Using Storytelling In Psychotherapeutic Group Work With Young Refugees ​

Sage Publications" Group Analysis" Vl.38-June 2005"

Using storytelling in psychotherapeutic group work with young refugees

Shai Schwartz and Sheila Melzak

This paper documents the development of a new approach to child and adolescent centered psychotherapeutic work in groups and with individuals. The work is with young survivors of political violence who all suffer from the problematic and troubling impact on them of violence, scapegoating, separation, loss and the many changes in their external and internal worlds during their developmental years.

Key words: refugees, storytelling, storyteller, folk tales, group

Introduction

We live on images. As human beings we know our bodies and our minds only through what we can imagine. . . To grasp our humanity we need to structure these images into metaphors and models. (Lifton, 1996: 3)

The authors work at The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a Human Rights Organization with a holistic approach towards helping survivors of torture and political violence, most of whom are asylum seekers and refugees.

In working with young refugees, we think with them about two separate areas of their experience. One is their external, social, cultural world, and the political acts, including acts of violence and discrimination that they have experienced. The other is the exploration of the psychological and physical consequences of this.

Over several years, The authors, (hereafter S.S. and S.M.) have, worked with this population, developing an integrated model of work that combines key aspects of their two different professional spheres. These include psychodynamic, developmental thinking, storytelling, story and drama therapy techniques and group psychotherapy.

The storytelling model both complements and interweaves with ongoing psychotherapeutic work. The co-facilitation between the two has for this reason been both unusual, and complementary in relation to their group work with different groups of children and young people, and in their training those who work with young refugees.  

S.M. is familiar with the personal stories, difficulties and resiliences of the young people with whom she works. (The young people attend the groups weekly and many also have individual psychotherapy.) S.M. concentrates on the psychodynamic issues while S.S. deals more with the ‘here and now’, the process of storytherapy and group work. Both share ‘holding’ the group, sharing responsibility for maintaining the structure and for containing the dynamic evolution of the process and the content.

Over the years there have been two specific therapeutic aims in our work with traumatised young refugees. The first has been to find ways for the patients to recall, and to subsequently reconnect with positive and formative aspects of their personal, family and community history, mythology and culture as sources of strength, and a way of developing their mature identity and sense of creativity and freedom after traumatizing experiences.

The second has been to help children and adolescents to understand and bear the often-conflicting dualities, some unconscious, resulting from their traumatic experiences. These dualities include vulnerability and resilience; inhibition and creativity and whether or not they feel entitled to life or expendable.

The model of working with stories seems to fit especially well with the population of children and adolescents with whom we work. The children come from many different countries, cultures, nationalities, and belief systems. Most come from societies which still retain traditional values within their families and their communities and where elders maintained authority through sustaining oral traditions.

Group cohesiveness and increased communication via free-floating interactions (Foulkes, 1964) are aims of our group work. Schlapobersky (1993) writes about three levels of psychotherapeutic work in groups that need to interconnect with each other. Individuals initially find their own language. Later they may begin a dialogue with a few group members and eventually the central themes are shared between all group members. The  work with  stories clearly  facilitated all three levels of discourse.

A group translates symptoms into their meaning and . . . transforms the driving forces which lay concealed behind them into emotions, desires and tendencies experienced in person. While doing so the members learn a new language, which had previously been spoken only unconsciously and the capacity for insight and communication grows.  (Foulkes, 1964: 176)

The Children and Adolescents

Most of these children and adolescents have been separated from familiar and loving families and communities, travelling to Britain alone to seek asylum. Most come from families and communities which were both functional and nurturing before they were fractured by violence.

Some have arrived with preoccupied parents who are unable to care for them, some with strangers. All are psychologically unaccompanied. They and their parents have been forced to be victims, and sometimes perpetrators, bystanders, and collaborators. Some have become rescuers, with capacities to empathize and care for others. Some have become ‘parents’ too early, caring for parents and siblings, at some cost to their functioning in other areas of their lives and to their own developmental needs. They have witnessed violent death and experienced violation and brutality, both to close family members and themselves. They are likely to have been overwhelmed by these experiences, lacking the resources to process these events. This is the character and definition of trauma.

These overwhelming events may have fragmented their internal worlds (Herman, 2002) and caused them to experience unbearable and inexpressible extreme and confusing emotions. For some, the usual boundaries between past and present and internal and external experience are broken. They experience thoughts and memories as if they happening in the present. This consequence of trauma is frightening and disorganizing. Young people feel that they are going mad, as they cannot control their thoughts, especially when they are tired. Most experience bad dreams and nightmares and many try to avoid sleep when these are unbearable. Some repress memories, some feelings. Some repress whole periods of their lives. Some remember, but choose not to share their experiences, fearing that this will activate overwhelming mental images. Many regress to a form of ‘magical thinking’ where cause and consequence are irrational. Many believe that their thoughts have magical powers, particularly to cause disaster and to connect with the dead.

 All the young people tend to disconnect themselves from their traumatic pasts for self-protection. The defenses that they use often prevent them from functioning in the present reducing their capacities to reflect and to relate. Also, in banishing undesirable personal memories they lose connection with their heritage, culture, and important aspects of their identity and functioning. They may idealize the culture of exile and begin to identify with it while rejecting their own. This denial is both the consequence of the pain of memory, and a result of their denigrating their old cultures. It is a survival tactic: they realize that survival in the new country requires integration into the host society. This process is facilitated by the West’s general denigration of Eastern or ‘Third World’ cultures.

Psychotherapeutic work with traumatized children involves the reconnection of memories with the original painful and difficult affects. Recovery from the impact of trauma can take place in the context of a safe healing relationship where remembrance and mourning can take place. Only then will the integration of the trauma and an awareness of the commonality of human rights abuses be possible. (Melzak, 1999: 419)

Psychotherapeutic group work needs to mobilise the imagination and creativity of each group member in order to restore the capacity to explore difficult events safely and to restore the abililities to think, to reflect, to make connections and relationships.

 Myth and Folk Tale

Since the beginning of human time the story has been the basic communication tool between people. It has been stirred and evoked by the ever-compulsive human need to make sense of reality, connect the next generation to the tribal heritage and celebrate life. It has utilized through art and sculpture, music, pantomime, dance and words.

The most ancient, deepest and most fascinating story form is mythology. Out of this classic story genre there flowed legends, folk tales and fairy tales. Mythology’s magical thinking plunges us into the subconscious and perhaps deeper. Joseph Campbell describes myth as ‘the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.’ (Campbell, 1949: 3)

Carl Jung maintains that –  

myths are revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings . . . The myth originates and functions to satisfy the psychological need for contact with the unconscious. The myth functions not merely to announce the existence of the unconscious but actually to enable humans to experience it. (quoted in Segal, 1998:  3)

The myth and its many lesser forms signify inner unconscious activity. A Dr Allen B. Chinen point out that psychoanalysts have made the connection between dreams and fairytales and maintains that we can interpret tales, in their symbolic form, just as we do dreams.

Both dreams and tales use as symbols the language of the unconscious imagination, rather than conscious reason and they address matters of the soul and not merely the mind. Chinen, 1989: 7)  

.

The Teller and the Listener and the Act of Storytelling

When we try to understand the social, emotional and spiritual process of storytelling, it immediately becomes clear that storytelling is a relational phenomenon that highlights present and past relationships between the ‘self’ of the teller, the listener and many  ‘others’.

Each story is recreated in the interaction between teller and listener. It is the relationship that causes a particular tale to come to life. By the act of sharing highly individual or collective, symbolic material with another to whom this same symbolic structure matters, a special, fragile bond is created which lasts for as long as the story is allowed to continue.  (Gersie and King, 1988: 32) 

The relationship between the listener and the teller resonates with past relationships in the internal representational world of both. The storyteller will invest passion and love in the telling. By turning to imagination and feelings the storyteller becomes vulnerable to the listener and in the subsequent contact the two will initiate a process of bonding.

In telling his tale, the storyteller connects to his/her own internal identifications: these different parts of his/her ‘self’ are represented by the characters in his stories. He/she explores the internal terrains of the conscious and the unconscious mind. This is the ‘setting’ of his/her stories and he/she fulfils his/her desire to enact his/her life in endless ‘plots’, continuously recreating him/herself. Thus the storyteller relives his/her own characters, settings and plots while recounting even the most far-fetched tales. These are inspired by the teller’s own repressed personal narrative and conflicts. Close attention to these mythological stories that people choose to tell can teach us much about their inner world, these aspects of their internal world are displaced onto the characters and events and terrain in the story. The group thus can explore them indirectly.

Stories and the Psychotherapeutic Process

Work with traumatized children needs both patience and the ability to work with resistance.

Gaps in the young people’s narratives and their difficulties in accessing memories led us to seek a different form of psychotherapeutic discourse. We felt that working ‘in displacement’ might be a better route to addressing these painful and absent themes. This brought us to experiment with telling and eliciting mythical, religious and traditional stories from the diverse cultures of the children who attend the groups. Our task was linking these to the children’s spoken and unspoken fragmented memories.

In a therapeutic group for traumatised young people, not all children will talk, but most are able to listen and their imaginations will be touched by others’ accounts. Personal and

Community stories, especially when told in groups, touch the unconscious parts of the mind, and forgotten experiences are mobilized and remembered. This process helps children who feel that they have lost their sense of identity on personal, family and cultural levels. It can restore their connections to the firm foundations of their development and from this their personal capacities to value themselves and to relate to others.

.

Our psychotherapeutic work with stories

At the beginning of a session there is inevitably some ambivalence, fear and tension. Our first task is to create a safe place for stories to well up from both the conscious and the unconscious mind, which takes time. We begin each group by giving participants an opportunity to reflect on their week. We ensure that everyone has an opportunity to talk. Through the preamble on the week’s events, we allow subjects to emerge and we highlight the dual importance of sharing the personal stories of each participant, and the process of listening. Through discussion and our careful, clarifying questions, the participants will begin to recall traditional stories alongside fragments of their personal histories.

Medical Foundation clients might, however, be quite resistant to telling stories. Remembering our first storyteller usually evokes warm memories. But in this context, it invariably means recalling loved ones who have been violently abused or killed, or from whom they have been separated. It may also involve remembering or reliving aspects of their own traumatic past.

Recalling childhood tales entails going back in time. The mere possibility of sifting through childhood stories can be so daunting and painful that the automatic response might be to deny ever having been told stories. The denigration of the participants’ culture as is another reason for resistance. In these instances, when introducing the subject we found we have to agree initially to relate to their culture and folklore as they do, with a grain of irony. We often ask the group about their resistance to their mother cultures. Some answer that their old cultures are primitive. Some do not respond, some describe their cultures with warmth and pride. The latter group tolerates more easily conflicting values and beliefs within themselves.

We have found that in new groups, which are often resistant, the best strategy is to first generally discuss tradition, folklore and magic, and their uses and effects in traditional society. We might identify similar issues in the host country. We might discuss the advantages of faith, and tradition. In the conversation we will keep on introducing the ‘here and now’ issues of daily life, its challenges and dilemmas. We might then recall an idea from magical or traditional thinking and test it out on dealing with these issues. When we sense lowered resistance to the mother culture, we would ask the group about their culture’s stock folk characters, heroes and heroines, evil or good spirits, and the wise and the foolish. We would also ask about characters from their various Holy Scriptures, myths, and magical rituals. The discussion passes back and forth between the ‘here and now’ and the mother culture. Eventually someone remembers a story and the storytelling session begins.

At times, the first stories that emerge are too superficial or insignificant to be worked through. In this case, we briefly discuss them and continue the session until a significant story emerges. However, there is, the danger of overlooking very powerful material in small and seemingly superficial tales. These apparently insignificant stories sometimes lead to important personal or group issues. Thus at times, we, the facilitators must cast rationality to the winds and have confidence in their own intuition. We have to work spontaneously while absorbing the story on many levels. We are listening to the storyteller’s unconscious messages through language, images, choice of characters, and the content’s symbolism, . We are listening and observing the group and its body language. We take into consideration the group process and dynamics and the story’s impact on the rest of the group. We are also attentive to processes of transference and counter transference by being aware of what is happening within our own bodies and minds and especially whether we are experiencing unexplained emotions.

All these factors influence our decisions, whether to stop our explorations and focus on a particular story, or whether to continue with the spontaneous storytelling process. We allow the process of storytelling to unfold. Insights develop in the new emotional place to which the story has taken us. We must instinctively decide when to stop and work through a specific issue.

If we do decide to stop and work with a particular story, we have first to decide whether to work with the group as a whole or just with the storyteller. We often identify important themes that we need to discuss and develop with the group. These concern key group issues.  It is, however, generally preferable to work first with the storyteller’s own issues, and only later to relate to the story on a group level.

We usually ask the participants and the storyteller for their emotions after the story. The participants feel safer to express opinions or ideas; they will not readily disclose or discuss their emotions. Much is learned by reflecting on the story’s impact at the emotional level.

Working through an issue in displacement

When we feel the story is relevant to the group situation or contains some hidden issue for the storyteller, we often work through it by role-playing some of the story’s characters. We ask the storyteller to describe a relevant character from his/her tale. The role-playing starts off with the story’s protagonist (the ‘hero’/‘heroine’), continues with other complementary characters, and ends with the antagonist.

After the storyteller has described a character, we sometimes ‘interview’ this character, always asking permission first. We ask the ‘character’ questions about his/her life to deepen the storyteller’s identification with the character. We might ask his/her opinion on a key situation in the story. This inevitably will raise conscious or unconscious issues that can be discussed with the ‘character’. At this point we might invite group members to ask the character any questions.

Sometimes we ask storytellers to depict a second character from their story. Later we might even stage a dialogue between these two characters, having another participant play one of them, or having the storyteller change chairs each time he plays the other character. There are numerous possibilities.  Through this technique many issues emerge and many attitudes to hidden issues can be worked through. We develop a conversation around the issues that arise. Time after time we have witnessed participants retelling some fantastic myth or folk tale remembered from childhood, and in analyzing the narrative we have realized that this parallels the storyteller’s personal narrative.

We have to decide whether to bring these issues out or whether to leave them on an unconscious level, to be worked through in displacement. The young people are not only dealing with past traumas  but also with a very difficult present reality of poverty, loneliness, and a strange new culture. To add to this, many have suffered police harassment, threats of deportation and racist and xenophobic attacks. If conversation turns to life in England, we discuss which of the story’s solutions and strategies could offer tools for dealing with the new life’s hardships. These folktales remind them of their own culture’s strengths, awaken humor and love and rekindle legitimacy and dignity. This might be either an opportunity for cultural empowerment or an opportunity to question some of the old traditional values that may be detrimental to their survival and healing process in the country of exile.

At the end of sessions like these we always perform a ritual to ensure that each young person steps out of the role they have taken. This is necessary to release them from their identifications with the stories’ characters. We ask the young person to acknowledge that they are no longer a character in the story and to say who they are in reality.

An example from a group session

The following story came up in a session with the oldest group of adolescents aged 16 to 21. This is a mixed gender group with 15 regular attendees and 20 members. The young people come from eight different African countries, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Kosovo and Russia.

Simon (not his real name), was usually a quiet participant, who preferred to listen to other participants’ stories. He surprised us by volunteering to tell a story he said his father told him as a young boy. Originally from Uganda, Simon was an especially sad boy who lost all his significant carers during his first 16 years through death through illness, separation and political violence. At 16 he was forced to watch the grotesque murder of his father by government forces who also abused Simon directly, by pouring boiling water over the front of his body, leaving him with wounds that took months to heal.

His story was about two boys who lived in the same village and remained friends until adulthood. As an adult, one man, a doctor, learns that his friend, a businessman, is ill. The doctor realizes that his friend is dying of AIDS. He is devastated, both because he cannot cure his friend and because he knew he would lose him. He remains with him in hospital until his death, and cannot imagine life without him. At the funeral a snake appears in the middle of the burial ceremony. The faithful friend pushes his foot out and cries out to the snake to bite him so that he can die and join his friend. The snake approaches him but when it is about to bite him he flees and hides behind the crowd and the funeral guests burst out laughing.

After the story we first ask a few questions, as if to better understand the story. Our purpose was actually to allow the storyteller to distance himself from the story.

Simon said that it was about a man who said  something he didn’t  really mean. He commented, ‘It is an old story and was told by my dad.’ This of course made the story very valuable in his eyes. He said.’ My father told me it so as to protect me from any danger of death in the future.’  This was  a very interesting statement in the light of the end of the session.

 We then asked Simon to describe the protagonist in more detail. He agreed willingly. He decided to call him Munangila We asked him a few questions about the character and then asked if he would  to play the part of the protagonist and allow us to interview him. He hesitated but agreed. We asked the character about his relationship with his friend, and his feelings about his death. We focused on the moment of fleeing from the snake. S.S. decided to use this as a form of cultural empowerment and he requested Simon, in his role as Munangila, to ask, the snake to kill him in his Ugandan language, and to act out the scene. We commonly use this strategy. S.S. asked him to teach us to say what Munangila said to the snake in Luganda. After he taught the whole group, we stood  up and repeated it, acting out the scene as described by Simon who recalled it from his home culture.

Simon began  to sing the sentence, as if singing the chorus to a familiar Ugandan song, and another Ugandan boy, Joseph, helped  him with the exact rhythm and tune. Everyone joined  in, singing in Simon’s language. This both supported him and tapped into each participant’s memory of his or her own mother tongue. Simon leads led us into a kind of dance, putting one foot into the circle and asking the snake to bite us. We did  this for quite a while. Everyone participated and enjoyed themselves. We were  ritualizing and exploring through play many of the participants’ death wishes. After a while we sat down and explored further this moment of choosing life over death. Simon told us in his role as the character that he felt  particular guilt about not going through with the act. He acknowledged that his friend would not have wanted him to kill himself. We eventually established that this was a wonderful moment of choosing life over death, and that the laughter that Simon initially interpreted as mockery he came to see as a moment of release and exhilaration. Here we ‘de-roled’ Simon and carried  on discussing this subject and asked other people in the group if they recognized this moment of choice.

Simon acknowledged  that he had often contemplated suicide. His story was unconsciously connected with his own conflicts about living and dying. Hinting that he had had many suicidal moments enabled other people in the group to join in. Simon missed his father and his culture and community dearly. He felt guilt and shame that he could not  (against all odds) save his father’s life and certainly he has sometimes wished to join him. He repeated the following sentence several times:  ‘He wanted to die and get married.’ We assumed that in his stilted Ugandan English, Simon meant to ‘become one’ with his lost parents rather than, literally, to marry.  This highlighted his wish both to merge and to escape as a way of avoiding the pain of separation and loss and the realities of annihilation and murder.

For Simon this experience in the group seemed to be an opportunity to perform an act of  ‘departure’ from his father i.e. to separate in a form of ritual and symbolic burial. We thus dealt with this issue both in displacement and directly. The process began with displaced, fragmented, conscious and unconscious themes, which slowly became conscious and integrated. We told a story, performed a ritual and discussed the subject, especially focusing on the decisive moment of choice between life and death. The group left this session feeling elated.

After these displaced explorations, initially with Simon and subsequently with the whole group, the young people began to directly discuss suicide. They had all thought about and contemplated suicide for various reasons. These included the wish to escape from the difficulties of life in the present; to escape from uncontrollable thoughts and memories; to escape from unbearable guilt and shame, or to ‘bring to life’ the fantasy that they could and would, in death, join those they loved and needed. They were familiar with both the idea and with the reality of suicide as one response to problem solving. Several group members for the first time shared with the group having seen adults in their own communities kill themselves in situations where they could not bear the pain of violent destruction and loss.

For this group of adolescents there is one central question that our model addresses and works through. ‘How do I, or in fact do I, continue living my life after the horrific experiences I have been through?’ The psychotherapeutic group work, using storytelling, provides, for each young person a source of thoughtfulness and involvement, in the transitional time before becoming integrated into the community of exile.

Conclusion

These themes will have to be revisited in the different contexts of the psychotherapy group and individual psychotherapy sessions. It is, however, clear that the storytelling medium has enabled the group to deal ritually and symbolically with one of the group’s central, difficult and most threatening issues. The result of the work has been that the group experienced relief and a sense of renewed vitality. Many overpowering and previously repressed feelings became both conscious and manageable. In light of this experience it will certainly be easier in the future to discuss these themes directly. The young people attending the group, previously stuck in their development after cumulative traumatic experiences, reconnected  to their personal sense of creativity and imagination and begin to move forward in their development.

In summary, we can see how through combining storytherapy techniques with  the group psychoanalytic process we enabled the group to express its deepest fears and relive some of its traumatic past in a displaced manner. The storyteller (Simon) took on the group voice and led the group through this ordeal. This act of storytelling and the ritualized and slightly parodied request to die empowered the group culturally and personally in a cathartic experience, a release of tension, by accessing feelings and thoughts that were previously unthinkable and unspeakable. It also moved the group closer to group cohesiveness (Yalom 1995) enabling the members to discuss together, more freely and in a direct way, these difficult and traumatic themes.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dick Blackwell and John Schlapobersky very much for helpful discussions about group analytic practice.

References

Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Chinen, A. B. (1989) In the Ever After. Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications.

Foulkes, S.H. (1964) Therapeutic Group Analysis. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Gersie, A. and King, N. (1988) Story making in Education and Therapy London: Jessica Kingsley. Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education Press.

Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.

Lifton, R. J. (1996) The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Washington, DC and London: American Psychiatric Press

Melzak, S.  (1999) ‘Psychotherapeutic Work with Child and Adolescent Refugees from Political Violence’, in The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (eds Ann Horne and Monica Lanyado), pp. 405 to428  London and New York: Routledge.

Schlapobersky, J. (1993) ‘The Language of the Group, Monologue, Dialogue and Discourse in Group Analysis’ in The Psyche and the Social World (eds D. Brown and L. Zinkin), pp. 211 to231 London: Routledge. 

Segal, R. (1998) Jung on Mythology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Yalom, I. (1995) The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

Shai Schwartz is a group facilitator, storyteller and elicitor, who has been active in professional theatre, writing, directing, acting and storytelling, over the last thirty years. He is also a trained group facilitator who uses story and drama therapy and psychodrama techniques in his work.. He divides his time between work in England and Israel, his home country.

Sheila Melzak is a community child and adolescent psychotherapist who trained at the Anna Freud Centre and currently works as Head of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. She has also worked overseas, in Somaliland, the Balkans, and Israel and the Palestinian territories, training adults who work with children during and after situations of political violence.

Address for correspondence:

Sheila Melzak

Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team

Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture

111,Isledon Road

London N.7.

Great Britain

OR

Shai Schwartz

Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam

D.N. Shalom 99761

Israel

[1][1]

[2][2][2][2]

[i]

[1][2][i]Sage Publications" Group Analysis" Vl.38-June 2005"

Using storytelling in psychotherapeutic group work with young refugees

Shai Schwartz and Sheila Melzak

This paper documents the development of a new approach to child and adolescent centered psychotherapeutic work in groups and with individuals. The work is with young survivors of political violence who all suffer from the problematic and troubling impact on them of violence, scapegoating, separation, loss and the many changes in their external and internal worlds during their developmental years.

Key words: refugees, storytelling, storyteller, folk tales, group

Introduction

We live on images. As human beings we know our bodies and our minds only through what we can imagine. . . To grasp our humanity we need to structure these images into metaphors and models. (Lifton, 1996: 3)

The authors work at The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a Human Rights Organization with a holistic approach towards helping survivors of torture and political violence, most of whom are asylum seekers and refugees.

In working with young refugees, we think with them about two separate areas of their experience. One is their external, social, cultural world, and the political acts, including acts of violence and discrimination that they have experienced. The other is the exploration of the psychological and physical consequences of this.

Over several years, The authors, (hereafter S.S. and S.M.) have, worked with this population, developing an integrated model of work that combines key aspects of their two different professional spheres. These include psychodynamic, developmental thinking, storytelling, story and drama therapy techniques and group psychotherapy.

The storytelling model both complements and interweaves with ongoing psychotherapeutic work. The co-facilitation between the two has for this reason been both unusual, and complementary in relation to their group work with different groups of children and young people, and in their training those who work with young refugees.  

S.M. is familiar with the personal stories, difficulties and resiliences of the young people with whom she works. (The young people attend the groups weekly and many also have individual psychotherapy.) S.M. concentrates on the psychodynamic issues while S.S. deals more with the ‘here and now’, the process of storytherapy and group work. Both share ‘holding’ the group, sharing responsibility for maintaining the structure and for containing the dynamic evolution of the process and the content.

Over the years there have been two specific therapeutic aims in our work with traumatised young refugees. The first has been to find ways for the patients to recall, and to subsequently reconnect with positive and formative aspects of their personal, family and community history, mythology and culture as sources of strength, and a way of developing their mature identity and sense of creativity and freedom after traumatizing experiences.

The second has been to help children and adolescents to understand and bear the often-conflicting dualities, some unconscious, resulting from their traumatic experiences. These dualities include vulnerability and resilience; inhibition and creativity and whether or not they feel entitled to life or expendable.

The model of working with stories seems to fit especially well with the population of children and adolescents with whom we work. The children come from many different countries, cultures, nationalities, and belief systems. Most come from societies which still retain traditional values within their families and their communities and where elders maintained authority through sustaining oral traditions.

Group cohesiveness and increased communication via free-floating interactions (Foulkes, 1964) are aims of our group work. Schlapobersky (1993) writes about three levels of psychotherapeutic work in groups that need to interconnect with each other. Individuals initially find their own language. Later they may begin a dialogue with a few group members and eventually the central themes are shared between all group members. The  work with  stories clearly  facilitated all three levels of discourse.

A group translates symptoms into their meaning and . . . transforms the driving forces which lay concealed behind them into emotions, desires and tendencies experienced in person. While doing so the members learn a new language, which had previously been spoken only unconsciously and the capacity for insight and communication grows.  (Foulkes, 1964: 176)

The Children and Adolescents

Most of these children and adolescents have been separated from familiar and loving families and communities, travelling to Britain alone to seek asylum. Most come from families and communities which were both functional and nurturing before they were fractured by violence.

Some have arrived with preoccupied parents who are unable to care for them, some with strangers. All are psychologically unaccompanied. They and their parents have been forced to be victims, and sometimes perpetrators, bystanders, and collaborators. Some have become rescuers, with capacities to empathize and care for others. Some have become ‘parents’ too early, caring for parents and siblings, at some cost to their functioning in other areas of their lives and to their own developmental needs. They have witnessed violent death and experienced violation and brutality, both to close family members and themselves. They are likely to have been overwhelmed by these experiences, lacking the resources to process these events. This is the character and definition of trauma.

These overwhelming events may have fragmented their internal worlds (Herman, 2002) and caused them to experience unbearable and inexpressible extreme and confusing emotions. For some, the usual boundaries between past and present and internal and external experience are broken. They experience thoughts and memories as if they happening in the present. This consequence of trauma is frightening and disorganizing. Young people feel that they are going mad, as they cannot control their thoughts, especially when they are tired. Most experience bad dreams and nightmares and many try to avoid sleep when these are unbearable. Some repress memories, some feelings. Some repress whole periods of their lives. Some remember, but choose not to share their experiences, fearing that this will activate overwhelming mental images. Many regress to a form of ‘magical thinking’ where cause and consequence are irrational. Many believe that their thoughts have magical powers, particularly to cause disaster and to connect with the dead.

 All the young people tend to disconnect themselves from their traumatic pasts for self-protection. The defenses that they use often prevent them from functioning in the present reducing their capacities to reflect and to relate. Also, in banishing undesirable personal memories they lose connection with their heritage, culture, and important aspects of their identity and functioning. They may idealize the culture of exile and begin to identify with it while rejecting their own. This denial is both the consequence of the pain of memory, and a result of their denigrating their old cultures. It is a survival tactic: they realize that survival in the new country requires integration into the host society. This process is facilitated by the West’s general denigration of Eastern or ‘Third World’ cultures.

Psychotherapeutic work with traumatized children involves the reconnection of memories with the original painful and difficult affects. Recovery from the impact of trauma can take place in the context of a safe healing relationship where remembrance and mourning can take place. Only then will the integration of the trauma and an awareness of the commonality of human rights abuses be possible. (Melzak, 1999: 419)

Psychotherapeutic group work needs to mobilise the imagination and creativity of each group member in order to restore the capacity to explore difficult events safely and to restore the abililities to think, to reflect, to make connections and relationships.

 Myth and Folk Tale

Since the beginning of human time the story has been the basic communication tool between people. It has been stirred and evoked by the ever-compulsive human need to make sense of reality, connect the next generation to the tribal heritage and celebrate life. It has utilized through art and sculpture, music, pantomime, dance and words.

The most ancient, deepest and most fascinating story form is mythology. Out of this classic story genre there flowed legends, folk tales and fairy tales. Mythology’s magical thinking plunges us into the subconscious and perhaps deeper. Joseph Campbell describes myth as ‘the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.’ (Campbell, 1949: 3)

Carl Jung maintains that –  

myths are revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings . . . The myth originates and functions to satisfy the psychological need for contact with the unconscious. The myth functions not merely to announce the existence of the unconscious but actually to enable humans to experience it. (quoted in Segal, 1998:  3)

The myth and its many lesser forms signify inner unconscious activity. A Dr Allen B. Chinen point out that psychoanalysts have made the connection between dreams and fairytales and maintains that we can interpret tales, in their symbolic form, just as we do dreams.

Both dreams and tales use as symbols the language of the unconscious imagination, rather than conscious reason and they address matters of the soul and not merely the mind. Chinen, 1989: 7)  

.

The Teller and the Listener and the Act of Storytelling

When we try to understand the social, emotional and spiritual process of storytelling, it immediately becomes clear that storytelling is a relational phenomenon that highlights present and past relationships between the ‘self’ of the teller, the listener and many  ‘others’.

Each story is recreated in the interaction between teller and listener. It is the relationship that causes a particular tale to come to life. By the act of sharing highly individual or collective, symbolic material with another to whom this same symbolic structure matters, a special, fragile bond is created which lasts for as long as the story is allowed to continue.  (Gersie and King, 1988: 32) 

The relationship between the listener and the teller resonates with past relationships in the internal representational world of both. The storyteller will invest passion and love in the telling. By turning to imagination and feelings the storyteller becomes vulnerable to the listener and in the subsequent contact the two will initiate a process of bonding.

In telling his tale, the storyteller connects to his/her own internal identifications: these different parts of his/her ‘self’ are represented by the characters in his stories. He/she explores the internal terrains of the conscious and the unconscious mind. This is the ‘setting’ of his/her stories and he/she fulfils his/her desire to enact his/her life in endless ‘plots’, continuously recreating him/herself. Thus the storyteller relives his/her own characters, settings and plots while recounting even the most far-fetched tales. These are inspired by the teller’s own repressed personal narrative and conflicts. Close attention to these mythological stories that people choose to tell can teach us much about their inner world, these aspects of their internal world are displaced onto the characters and events and terrain in the story. The group thus can explore them indirectly.

Stories and the Psychotherapeutic Process

Work with traumatized children needs both patience and the ability to work with resistance.

Gaps in the young people’s narratives and their difficulties in accessing memories led us to seek a different form of psychotherapeutic discourse. We felt that working ‘in displacement’ might be a better route to addressing these painful and absent themes. This brought us to experiment with telling and eliciting mythical, religious and traditional stories from the diverse cultures of the children who attend the groups. Our task was linking these to the children’s spoken and unspoken fragmented memories.

In a therapeutic group for traumatised young people, not all children will talk, but most are able to listen and their imaginations will be touched by others’ accounts. Personal and

Community stories, especially when told in groups, touch the unconscious parts of the mind, and forgotten experiences are mobilized and remembered. This process helps children who feel that they have lost their sense of identity on personal, family and cultural levels. It can restore their connections to the firm foundations of their development and from this their personal capacities to value themselves and to relate to others.

.

Our psychotherapeutic work with stories

At the beginning of a session there is inevitably some ambivalence, fear and tension. Our first task is to create a safe place for stories to well up from both the conscious and the unconscious mind, which takes time. We begin each group by giving participants an opportunity to reflect on their week. We ensure that everyone has an opportunity to talk. Through the preamble on the week’s events, we allow subjects to emerge and we highlight the dual importance of sharing the personal stories of each participant, and the process of listening. Through discussion and our careful, clarifying questions, the participants will begin to recall traditional stories alongside fragments of their personal histories.

Medical Foundation clients might, however, be quite resistant to telling stories. Remembering our first storyteller usually evokes warm memories. But in this context, it invariably means recalling loved ones who have been violently abused or killed, or from whom they have been separated. It may also involve remembering or reliving aspects of their own traumatic past.

Recalling childhood tales entails going back in time. The mere possibility of sifting through childhood stories can be so daunting and painful that the automatic response might be to deny ever having been told stories. The denigration of the participants’ culture as is another reason for resistance. In these instances, when introducing the subject we found we have to agree initially to relate to their culture and folklore as they do, with a grain of irony. We often ask the group about their resistance to their mother cultures. Some answer that their old cultures are primitive. Some do not respond, some describe their cultures with warmth and pride. The latter group tolerates more easily conflicting values and beliefs within themselves.

We have found that in new groups, which are often resistant, the best strategy is to first generally discuss tradition, folklore and magic, and their uses and effects in traditional society. We might identify similar issues in the host country. We might discuss the advantages of faith, and tradition. In the conversation we will keep on introducing the ‘here and now’ issues of daily life, its challenges and dilemmas. We might then recall an idea from magical or traditional thinking and test it out on dealing with these issues. When we sense lowered resistance to the mother culture, we would ask the group about their culture’s stock folk characters, heroes and heroines, evil or good spirits, and the wise and the foolish. We would also ask about characters from their various Holy Scriptures, myths, and magical rituals. The discussion passes back and forth between the ‘here and now’ and the mother culture. Eventually someone remembers a story and the storytelling session begins.

At times, the first stories that emerge are too superficial or insignificant to be worked through. In this case, we briefly discuss them and continue the session until a significant story emerges. However, there is, the danger of overlooking very powerful material in small and seemingly superficial tales. These apparently insignificant stories sometimes lead to important personal or group issues. Thus at times, we, the facilitators must cast rationality to the winds and have confidence in their own intuition. We have to work spontaneously while absorbing the story on many levels. We are listening to the storyteller’s unconscious messages through language, images, choice of characters, and the content’s symbolism, . We are listening and observing the group and its body language. We take into consideration the group process and dynamics and the story’s impact on the rest of the group. We are also attentive to processes of transference and counter transference by being aware of what is happening within our own bodies and minds and especially whether we are experiencing unexplained emotions.

All these factors influence our decisions, whether to stop our explorations and focus on a particular story, or whether to continue with the spontaneous storytelling process. We allow the process of storytelling to unfold. Insights develop in the new emotional place to which the story has taken us. We must instinctively decide when to stop and work through a specific issue.

If we do decide to stop and work with a particular story, we have first to decide whether to work with the group as a whole or just with the storyteller. We often identify important themes that we need to discuss and develop with the group. These concern key group issues.  It is, however, generally preferable to work first with the storyteller’s own issues, and only later to relate to the story on a group level.

We usually ask the participants and the storyteller for their emotions after the story. The participants feel safer to express opinions or ideas; they will not readily disclose or discuss their emotions. Much is learned by reflecting on the story’s impact at the emotional level.

Working through an issue in displacement

When we feel the story is relevant to the group situation or contains some hidden issue for the storyteller, we often work through it by role-playing some of the story’s characters. We ask the storyteller to describe a relevant character from his/her tale. The role-playing starts off with the story’s protagonist (the ‘hero’/‘heroine’), continues with other complementary characters, and ends with the antagonist.

After the storyteller has described a character, we sometimes ‘interview’ this character, always asking permission first. We ask the ‘character’ questions about his/her life to deepen the storyteller’s identification with the character. We might ask his/her opinion on a key situation in the story. This inevitably will raise conscious or unconscious issues that can be discussed with the ‘character’. At this point we might invite group members to ask the character any questions.

Sometimes we ask storytellers to depict a second character from their story. Later we might even stage a dialogue between these two characters, having another participant play one of them, or having the storyteller change chairs each time he plays the other character. There are numerous possibilities.  Through this technique many issues emerge and many attitudes to hidden issues can be worked through. We develop a conversation around the issues that arise. Time after time we have witnessed participants retelling some fantastic myth or folk tale remembered from childhood, and in analyzing the narrative we have realized that this parallels the storyteller’s personal narrative.

We have to decide whether to bring these issues out or whether to leave them on an unconscious level, to be worked through in displacement. The young people are not only dealing with past traumas  but also with a very difficult present reality of poverty, loneliness, and a strange new culture. To add to this, many have suffered police harassment, threats of deportation and racist and xenophobic attacks. If conversation turns to life in England, we discuss which of the story’s solutions and strategies could offer tools for dealing with the new life’s hardships. These folktales remind them of their own culture’s strengths, awaken humor and love and rekindle legitimacy and dignity. This might be either an opportunity for cultural empowerment or an opportunity to question some of the old traditional values that may be detrimental to their survival and healing process in the country of exile.

At the end of sessions like these we always perform a ritual to ensure that each young person steps out of the role they have taken. This is necessary to release them from their identifications with the stories’ characters. We ask the young person to acknowledge that they are no longer a character in the story and to say who they are in reality.

An example from a group session

The following story came up in a session with the oldest group of adolescents aged 16 to 21. This is a mixed gender group with 15 regular attendees and 20 members. The young people come from eight different African countries, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Kosovo and Russia.

Simon (not his real name), was usually a quiet participant, who preferred to listen to other participants’ stories. He surprised us by volunteering to tell a story he said his father told him as a young boy. Originally from Uganda, Simon was an especially sad boy who lost all his significant carers during his first 16 years through death through illness, separation and political violence. At 16 he was forced to watch the grotesque murder of his father by government forces who also abused Simon directly, by pouring boiling water over the front of his body, leaving him with wounds that took months to heal.

His story was about two boys who lived in the same village and remained friends until adulthood. As an adult, one man, a doctor, learns that his friend, a businessman, is ill. The doctor realizes that his friend is dying of AIDS. He is devastated, both because he cannot cure his friend and because he knew he would lose him. He remains with him in hospital until his death, and cannot imagine life without him. At the funeral a snake appears in the middle of the burial ceremony. The faithful friend pushes his foot out and cries out to the snake to bite him so that he can die and join his friend. The snake approaches him but when it is about to bite him he flees and hides behind the crowd and the funeral guests burst out laughing.

After the story we first ask a few questions, as if to better understand the story. Our purpose was actually to allow the storyteller to distance himself from the story.

Simon said that it was about a man who said  something he didn’t  really mean. He commented, ‘It is an old story and was told by my dad.’ This of course made the story very valuable in his eyes. He said.’ My father told me it so as to protect me from any danger of death in the future.’  This was  a very interesting statement in the light of the end of the session.

 We then asked Simon to describe the protagonist in more detail. He agreed willingly. He decided to call him Munangila We asked him a few questions about the character and then asked if he would  to play the part of the protagonist and allow us to interview him. He hesitated but agreed. We asked the character about his relationship with his friend, and his feelings about his death. We focused on the moment of fleeing from the snake. S.S. decided to use this as a form of cultural empowerment and he requested Simon, in his role as Munangila, to ask, the snake to kill him in his Ugandan language, and to act out the scene. We commonly use this strategy. S.S. asked him to teach us to say what Munangila said to the snake in Luganda. After he taught the whole group, we stood  up and repeated it, acting out the scene as described by Simon who recalled it from his home culture

Simon began  to sing the sentence, as if singing the chorus to a familiar Ugandan song, and another Ugandan boy, Joseph, helped  him with the exact rhythm and tune. Everyone joined  in, singing in Simon’s language. This both supported him and tapped into each participant’s memory of his or her own mother tongue. Simon leads led us into a kind of dance, putting one foot into the circle and asking the snake to bite us. We did  this for quite a while. Everyone participated and enjoyed themselves. We were  ritualizing and exploring through play many of the participants’ death wishes. After a while we sat down and explored further this moment of choosing life over death. Simon told us in his role as the character that he felt  particular guilt about not going through with the act. He acknowledged that his friend would not have wanted him to kill himself. We eventually established that this was a wonderful moment of choosing life over death, and that the laughter that Simon initially interpreted as mockery he came to see as a moment of release and exhilaration. Here we ‘de-roled’ Simon and carried  on discussing this subject and asked other people in the group if they recognized this moment of choice.

Simon acknowledged  that he had often contemplated suicide. His story was unconsciously connected with his own conflicts about living and dying. Hinting that he had had many suicidal moments enabled other people in the group to join in. Simon missed his father and his culture and community dearly. He felt guilt and shame that he could not  (against all odds) save his father’s life and certainly he has sometimes wished to join him. He repeated the following sentence several times:  ‘He wanted to die and get married.’ We assumed that in his stilted Ugandan English, Simon meant to ‘become one’ with his lost parents rather than, literally, to marry.  This highlighted his wish both to merge and to escape as a way of avoiding the pain of separation and loss and the realities of annihilation and murder.

For Simon this experience in the group seemed to be an opportunity to perform an act of  ‘departure’ from his father i.e. to separate in a form of ritual and symbolic burial. We thus dealt with this issue both in displacement and directly. The process began with displaced, fragmented, conscious and unconscious themes, which slowly became conscious and integrated. We told a story, performed a ritual and discussed the subject, especially focusing on the decisive moment of choice between life and death. The group left this session feeling elated.

After these displaced explorations, initially with Simon and subsequently with the whole group, the young people began to directly discuss suicide. They had all thought about and contemplated suicide for various reasons. These included the wish to escape from the difficulties of life in the present; to escape from uncontrollable thoughts and memories; to escape from unbearable guilt and shame, or to ‘bring to life’ the fantasy that they could and would, in death, join those they loved and needed. They were familiar with both the idea and with the reality of suicide as one response to problem solving. Several group members for the first time shared with the group having seen adults in their own communities kill themselves in situations where they could not bear the pain of violent destruction and loss.

For this group of adolescents there is one central question that our model addresses and works through. ‘How do I, or in fact do I, continue living my life after the horrific experiences I have been through?’ The psychotherapeutic group work, using storytelling, provides, for each young person a source of thoughtfulness and involvement, in the transitional time before becoming integrated into the community of exile.

Conclusion

These themes will have to be revisited in the different contexts of the psychotherapy group and individual psychotherapy sessions. It is, however, clear that the storytelling medium has enabled the group to deal ritually and symbolically with one of the group’s central, difficult and most threatening issues. The result of the work has been that the group experienced relief and a sense of renewed vitality. Many overpowering and previously repressed feelings became both conscious and manageable. In light of this experience it will certainly be easier in the future to discuss these themes directly. The young people attending the group, previously stuck in their development after cumulative traumatic experiences, reconnected  to their personal sense of creativity and imagination and begin to move forward in their development.

In summary, we can see how through combining storytherapy techniques with  the group psychoanalytic process we enabled the group to express its deepest fears and relive some of its traumatic past in a displaced manner. The storyteller (Simon) took on the group voice and led the group through this ordeal. This act of storytelling and the ritualized and slightly parodied request to die empowered the group culturally and personally in a cathartic experience, a release of tension, by accessing feelings and thoughts that were previously unthinkable and unspeakable. It also moved the group closer to group cohesiveness (Yalom 1995) enabling the members to discuss together, more freely and in a direct way, these difficult and traumatic themes.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dick Blackwell and John Schlapobersky very much for helpful discussions about group analytic practice.

References

Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Chinen, A. B. (1989) In the Ever After. Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications.

Foulkes, S.H. (1964) Therapeutic Group Analysis. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Gersie, A. and King, N. (1988) Story making in Education and Therapy London: Jessica Kingsley. Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education Press.

Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.

Lifton, R. J. (1996) The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Washington, DC and London: American Psychiatric Press

Melzak, S.  (1999) ‘Psychotherapeutic Work with Child and Adolescent Refugees from Political Violence’, in The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (eds Ann Horne and Monica Lanyado), pp. 405 to428  London and New York: Routledge.

Schlapobersky, J. (1993) ‘The Language of the Group, Monologue, Dialogue and Discourse in Group Analysis’ in The Psyche and the Social World (eds D. Brown and L. Zinkin), pp. 211 to231 London: Routledge. 

Segal, R. (1998) Jung on Mythology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Yalom, I. (1995) The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.

Shai Schwartz is a group facilitator, storyteller and elicitor, who has been active in professional theatre, writing, directing, acting and storytelling, over the last thirty years. He is also a trained group facilitator who uses story and drama therapy and psychodrama techniques in his work.. He divides his time between work in England and Israel, his home country.

Sheila Melzak is a community child and adolescent psychotherapist who trained at the Anna Freud Centre and currently works as Head of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. She has also worked overseas, in Somaliland, the Balkans, and Israel and the Palestinian territories, training adults who work with children during and after situations of political violence.

Address for correspondence:

Sheila Melzak

Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team

Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture

111,Isledon Road

London N.7.

Great Britain

OR

Shai Schwartz

Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam

D.N. Shalom 99761

Israel

Articles​