The Psychologist Adventurer

Maps Mapoyane and Gail Womersley

Earlier this year Gail Womersley gave a talk to the Cape Town Self-psychology group (CTPSPG) about her 2 years working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). It turned out that we were extremely fortunate to hear this plucky young clinical psychologist. MSF, recognising her qualities - she is creative, culturally sensitive, eloquent and charismatic - had sent her on an event-packed fund-raising tour to raise money for their projects in the war-torn Central African Republic.

It seems that self-psychology still provides something of an emotional and theoretical touchstone for Gail. With MSF, she had moved far into the field of trauma response in a very short space of time and probably felt the need for recognition and understanding from her former colleagues and mentors. I think she got that - we were spellbound. She had raised the question of whether the kind of short-term work she was doing was ethically acceptable from the viewpoint of promoting the kind of changes to which long-term therapy aspires. A question I felt plagued by myself at the Trauma Centre where I often felt that I was dispensing plasters for wounds that were never going to heal. I don't think many of us were too concerned about addressing, let alone answering such a question - it was the riveting adventure of it all that was so gripping.

In 2 years, Gail had worked in 4 different countries: 1) In Zimbabwe - she supervised counsellors working in an HIV project. 2) She worked - again supervising counsellors - in the Ukraine for a year in a prison for TB patients, kept there in order to secure their adherence to medication. A harsh regime inherited from Soviet times. 3) Then 2 months in a conflict-ridden area of South Sudan only accessible by plane, in which one third of the population in a remote village had been killed. The physical impact of trauma was evident. There were groups of children who had no parents and a soldier who had become psychotic - a great variety of challenges, including working with interpreters, which Gail met with a lively creativity.  4) She had just come from a 2-month emergency project in the Central African Republic war zone to fund raise for further projects MSF wants to set up there.

Many things she talked about felt familiar to me from 10 years working at the Trauma Centre in Woodstock - she'd been trained to provide Psychological First Aid which is all about affect regulation and equipping people to survive rather than promoting psychological health. She'd had to deal with being idealized as a white person and she had to be careful not to become addicted to the adrenaline rush. (I remember times when I saw people for therapy who were addicted to war zones - it happens to journalists and photographers.) I myself, when I took 6 weeks off to walk the Camino, found the whole enterprise terribly boring for the first few weeks. However, Gail did not have a safe haven to go back to every evening and someone familiar with whom to talk and to cuddle. In the conflict zones, she lived in tents close to field hospitals often in the firing line. It was quite obviously exciting work and Gail was high on it. Many years ago, one of the reasons I became a medical student was because I was inspired by the work of Albert Schweitzer - I also wanted to save people in Africa! I just never knew how. Now here was Gail working in an organization that does exactly that - if I wasn't green with envy, it is only because for me, its too late and because I got to know her in 2011 when we stayed in an apartment together in New York during the Bystanders No More conference in which we were both presenters on the same panel. So I feel like I knew her before she became famous or went off to do her adventuring and that seems to mitigate the envy somewhat.

In any case, I try to comfort myself with the notion that being a psychologist/therapist can be seen as a rather adventuresome occupation - we enter new realms in the geography of someone else's mind, identity and culture every day. We journey into conflict zones, we try to transcend binaries and facilitate reconciliation. Is it similar? What do you think?