Frida's Notebook

On empathy and imagination (with thanks to J K Rowling)

A little over a year ago I tried to put into words here some thoughts I had on empathy and imagination and what they had to do with activism for human rights and social justice. What I managed to say was:

"Ultimately, though, I believe that the strongest motivator for the defense of human rights is ... empathy. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be a Palestinian mother who watched her child die because the ambulance carrying him to the specialised hospital in the West Bank was not allowed to pass an Israeli checkpoint that I feel compelled to work towards securing the right to freedom of movement for her and for everyone else. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be an Algerian asylum seeker in New Zealand, labeled a security risk by the central intelligence agency but unable, even through my defense lawyer to see the basis on which I am accused of being such a risk, that I feel bound to do what I can to defend the right to a fair trial and a defense for him and for everyone else."

Today I watched the commencement speech that the amazing J K Rowling gave at Harvard University. I know it has been emailed and posted in various places, for good reason. It came to me from Blue Poppy, via Swirly. So I took a break from studying about how community psychologists should be committed to working with oppressed people to help achieve their goals for liberation and watched this video.

She puts it so well and I was not expecting it. Although I probably should have been expecting it, her Harry Potter books explore complex themes of marginalisation and social justice, including a fairly intense exploration of racism and xenophobia through the device of the "mud-bloods". But I wasn't. I under-estimated her and expected a speech about how important imagination is to the creative act. Which it is, of course. But she goes on to talk about how that creative act, the ability to imagine, lies at the heart of what makes us human. We, apparently unlike all other species, can imagine what it might be like in someone else's shoes and based on that creative act of imagining we can feel empathy. 

What I said in May last year was that I didn't believe that empathy was a "static quality that we are either born with or without. I think we can generate empathy, I believe we can cultivate the quality of empathy within ourselves."

I also had some ideas about how to generate empathy - they included a certain kind of travel and releasing ourselves to the transformative power of literature, art and film. I think those are still great tools for generating empathy. In fact my very next post was an exercise in using the creative power of poetry to cultivate the moments of powerful empathy that I experienced in day-to-day life in Afghanistan. But what I have been also learning, over and over again. Is the power of the simple practice of letting go, through seated meditation or whichever practice works for you, and revealing our natural warmth, compassion, imagination and empathy. 

16 Days

The wife of my colleague agreed to let me take her photo this week on the condition that her face was obscured. She was shy, but still friendly to a strange woman who turned up outside her house trying to speak Dari to her even though she only speaks Pashtu. Duh

This week I've been emotionally triggered what feels like a thousand times a day. I'm heading into my very last week in Ghor and my emotions are heightened, but the events of the week were fairly intense anyway.

Between last Friday and today the good people of Ghor have experienced tribal conflicts in Shahrak which had in the preceeding week culminated in an ambush on a police convoy killing the District Chief of Police and at least five of his soldiers, plus two tribal elders in the vehicle with him. The police this past week set out to rescue three men abducted in the ambush. Officially this rescue was to recover police officers but according to some local sources they were armed men from one tribe who had been travelling with the police to carry out attacks on the other tribe's villages. In any case the police operation seems almost certainly to have been complemented by reprisal attacks from the other tribe which were either ignored or actively supported by the police.

I don't know what kinds of feelings are generated in you when you read this kind of report. Pema Chodron talks about the reversion to numbness in the face of an overwhelming sense of helplessness. That seems to be a common response in much of the world, and understandably so. As for me I feel angry and sad at the same time about these events, and yes, I feel some hopelessness.

The week went on. This week was the first week of the international campaign "16 Days of Activism to Eliminate Violence against Women" (let's just say "16 days" from here on in, huh?). In my part of the world this week was marked by a grenade attack on the home of the Head of the Department of Women's Affairs, a grenade attack on the home of the female Provincial Prosecutor, renewed death threats against another woman holding a position of public office and rumours about the Head Teacher of the Girls High School.

I struggle to know what to do with the sadness and anger that is generated by these attacks. The morning after the first grenade attack I was at her house, and she was calmly showing me where the windows where smashed, where her car was damanged and where she shot a bullet into the door of her own car as she grabbed a gun and fired wildly in response to the attack. She took calls as we talked and thanked me for coming to see her and she asked me how my trip to America was - she herself having just returned from a trip away. I watched her and tried to learn from her how to behave under these circumstances.

Three days later she called me to her office, asking me to come alone and therefore without a translator. I went and we struggled to understand each other but in the end I got the point. She wanted to know what I was doing to push the police to find the person who attacked her. She was insisting that I should personally do more. My reaction? Not anything I'm proud of. I was overcome with a wave of anger.

It was anger born out of frustration because I have been meeting the responsible security officials, I have been exhorting them to do everything they can to find whoever is doing this, but they look me straight in the eye and tell me whatever they think I want to hear and I know that these meetings are achieving nothing.

So was I really angry at her for asking me to help? Of course not.

I was angry at the people who threw the grenade in the first place, for not having the courage and the decency to come out and publically speak their minds rather than sneaking around at night throwing grenades, putting children at risk and terrorizing those people in this town who are standing up for what they believe in.

I was angry at the Chief of Police for not putting an end to this - in a town of 10,000 people I cannot believe that it is impossible to find and arrest the person who has carried out five such attacks in the past month.

I was angry at myself for being so entirely useless in these circumstances.

I was angry at the journalist who had been visiting for two days, giving the impression that Afghanistan and it's stories of grenades and improvised explosive devices was a great lark, a 'boy's own adventure'.and who seemed disinterested and distracted from the real stories all around him.

For several days I allowed all these triggers to feed the angry, despairing wolf and by Wednesday as I sat in a special ceremony to mark the "16 days" I was on the verge of tears the whole time.

I was aware of the young Lithuanian soldiers patrolling the perimeter on foot specifically because I was here. Because by standing alongside the Head of Women's Affairs to give our speeches at this occassion I was now putting myself at risk of grenade attack. I thought about the risk that this entailed for those young men and I thought about their families at home.

I thought about why I needed to be at the ceremony and about all the other people who had agreed to come and stand up for women's rights. The Deputy Governor, one of the local Mullahs, the Head of the Provincial Council, the Head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. I thought about the people who, by sneaking about at night and throwing hand grenades, were trying to undermine all that this ceremony stood for.

I watched five young girls sing a song based on the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and I wondered which one of them might be killed, maimed, beaten, raped or tortured in the years to come. I watched five beautiful boys stand up along side those girls and participate in a battle of the genders quizz. And I thought about which of those beautiful boys would end up hating his life, beating his wife, consumed by anger and hopelessness.

I know! Great thoughts for feeding the despairing wolf right, right?

Finally when the ceremony was over I came home and let myself have a good cry. I just let the anger and the sadness wash out of me.

When the crying was over I wrote. I wrote for myself, I wrote to the journalist, I wrote to friends who would understand and share with me in the pain. I wrote out the anger. I wrote to the other side. Sometimes, for me, writing is what I can do when I am too filled with emotion to sit in meditation. Sometimes writing is what I need to do first.

Then I sat, and I tried to get in touch with my natural openness, my natural warmth, my natural intelligence. Here are some of the things that came up for me:

Maybe the journalist was not callous and shallow. Maybe he was out of his depth and a bit overwhelmed. Maybe the sarcastic humour was a cover for confusion or even fear. Maybe the distracted twitchiness was not because he found the people around him uninteresting but because he didn't know where to look first, he didn't know who to talk to or what to make of it all. Maybe a little more kindness from me would have made all the difference.

I have to confess I didn't get quite that far with the guy(s) throwing the grenades. But I did find myself much less overwhelmed with emotion everytime I thought about them.

When I think about how hard it is for me to deal with all these emotions I have to stop for a moment and give respect to the people who are more directly affected by all these events. If it takes me a week to figure out how to stop reacting to the triggers and get back in touch with my basic goodness and my belief in the goodness of others then what does it take for the families in Shahrak whose fathers, brothers, sons were killed in the ambush? What does it take for the women whose homes have been attacked by grenades in the night, scattering deadly shards of glass across the room where their children sleep?

In these moments the cycle of violence makes sense to me, and I find myself coming back to the drawing board about how I can make my small contribution to peace in these times of war.

24 hours of peace... and Lessons in Letting Go Part VII

Car ornament, Ghor, 2007

21 September is International Peace Day. The United Nations has focused it's activities this year on Afghanistan. Shit - I just heard an enormous explosion. Perfect. It's the day of peace and I was about to write a post about all about peace and how it is not just a pretty word, how it is the result of a whole lot of hard work and the resolution of conflicts. About how the women who told us on Sunday that they would kill anyone who tried to take their land from them are not blood thirsty warriors but mothers and wives who know that without the land they all die anyway so they might as well fight for it. I had all sorts of thoughts about peace, development, security and human rights today. Instead I hear an enormous explosion.

While on the subject of peace, and my view that it cannot be expected to flower until fundamental human rights are respected and conflicts are resolved. Over at Laila's blog she posted this week about new restrictions placed on civilians in the Gaza Strip. Read it and weep. The PR term for these restrictions is apparently "civilian levers". Civilian levers? How can they say this stuff with a straight face?

For some reason the spin has always been what makes me the maddest. If you are going to cut off the water, fuel, food and electricity supply to men, women and children who are trying to live a life of some minimum quality under unbearable circumstances then at least have the balls to call a spade a spade. These are not "civilian levers" this is a classic, text book example of collective punishment, and there is a reason it is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Maybe we should suggest that someone sits down and watchs "The Pianist" to remind themselves of where, when, how and why the Geneva Conventions were developed.

Sigh.

Aside from rants, I'm so full of thoughts and ideas and inspiration today. I can't quite get it all into order in my head to share it here. So this may be a little disjointed.

The lessons in letting go continue. This past two weeks the key theme has been letting go of "unrelenting standards". It's a phrase I picked up on a pop-psychology magazine and I can't get it out of my head. I guess it spoke to me. Little by little and with many relapses I am learning to let go of standards that don't help me, standards that used to hold me back by telling me that everything I did should be done well.

This week I read Keri Smith's post about her dust bunnies and smiled in recognition. It is so good that as well as linking I'm going to go right ahead and quote her here.

my house is never as clean as I would like, but I much prefer to spend time writing reading and making things than cleaning. i keep it at a point which it doesn't depress me, tidy but a bit dusty.

these are truths that a few years ago I would not wanted to have anyone know about. I would try and make people think that everything was pretty and funky and well functioning all the time. I am perfect and you should want my life.

at some point i became extremely wary and suspicious of the notion that people teach in self-help books that we should all aspire to a fully self-actualized high functioning life. this life and all it's messiness is what makes life interesting and intensely creative. i think often that's how creativity arises, in having to deal with things in the moment. the fact that some plans you have don't work out the way you wanted or "planned" forces you into a new way of seeing and operating.

in need of fixing is a perfectly good place to be. at times this is exactly who I am. sometimes life is uncomfortable and I no longer feel the urge to run from that. most importantly i no longer feel the need to live up to someone else's ideal. i can breathe deeper because I am not spending any energy hiding the truth from people.

because everyone else is messy too and has dust bunnies in the corners of their rooms.
some just hide it better than others.

Amen, Keri. My new friend Swirly was full of the same brand of goodness and wisdom this week.

It seems my stranglehold on my own life, demanding only the very best at all times, may have taken a little too long to overcome under normal circumstances so I led myself to Afghanistan. Here, I couldn't pick one day when I measure up to the standards I once thought were inviolable.

I too now miss deadlines, and hand over papers that I once would have never allowed to see the light of day, I drop balls and fail over and over again and - lo and behold - through it all I am still making a positive difference. I am still doing a good job.

I miss yoga sessions and haven't been for a run in three months, I eat what I can get which is sometimes the kind of food I would never have allowed past my lips in a past life. Yet, my health is good, my body has not collapsed or transformed into an unrecognisable blob. I still think that striving for excellence is great, that taking care of my body and meeting my committments to others are important. But in learning to survive here I've learned that nothing is more important than letting go a little bit. Letting go of my unrelenting standards and of my expectations of myself and others.

This week I'm also feeling closer and closer to realising my own power to make my dreams come true. Both Laini and Denise wrote about dreams this week, and I realised that I still have dreams that haven't yet had their day in the sun. I've never really lost my belief that, if I put my mind to something I can make it happen. As a little girl I dreamed of working for the United Nations, travelling to remote and troubled places and fighting for justice. A big dream for a farmer's daughter from small town New Zealand. Yet, here I am. I have more dreams, and now it is time to let some of them out to play. I'm pretty excited about that.

Tell your story

Women in camp of displaced people, July 2007

This phrase has woven in and out of my life and thoughts over and over again through the past year. My personal experience of an extreme trauma response taught me the importance of telling my story, in my own words, my own time and my own way, as part of my healing. In my work I hear many trauma stories and I often think about the possible disconnection between the reasons why people chose to tell me their stories and the reasons why I have been sent to listen.

The trauma story is a personal narrative told in the person's own words about the traumatic life events they have experienced and the impact of these events on their social, physical, and emotional well-being. It is not someone else's interpretation of events, although it may contain observations on the reactions of family members and the local community. The storyteller may tell the story to others for many reasons, including to get benefits or medical care. Similarly, the survivor may have many personal and social reasons for keeping the nature and history of their traumatic events a secret (for example, in the case of rape trauma). Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

I have a mandate to ask people to share their trauma stories with me in order to document human rights violations and abuses. The purpose of this documentation is several fold and the different objectives may or may not overlap with the reasons why the survivor has chosen to share his or her story with me. The objectives and their possible outcomes for the individual are:

i) to record and report on trends and patterns of violations in order to inform and influence policy making and implementation. This objective aims for long term and systematic change and is unlikely to bring any immediate or direct benefit to the individual telling me their trauma story;

ii) to verify allegations of serious human rights violations to be followed through the justice system for the purpose of holding the State accountable and promoting justice for victims. In some cases this objective will lead to direct (although rarely immediate) benefits for the individual, although not necessarily the benefits which he or she is seeking. The justice system, even when it is working perfectly, can meet only a limited ranges of needs such as having the truth of your experiences validated by an authorative body, seeing the perpetrator of injustice against you held accountable for his/her actions and occassionally, but not often, receiving material compensation for the wrong done to you.

iii) to identify cases were immediate protection is required and to assist individuals to find protection when they need and want it (this might include reference to shelters in the case of women facing ongoing violence or threats of violence, for example).

Because I am part of an integrated mission, I can also sometimes meet other, more material needs of trauma survivors. If someone, in telling me their story, tells me that what she really needs is some food for her children or a tent so that she doesn't have to keep living in the back room of a hostile brother-in-law, I may be able to attract the attention and assistance of humanitarian actors who can provide those kinds of material aid.

In the process of listening to and documenting personal trauma stories I may be contributing to other needs such as the need to be heard, to be taken seriously and to have the seriousness of the wrong done recorded by someone. But I am aware that the people who share their stories with me often have many other reasons for sharing and many of them I will never even understand, let alone be able to meet.

I am trained as a lawyer, and as a human rights monitor, to interview and record trauma stories as legal events, asking direct and indirect questions to try to fix down the factual details required to complete a case report. I often find myself asking people for more details about dates and times and places. These are important for legal verification, but they are often of very little relevance to the storyteller and I often wonder what impact this interrogation for details has on the storyteller.

Conducting an interview that helps patients tell their trauma story is difficult and takes practice ... traumatic life histories can be very elusive. ... Because the trauma story is so loaded with meaning and so closely associated with the essential worldview of the traumatized person, it can only be presented to someone else in an oblique way. The emotions and events that are the most important to you are difficult to tell directly to other people. The trauma story itself remains hidden until the patient finds the opportunity to reveal just a fragment. Maybe this is reluctance exists because the survivor fears rejection, or , worse, because he or she fears the intended listerner has no interest or curiosity in the story. Understanding the trauma story demands a considerable amount of skill from the listener, not just to share the emotional feelings but also to enter into an examination and apprecation of the historical, cultural, and personal meanings of the events. This well-rounded approach allows even the most severe trauma events to be told. Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

Um, so you mean I shouldn't just keep asking "when exactly did this happen?", "what was the name of the man who came to the village and killed you children?", "did anyone else see this happen?"? I'm being a little facetious, of course I don't leap on the teller of traumatic stories with those kinds of direct questions. But given limited time and overwhelming workload, I know that I am sometimes impatient to get the kinds of details I will need in order to enter this "case" into our database.

Where is the time to simply listen? To listen to the story as the teller wishes to tell it. To let it be, perhaps, for today, explaining that I would like to document this story as a human rights case but that in order to do that I will need to ask more detailed questions. To ask if I could return to do that another day, once the storyteller has had time to think about what he or she wants to get out of telling the story to me. Where is the time to do that?

I understand that it is my responsibility to make that time. But that can be challenging when you have responsibility for monitoring human rights across four provinces where literally millions of people with millions of stories of trauma and violation live and when on top of that you are responsible for the set up and running of a new office including building relationships with local authorities and coaching staff on work planning and reporting, and when on top of that you are responsible for the research and development phase of a new national project on violence against women and women's access to justice in this country where the UN Special Rapporteur found that "severe violence against women [remains] all-pervasive" and when on top of that you try to maintain relationships with friends and family at home and abroad, to nuture your creative self with personal time for reading and writing and to make time to exercise and to cook, clean house and get the laundry done.

I'm not complaining, I love my job and the privilege of doing this work. But there is so much to think about in order to honour those who chose to tell me their story and I often feel rushed and overwhelmed with work and I worry that I don't give them the time and patience they need and deserve.

Another dimension of listening to trauma stories that I worry about here is the process of translation. As you can probably tell from the extracts above, I've been finding Dr Richard Mollica's book incredibly interesting and soaking up his experience and expertise gained from many years of 'treating' people who have undergone trauma and torture. One of the first and most important lessons he learned about listening to trauma stories was that language matters. The words people chose to use to describe their experiences are very important and that the listener who wants to understand their story must pay very careful attention to the precise words and phrases chosen and to their historical, social and cultural meanings.

Another major breakthrough in our approach was an intentional focus on culture and history as revealed in the words that our patients used to describe their traumatic life experiences. The uncovering process, the seeking of historical origins and meanings of words and phrases that can bring us closer to the actucal world of the storyteller - is a powerful method of interpretation. ... Words, especially those that describe traumatic events, need to be carefully defined in the life of the patient, family and community. Richard F. Mollica, MD, Healing Invisible Wounds.

I conduct all my interviews through a translator. These translators are all fluent in local language and culture, but most of them are far from fluent in English. We often have to accept that there a large gaps in our understanding of each other and I am painfully aware of how much I am missing because of this. As the time which I have spent in Afghanistan slowly grows towards the two year mark I am beginning to recognise key words in Dari and to recognise certain phrases. Little by little I am developing the ability to notice words anf phrases that come up often in interviews and I keep a note of them in the top margin of my notebook. Some are very telling - just this week I hear several different storytellers respond to my question about what they would like to see happen to address the wrong done to them by saying that Afghans can forget all terrible things done to them by praying. It is a phrase that jars when I hear it. I spend enough time listening to trauma stories that date back 30 years to know that many Afghans have not forgotten the wrongs done to them. So I understand that I do not understand what the speaker really means when he or she says this.

Some people might tell me to concentrate on my work as a lawyer and human rights monitor and not to stray to far from what I know into the complex territory of psychological responses to trauma. But I can't see that boundary very clearly. More accurately perhaps, I see the boundary but the reality of work doesn't not respect it. Stories are not always about facts and events, they are often about feelings and responses to those events. The remedies people seek are not always about justice, they are also about the acknowledged need for reconciliation in order to build a peaceful tomorrow. In Afghanistan our human rights work is always going to cross into the territoriy of 'transitional justice' and all the questions that come with that.

I know my limits, I know how very much there is that I do not know or understand, but I am not going to let that stop me trying to understand more. Hence the Amazon order of books on the psychology of trauma and healing. Hence the weekend hours spent reading Richard Mollica and frantically scribbling notes and further questions. Hence the plan to go back to university and study psychology next year.