Wounded healers in refuge : personal experiences of resilience in the face of adversity : voices from Malta

Abstract

The phenomenon of forced migration has seen the creation and spread of different hegemonic stories about people seeking refuge. On the one hand, media driven and political discourses tend to criminalise forcibly displaced individuals. On the other hand, they have often been pathologised by trauma-focused clinical literature. The common tendency is to regard asylum seekers as a homogeneous group, indissolubly defined by their migration status, rather than by their humanity and individuality. However, recent studies in the field of refugee care have redirected the attention to the uniqueness of human responses, noting that not all asylum seekers are necessarily traumatised and that in fact resilient, or even generative outcomes in the face of the upheavals of forced migration are not uncommon. The purpose of this study is threefold. Firstly, it aims at offering a counter-narrative to the dominant and generalised tales about forcibly displaced individuals by giving a voice to personal experiences of resilience in the face of adversity. Secondly, it strives to address a perceived gap in the literature on resilience among refugees. Such a gap exists, for instance, in the scarcity of narrative research on the subject within the Maltese context of refuge. Another objective of this undertaking is to achieve a better understanding of the factors in the host country which may facilitate or impair resilience and how counselling could be of benefit. The study has employed a narrative process of inquiry. Three personal stories, narrated during individual semi-structured interviews, are presented in the original first person. The inquirer's subjective and literature-influenced re-telling of the respondents' narratives takes place in a separate chapter. The findings show that resilience undoubtedly plays a key role in helping forcibly displaced individuals cope throughout the ongoing challenges of resettlement. Resilience is an idiosyncratic, dynamic and context-related response to adversity. Contrary to early studies on it, resilience is not merely an intra-psychic process; it is strongly influenced by the environmental lack of, or provision of existential resources, protection status being chief among the factors. Thus, resilience can best thrive when basic needs are met. This has profound implications for counsellors, who are urged to expand their work on a systematic level through advocacy for social justice in order to counter oppression and to facilitate access to resilience promoting resources.