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This article describes how cultural understandings can be utilised in re-authoring stories of individuals suffering from hardships as a result of torture or trauma. Anthropological research about the varied ways in which people express and experience emotion opens possibilities for therapeutic practice. Through an example of therapy, the author illustrates how cultural idioms and understandings can be integrated into a narrative that is healing and empowering.
Keywords: stories, cultural idioms, trauma, cultural meanings, re-membering, emotional expression, somatic reactions, narrative therapy
INTRODUCTIOn
Just as the photographer uses different lenses to obtain either detailed or wide angled images, mental health clinicians are trained to use cer tain lenses through which they see people. These lenses guide how clinicians will think, what they will look for, and how they will treat suffering individuals. A few years ago, as I began to work with immigrants who were seeking asylum, I was curious to find out more about how other cultures viewed mental health. I discovered that most global organisations were using the western model for mental health in disaster relief. This approach was not always culturally sensitive or appropriate. Most clinicians are taught to see through the lens of the Western diagnostic framework, a frame that privileges biological explanations for mental illness, using a medical model to guide diagnosis and treatment. This model assumes cer tain ideas about individuals that reflect Western cultural norms: what a 'self ' is, how emotion is experienced, the privileging of rationality over irrationality, and how healing should take place. Narrative therapy, on the other hand, provides an alternative paradigm for working with cross-cultural clients that can honour cultural meanings (Waldegrave, Tamasese, Tuhaka & Campbell, 2003). The narrative model (White & Epston, 1990; White, 2006) seeks to provide an open, culturally responsive approach to working with individuals from different cultures.
Telling stories appears to be a significant aspect of life across all cultures. What's more, the sharing of stories seems to carry the potential for healing within diverse cultural contexts. The perspectives of people from many different cultures, as well as anthropological research, demonstrate how people from diverse cultures experience both emotion and healing in different ways, hence the impor tance of finding therapeutic approaches that honour cultural traditions and customs.
The...