People
Tell Their Stories:
Abuse
and Violence
Bosnia's Death Highway: My Personal
Story of Trauma Work, Compassion Fatigue and Hope Danica Borkovich Anderson, CCCJS
16713, B.C.E.T.S
I
remember how NATO's SFOR tanks rolled along the highways in Bosnia. One Bosnian highway is aptly
called "Death Highway," because of the bombed and burned-out shells
of the homes which press against the road. It was March, 1999 and very cold in Bosnia. I had been invited to carry out
clinical work in connection with trauma, with Bosnians who ran an organization
called "Medex Mine Awareness". Medex is a non-governmental agency which teaches a
curriculum for children to survive the more than three million landmines in Bosnia. A part of me suspected that I
would be facing a difficult clinical situation working in Bosnia. I went anyway. Compassion
fatigue started to set in soon after my first trip to Bosnia in March, 1999. I would
experience burn-out, just like the bombed buildings. It was like looking into a
camera lens, and re-focusing the lens when I found myself embarking on a very
sacred pilgrimage, fully equipped with my Bosnian mother tongue as I walked
along war-weary and destroyed roads, villages, and homes. I was definitely off
the beaten track in Bosnia, and I knew I must have been
summoned here to learn something very important.
I did not know what I was
called to do at the time, but I felt that the reason would soon unfold. I did
not know that I would experience compassion fatigue, and that I would not be
able to distance myself from the traumatized Bosnians with whom I was working.
My Bosnian American Serb cultural background and my understanding of the
language immersed me deeply into the Bosnian situation, and I found myself
traumatized each time I set foot on Bosnian soil. Yet, I knew my strengths in
treating trauma in Bosnia were my Bosnian heritage, and
mother-tongue skills, along with my experience in trauma treatment. I didn't
know at the beginning that I would need to remember to view those skills as an
asset, rather than as a liability.
NATO's bombing of the Republic of Serbia heralded my development of a
cultural clinical trauma treatment immersed in feminist archetypal
psychologies. I worked long days and nights whenever I went to Novi Travnik, Bosnia. I now recognize that compassion
fatigue's common companion is workaholism, with
burn-out ensuing shortly thereafter. All I knew at the time was that the
constant work tuned out disturbing messages. I would do self-talk and justify
how much work there is to do in Bosnia so that I could work the 24-hour
shifts which inevitably took place whenever I was there. I was numbing myself
in an exaggerated fashion.
Like most Bosnians, I
worked, but I also did not have the vocabulary to express the trauma and horror
that my eyes or my ears absorbed as I heard the first-person stories. As I
surveyed the town of Novi Travnik, I was traumatized by what I saw.
The Bosnian women that I worked with were already vulnerable from PTSD; most
Bosnian women are refugees, joining 23 million refugees as of March 1995 (Mertus, Tesanovic, Metikos, & Boric, 1997 ). The civil war in Bosnia took over 200,000 lives, and left
3 million refugees without their homes (Mertus et al,
1997). I was in a soup, comprised of traumatized peoples, and I rarely had the
opportunity to talk to a non-traumatized person. This made me grow more silent
with each experience I had. I could not share what I saw, what I felt, or what
I heard.
All of these factors have
strongly influenced Bosnian women, including myself, to remain silent, and to
maintain victim status. Silence does not increase vocabulary, or promote an
expression of first-person story. I was experiencing an utter lack of words
which could appropriately describe the depth of what I was experiencing.
I actually started to
acknowledge that each time I worked in Bosnia, I was colluding with truth.
Sometimes, I wished for bombs to hit the grenade-damaged homes that now had
trees growing in them. I wanted to erase this violent statement of burned and
assaulted homes, and I wanted to avoid anything "religious," because
all of that depicted hatred of anything feminine. Disturbing thoughts and
violent schemes that entertained these types of "solutions" were
another signal that I was experiencing compassion fatigue.
I was jarred into
realizing the unexamined maw of those disturbing thoughts by a young Muslim
woman who, upon realizing that two Muslim women in Novi Travnik
had been mutilated and sexually blinded, pleaded for answers. Her plea of,
"How is a razor blade an indication or a representation of my Muslim
faith?" catapulted me into awareness. I ended up speaking to her about how
a solution such as a razor blade or erasing a woman's sacred feminine with
violence was never an answer. I felt I had answered myself. I began a probing
examination into my own disturbing thoughts. I felt attacked from every angle
as a woman, and therefore I did not feel any sense of safety or trust. I was
uncomfortable being a victim. With my disturbing thoughts, I was mutating from
a victim to an attacking offender. I knew this was an indication that I was in
the cycle of violence.
I felt traumatized each
time I walked the Muslim sector of Novi Travnik. When
I work in Bosnia, I lived with the women. This
meant that I faced the Bosnian women's issues of having no work, no food, or no
money to live on. There are no laws against domestic violence or child abuse in
Bosnia. Bosnian women maintain a
brotherhood (not a sisterhood, since most have not ever experienced solidarity
with women) with the violence, thus ensuring that the intergenerational aspects
of trauma continue to be a part of their lives. For instance, in the women's kolos, in their circles (in Bosnian, "kolo" means " a circle" or "to
dance,"), one would often hear one Bosnian woman complaining about her
screaming neighbor. The Bosnian woman would comment loudly about how the woman
simply did not clean her house well enough for her husband - this justified her
nightly beatings. Bosnian women, unable to support other women, and unable to
truly understand that women are the target for all androcratic
reactions, join the brotherhood by finger-pointing, and by being in isolation
from one another. The silence and lack of support for each other was deafening.
I became intimate with
their life, and therefore with their trauma. The intimacy meant that I could
feel compassion and empathy, while seeing how my own childhood traumas were
similar to the traumas the Bosnians were facing. Carefully and conspicuously, I
recorded what was happening to my womanhood or to anything remotely feminine in
that context. The feminine was being systematically raped, maligned, and feared
by androcratic violence, a cult of hatred that is
deeply rooted into the Southern Slav way of life. Being a female in this world,
regardless of the land of your birth, is usually a journey into violence, and
thus working in this environment had me working on many of my own unassimilated
and unexamined female issues.
As a trauma
psychotherapist, I already knew that statistics demonstrate that most
perpetrators of violence are male. As a daughter of Bosnian immigrants, I
intimately knew from first-hand experience of the raw violence that is meted
out towards women because women are nonentities. As a therapist, I heard many
women vehemently resist the term "feminist," let alone utter the word
"Goddess", because any such acknowledgement would render them less
"feminine" according to the male point of view, and then they would
become real targets of the patriarchy. Until my clinical work in Bosnia, I had no idea how violent all
this unconsciousness of the feminine could be. Nor did I know that I would be
painfully conscious of every detail that fed into the violence cycle. This
meant I virtually never rested, nor was I ever really at peace.
As I walked their steps
and streets, I knew that the most effective trauma treatment would need to edit
out all the warrior male-centered symbology so
prevalent in their current culture; the cult of the male reigns supreme in Bosnia today. I am one of 2.5 million
American Serbs in the United States, and I was raised in the very
same warrior male-centered cult in Chicago, Illinois. The child abuse I suffered in my
childhood, and the abuse that so many American Serb children of my generation
suffered, taught us all that the war never stopped, and that it was continued
through the generations. I do know from my work in Bosnia that this was perhaps the single
most important driving force to my becoming a forensic therapist. It also was a
significant factor in my compassion fatigue.
I would find myself
constantly asking in disbelief how the violence continues to be perpetuated,
whether in the Serbian Orthodox enclaves of the United States, or in Bosnia. Working in Bosnia ensured that I went through
another therapeutic process in connection with my family of origin issues,
especially in terms of my mother, who stood by and watched, and did nothing
about the abuse. I remember sitting in a large hall with the Bosnian women and
feeling haunted by my mother. Every single one of the Bosnian women mirrored an
intimate trait of my own Serbian mother.
I was hearing the voice
of my mother in my childhood when I worked with the Bosnian women. I was
feeling the brutal blows of my Bosnian Serb father when I had sessions with the
men who spoke of their war atrocities. I thought of how the landscape holds
memories, just like the body does. My childhood with its traumas was my
internal geography, as it was for these Bosnian women and children. I realized
I was negotiating the same landscape of trauma as the Bosnian refugees were.
It was harder and harder
for me to return to Bosnia, because I found the geography of
their trauma perilous, and too close to my own Bosnian
American childhood traumas. At a deeper level, I recognized how the Bosnian
women had no such choice of deciding when to return to this landscape and
internal geography, since they physically live in a war-torn land. This is just
like children, who do not know choice as abuse or trauma rains down on their
bodies and spirits. I felt frozen, not completely able to understand their
position.
I would try to move
forward from this frozen geography through choice. I recognized that I had an
awareness of choice. I sought help in clinical supervision and in therapy. I
would adjust my calendar in Bosnia to do daily exercise, to carry
out journal writing, and to practice meditation. Conscious that healing the
effects of post-traumatic trauma requires that the first-person story be told
and expressed as soon as possible after the traumatic event (Ochberg, 1988), I started to write articles about my
experiences in Bosnia.
Since Feminist Archetypal
Psychology practices are applied in my work and are interdisciplinary, I took
note of the need for "first stories" of suffering as a rite of
passage to a wisdom that introduces the individual into a "new way of
being" (Borysenko, 1993). This meant that my
suffering transcended into meaningfulness, helped by my journal writing. A
"time-out" to exercise my body refreshed my mind/spirit; this helped
me to become more aware that I had a choice; I became able to disengage from
the trauma all around me for brief interludes.
Being more mindful of my
intention made me aware of the need to understand how trauma can penetrate and
bleed into my own personal experiences. As I reviewed the clinical work in Bosnia, I noted some important
cautionary signs that, in the future, would help me to take the suffering into
meaningfulness, rather than into compassion fatigue:
·
using
work or working excessively to avoid looking at your issues or emotions. This
is "numbing" oneself, and is often expressed as substance abuse or
other addictive behaviors. Overeating, or not eating , and chain-smoking are
other examples of this kind of thing;
·
the
blurring of boundaries, and being immersed into a situation, or closely
identifying with the individuals - that is, sharing a common history or
traumatic events.
·
being
unable to share or express first person story - lacking a vocabulary or feeling
that "no one would understand", or that "no one cares enough to
actually listen."
Working
with my own uncomfortable feelings, while working with severely traumatized
peoples required my utmost attention to "dailiness."
By focusing on my daily activities, I was setting limits in terms of what was
humanly possible to achieve. More importantly, I was able to record the
emotional facts that I was intensely experiencing, whether it was in my journal
writing, my conversations with my support community, or jogging down Bosnian
country roads. After jogging one morning in Bosnia, I remembered how I felt I was
moving from an unconscious state to a very focused and aware state. Sometimes,
after these periods of reflection, I literally stopped in my tracks! And this
was definitely needed.
I eschew self-help
programmed directions, because they seduce a person into thinking that there
are proscribed steps for life situations. My reasoning and experience tells me
that every person is unique, therefore no set of generalized steps are the
answer. I do feel that it is extremely important to share one's life
experiences, because everyone learns from how other people have handled
different situations. No book, no computer, and no school can compare with the
humanistic sharing of one's life. What I learned in my situation was how I can
always garner an increasing set of valuable life-coping skills and tools that
will keep me healthy in my life experiences, even when I am working with
traumatized peoples in war-torn environments. My garnered life skills and tools
from this experience are:
- the ability and awareness to
seek help. This is critical. A good therapist is a part of a healing and
supportive community that every individual needs to be surrounded with
while experiencing any kind of trauma. I discovered other resources in the
helping professions through avenues such as the Internet, and through my
professional organizations. One Internet search led me to the website,
"Gift From Within,"
which greatly encouraged and supported me at a time when it was very
needed.
- developing and always
enhancing your support community and family/friend base. I now have
friends from the humanitarian fields, and not just in the mental health
fields; we can share our experiences, and increase our vocabulary to
express ourselves. Listening to their responses to my first-person story
is imperative, even if at times you prefer not to hear what they are
saying. My life skills of always having a community were updated and
expanded, and I now have an increasingly diverse support community and an
array of friends.
- keep to your daily activities
on your calendar, even if you do travel or are not at home. For myself, I
recognized how my daily activities were in essence "spiritual
practices," not rigid routines that can be deadening. A rigid routine
is compulsive, and also an indication that you are numbing yourself in an
addictive fashion. Journal writing or meditating for 30 minutes daily,
along with walking, jogging or yoga, center a person and give focus and
direction. When I did my "daily" spiritual practices, I found
that I actually also scheduled in times for "fun" activities.
When I traveled, I tended to forego my spiritual practices. Now, I make
sure I enable myself to conduct my spiritual practices, even if they are
modified and altered.
To this
very day, I continue to work with the Bosnian refugees, but under healthier conditions
and limits. I found that when I tried to be specific with my traumatic
experiences I not only gained a vocabulary I gained more focus by taking care
of myself. I was stunned when I modeled self-care the Bosnian women came to
know what they were doing and not doing in their traumatized lives. I never had
to speak a single word, show a self-help video or get a guest speaker in to
dramatize the need for these women to take care of themselves hence their
family started to heal and with the final outcome their community started to
heal. A dark haired Muslim mother, who leads the kolo-circle
organized a strike with other mothers about the mounting garbage in the
streets. This is not a small feat to go up against the ruling governments rife
with pilfering pockets. The Muslim mother waited until I had left to do the
strike. She and other Muslim women wanted those in power to realize this strike
was all theirs and not from an American!
I saw a glimpse of
solidarity amongst these Bosnian women striking about the garbage and this is
an indication of health rising up from the depths of suffering. At times I have
felt such resignation and hopelessness working in a war-torn country with
traumatized peoples. I felt despair with the utter apathy and neglect about the
situation of women in Bosnia, across the globe to the streets
in my neighborhood. I was often slapped with the reality that no one did care
what happened in Bosnia because it was not in their
backyards. But when I saw these glimpses of solidarity with the Bosnian women
or women who wanted to come to Bosnia with me because they did have
empathy and wanted to rise from their own depths I felt renewed and motivated.
Isn't the force of our life experiences and feelings that ride along with these
life experiences our universal humanity that connects every one of us together?
I only know for myself the work I do on that sacred Bosnian landscape riddled
with terrible wars became a pilgrimage to the center of my being. And it was
not easy. And it was beautiful at times. And it is a process not something to
achieve or attain like goals at a hockey game.
In fact, the process
continues to grow with my clinical work in Bosnia. Together with the Bosnian women,
I prepared a second annual conference in October. The clinical format of the kolo has developed self-sustaining psychological and
economic activities, such this annual conference held in Novi Travnik, Bosnia. The second annual conference
"First Person Story," was October 20, 2001 for 10 days. People came to bear
witness to these women and their first-person stories. The first seven days of
the conference toured the body of Bosnia. The second portion of this
unique conference - the last 3 days - had the participants hearing the Bosnian
women's first person stories as they speak them. The conference allowed one to
either participate in the entire ten-day program or the three-day conference
segment. This year's conference participants joining the group were guided by
Patricia Reis, feminist archetypal therapist and renowned author, along with
Anne Yeoman, another seasoned therapist from the Boston area. All the funds went directly
to the Bosnian women hosting the conference.
©Danica Borkovich. All Rights Reserved. Article reprinted by
permission of Gift From Within, PTSD Resources for
Survivors and Caregivers, and Danica Borkovich.
More information on Danica Borkovich Anderson and the
Kolo:
The kolo
is an engendered clinical trauma treatment program for Bosnian women and other
victims of Post Traumatic Stress. The word "kolo,"
when translated, means "circle" or "to dance" in Bosnian.
The kolo can be described as being a geosphere. Kolos are literally
micro-geospheres of Mother Earth, are a natural form,
and provide a structure for a source of sisterhood for Slavic peoples.
Employing Feminist Archetypal Psychology practices because they are
interdisciplinary, Danica was able utilize the rich
resource of "Old Europe" and her ethnic heritage by spinning through
the fields of archeology, archeomythology, ecology,
women's studies, and psychology.
Danica Borkovich
Anderson is a forensic psychotherapist, a board certified expert in trauma
(B.C.E.T.S.), and a keynote speaker. Her private practice (in Olympia, WA)
includes a rich diversity of individual and group-kolo
sessions, workshops and work/study programs in such places as Crete, Ireland,
Malta, Scotland, and Spain, in which participants can experience ancient
Neolithic, archeological sites. Currently, she is in the process of applying
for non-profit status for her work with Bosnian women and children. All of her
work with Bosnian peoples have been entirely donated by private donors and
supported via participation of her work/study programs and workshops. You may
contact her at danica_kolo@yahoo.com,
or visit her website: www.femininematrix.com
- Mertus, J. Tesanovic, J., Metikos, H.,
& Boric, R. (Eds.) 1997. Context Suitcase: Refugee voices from Bosnia and Croatia. Berkley, California: University of California Press.
- Frank M. Ochberg, M. D. 1988. Post Traumatic Therapy and
Victims of Violence. Brunner Mazel Publishers.
- Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. 1993. Fire in the Soul, Time Warner, Inc., New York.
Other important
references:
Video "When Helping
Hurts: Sustaining Trauma Workers."
Danica Anderson: "After the Bosnian Women's
conference, the participants spoke of how utterly clear the "When
Helping Hurts," tape became for them when dealing with the aftermath
of touring the body of Bosnia. I found the information and
sharing on the video "When Helping Hurts," to be instrumental in
signaling the need to get help in dealing with my compassion fatigue."
"Compassion Fatigue:
Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress." Charles Figley,
$48.95.
