way. And I am angry that this is the landscape of choice he has—risk life, limb, and crushing debt to undertake a life-threatening journey where, even if successful, you will be separated from your family for 2 years, or wallow in a tent or decaying apartment where every aspect of your existence is dependent on aid resources that are rapidly drying up now that your people are not politically relevant. That we have built a world where material scarcity, forced poverty, and internationally influenced civil wars are written off as “unfortunate traumas.”
Days ago, I told him not to go. That we will try to find another way.
He was weeping.
I told him, “Habibi, you could die. Are you willing to risk your children losing their father?”
He paused, and said, “But they already have.” He continued sobbing.
They have lost him to depression, hopelessness, trauma, shame, guilt, fear.
What is the work with this man? A breathing exercise? Cognitive reframing? EMDR—for which trauma? For his PTSD or his depression or his hopelessness or his anger or his anxiety? A life of dignity is not a treatment protocol. That is not to say trauma healing work is irrelevant for this man—but there is simply no post- to his post-trauma challenges.
It is heavy. This work is heavy. And we are not here to shy away from it, but to explore how what we know how to do—this like build relational containers of healing and hope, building regulation in the body, investing in spiritual, emotional, psychological, and interpersonal resources towards healing—to explore how these things are complicated by the realities of war, separation, violence, politics, racism, and social division.
Today we aim to connect dots, for the context of violence, disconnection, and injustice is universal. Where power, greed, identity threat, and perceived status loss go, so does violence. And that is not to suggest such traumatic experiences are inevitable, but rather that the challenge at hand is massive for those in the field of mental health and psychosocial support. What we see in parts of Los Angeles—as we will hear today—or what we see in the Kashmir Valley or in the Republic of the Maldives or Gaza—is connected. To be interested in the mental health of survivors of violence and conflict without being interested in their justice is insufficient at best, and complicit at worst.
This is where the etiology of PTSD, stress related disorders, and sub-pathological adaptations in the self, relationships and communities pushes us into a difficult position. In some cases we know so clearly the causes of harm. In many conflicts our tax dollars drop the bombs that cause the trauma and then agencies based in those countries get the big contracts to respond to the trauma. It’s a perverse cycle.
Is the role of the mental health practitioner or psychosocial support worker inherently political? How can privilege and class and foreign intervention destroy local ways of healing? And at the same time how can privilege and platforms be leveraged to do the work of undoing the structural sources of harm? How do we build sustainable teams in such environments? Where are the bright spots in new protocols and ways of working that can bring hope and agency even in the most adverse circumstances. Where do we see those bright spots of innovation that honor the local, offer agency to survivors, and work around systems that are unwilling or unable to change in the timeframe needed.
In the case of trauma and conflict, I sit in a pile of my own unintended complicity, while also fiercely trying to get this right. So how do we dare do work? Carefully, with humility and permission. With radical empathy as we know how trauma metastasizes in self and society, and we understand that grace, dialogue, and healing are necessary parts of justice.
We will start today with Justine Hardy, who will take us to the Kashmir Valley, a site of decades of violence, and millennia of beauty, art, faith, and complexity. We will then talk about one of many elephants in the room—extremism—and the delicate work of trauma-responsive care for persons exiting violent extremist groups. I will focus on collective work with returnees from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, while calling out our obsession with violence in the Islamic world, when in reality, much of what goes on in this country should be equally as vilified and understood in the context of history and policy. After lunch we will shift geographies, focusing the city of Los Angeles, exploring innovative models of care for persons exiting incarceration, and in bringing neurofeedback to communities that have long suffered the consequences of injustice, racism, and systemic exclusion.
Today will be uncomfortable, eye opening, and challenging.
Justine Hardy’s outline:
I was talking about trans-generational trauma, and though the following is only in bullet point, and without the elegance of Mike’s introductory comments, it gives an outline:
The different impacts across several generations living through (and within) the same conflict.
How to begin to address the misunderstandings and differences between the trauma of each generation.
How to support and accompany those who are ‘frozen’ (psychologically paralysed) by trauma in settings where there is little or no recourse to treatments other than the heavy bombardment of pharmacology and what an individual therapist can do face-to-face with the people they are working with.
Working with the next generation, exploring ways of interrupting the cycles of violence that play out across the generations.
Working somatically (in the mind-body continuum) both preventatively and curatively to give people the agency of understanding what is happening within their nervous system responses and how this interacts with their minds, mood and capacity to function.
