Should Individual Counselling Be a Luxury?

From "The Gift Returned" by Lauraine Vivian

For many years, post-TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), there has been hardly any funding for individual trauma counselling. The directors and management at the Trauma Centre (and probably other NGO’s) had to be creative in how they could permit counselling programs to continue. No-one on the staff doubted the need for it and many of us were invested in it. By invested, I mean that we had been trained to do individual work and believed in it. Besides, it had taken at least 10 years of mental health education to make trauma counselling into a service that poor and working class people would seek, let alone find accessible. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the Trauma Centre’s Training Department played a part in this. It offered widely disseminated Trauma Skills programs to front-line workers. But prior to those programs, OASSSA, provided services to ex-detainees and their families even before the Trauma Centre existed.
The imparting of various forms of emotional literacy also happened in workshops provided to many workers during the 90’s. These were intended to fuel the transformational agendas of various sectors, e.g. public service, the army, the police, and other emergency personnel.

These efforts reached their apex in the trauma counselling culture that developed around the TRC. In 1996, when I met with Thulani Granville-Grey who was involved with the Human Rights Violation Committee of the TRC, he showed me his list of victim requests. I was surprised to see that counselling was prominent among them.

Now the global economic crunch has relegated individual counselling and therapy to the realm of the luxurious –services a developing society can presumably ill afford to indulge. And yet the need remains. I have recently participated in a worldwide e-mail colloquium of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IARPP). In it we discussed traumas of history and war. The need for a respectful, patient, nuanced approach to each individual with their own unique history, was so sensitively articulated by many experienced practitioners that I wonder how we can go about effecting the kind of mass scale of recovery that is required in this country. Why should only those who can afford it have the individual attention that most people need? Is everyone else supposed to make do with groups, workshops and “community healing”? I’m not saying those don’t also have their place, but it’s not enough, is it?

Trauma Centre Reunion – October 2010

After I resigned from the Trauma Centre in May last year, I had the feeling that there was hardly anyone left working there to whom I needed or wanted to say goodbye. All the colleagues I’d been close to had already left years before. Perhaps many people who work in NGOs for more than a few years have had a similar experience?
Anyway, I decided I would construct my own farewell reunion. So finally in early October 2010 – after Eid and the Jewish holidays – 13 of us met on my patio for a Saturday lunch. A big coincidence/surprise was that Potiphar Nkhoma, who started working at the Trauma Centre pretty much at the same time as I did in 2001, just happened to be in the country from the USA and he turned up.

l.to r: Jackie Stewart, Siyabulela Mkabile, Potiphar Nkhoma, Emma Oliver, Kailas Kassan-Newton, Carmen Low-Shang, Haseena Parker, Robyn Rowe, Kerry Magnus. Seated: Lane Benjamin, Sarah Crawford-Browne, Margaret Green

I was sorry that some people who had been very important to me were unable to come – Dr Gordon Isaacs, who introduced me to trauma work (South African style) and supervised me for years, Maria Stacey, the first co-ordinator I had when I joined the Intake team and Eric Harper, who believed in me enough to hand over the work he was doing with Khulumani – an experience from which I learned so much. They had other commitments, as did Wanga Zembe, who was in Oxford ‘defending’ her Ph.D.