(Continued from Northern Expansion Part I)
My limited time in Uganda prevented me from traveling north to Acholiland where TCON has recently expanded it’s efforts. Instead, the Gulu leaders came to Craig and I to discuss future plans. The lunch meeting lasted less than a few hours, yet the conversations from this particular meeting have echoed in my mind and heart repeatedly since that afternoon.
In psychology there is a term called countertransference that refers to the emotional experience of a therapist in connection to the patient. In certain psychological theories, countertransference is deemed an enemy to the therapeutic process. In other relationally-oriented theories, countertransference is simply viewed as another tool for understanding your patient and all that they are bringing to the relationship. You can likely guess which camp I fall into. The therapist in me showed up for that particular meeting (I find it difficult to ever really set it aside). As I sat and took in stories of traumatized children – children who were abducted, forced to murder their own family members for survival, children who were tortured and raped – it was only natural to focus intently on the impact of trauma written on the faces of the women sharing these stories.
Caroline, the leader of the Acholi Widows Initiative, was able to articulate the devastation her surrounding community has survived. Beyond the child abductions and the migration to IDP camps where everyone was forced to live for decades, the instability, uncertainty and the continued threat of violence lasting for 20+ years has certainly left a traumatized people in it’s wake. Trauma can be paralyzing. It can numb the psyche of an individual, perhaps even an entire community. To survive such horrors, a human being must dissociate from reality at times. This is what I had expected to encounter in conversation with these women. But that is not all that I discovered. Certainly I witnessed the glossy eyes and distant stare when Caroline spoke of the screams emitted from the playgrounds after allowing former child soldiers suffering from PTSD to reintegrate into the public school system. That’s the thing with trauma – it’s aftermath reaches far beyond the actual threat of physical danger. But I witnessed more than the psychological impact of trauma that day. As Caroline shifted gears and began sharing with us her desire to help rebuild her community, her plans for assisting widows and their children, her strategy for developing sustainable income-generating activities – I saw something more powerful than trauma. I saw HOPE.
Skeptic that I often am, I was cautious to embrace hope as a healing balm to trauma because my educated therapeutic mind learned that human beings develop defense mechanisms to survive our experiences. Was this hope I caught a glimmer of simply a defense mechanism? A spiritualization of the circumstances? Or was it truly a balm tending to the heart and soul of a traumatized people?
It’s been weeks since I returned from Uganda and I am convinced that it was the latter. Somehow these women have held onto the belief that, hard as it will likely be, they can overcome their circumstances – both historically and currently. And the beautiful thing about hope is that it’s contagious. So my countertransference experience on that day was one of deep and undeniable sorrow AND it was also one of hopefulness and a palpable desire to aid these women in whatever way possible as they rebuild their hearts, their souls and their lives.