Workshop: Social Anchoring, participation,
healing architecture
Supported by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung BpB
This workshop focuses on the concepts of social anchoring, community participation, and healing architecture to foster inclusive and therapeutic environments..
Speaker:
- Lena Grabowski | Psychotraumatologist, collaboration with Save the Children, trauma-sensitive support for refugee children and families lenagrabowski.de
- Inna Obelets | UA and Rostock, Psychotraumatologist, working with refugees on experience of migration, violence, war, torture
- Anna Dobrova | Co-founder of NGO METALAB, coordinator of its affordable housing program CO-HATY, www.cohaty.org/en, metalab.space
- Yuliia Leites | a psychoanalytic psychotherapist from Kyiv, a member of the Ukrainian Psychedelics Research Organization
Special listener: Tatjana Dneprova
Moderation: Anastasia Zhuravel
Simultaneous translation
Photo credit background image: CO-HATY project
Special Thanx to Yuliia Leits who kindly authorized the use some slides from her presentation:
An investigation of trauma through psychoanalysis and psychedelics
About Yulia Leites:
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice | MA Clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy | Participant of Melanie Klein Trust Supervision Initiative | Member of Ukrainian Psychedelics Research Association
Work with soldiers
Toward the end of 2022, I started feeling that it was time for me to work with soldiers from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I consulted with quite a few colleagues, and most of them advised me not since it is a very harsh experience.
But despite the fear, I decided to give it a chance. Instead of affiliating with an organisation, I chose to do this on my own. I made a simple post on Instagram, saying that I was looking for one client, a soldier—gender didn’t matter—for a year-long pro bono therapy with me.
The post gained a lot of traction, shared by friends and even people I didn’t know. By the end of a few days, I had received over 60 applications. I interviewed many of them and eventually chose two men to work with.
One of them went missing and I haven’t heard from him since.
The other is still in therapy. We’ve been working together for about a year and a half now. He has received two medals, and despite often being on the front lines and sometimes disappearing for periods, we’ve managed to maintain our psychotherapeutic alliance.
Later that year I made another similar post and began working with another fantastic guy, Arthur. We worked together for 5 months until he was killed near Avdiivka. He was a combat medic, and his loss was profound for me.
Work with Azovstal defenders and their families
Fenix psychedelics rehabilitation center from Valencia, Spain, invited me to participate in the rehabilitation of a very unusual mixed group.
The group of 5 consisted of 3 soldiers — two women and one man. The women were held in russian captivity for 10 and 6 months before they were exchanged, and the man was held for 3 months. 2 civilians — two mothers of soldiers. One was the mother of the woman who was held for 6 months, so they participated together — the mother and the daughter. The other mother lost her son, who was killed in russian captivity during the infamous missile strike on Olenivka, which is recognized in Ukraine as a terror act.
Fenix Psychedelics Rehabilitation Center in Valencia brings people over for a one-week experience involving various types of therapeutic activities before sending them back to
Ukraine. Initially, the team didn’t have a structured therapeutic program in place, so I proposed a plan. My setup provided each participant with five hours of therapy, spread out over the course of 5 weeks. The psychedelic experience involvs a combination of mushrooms and MDMA, commonly known as a “hippie flip” I observed the changes that occurred in them and how psychedelics helped them go straight to the core of their trauma, rather than just circling around it.Community healing phenomena has also occurred.
On trauma by Werner Bohleber
– Traumatic experience leads to a severe impairment or even a complete destruction of the feeling of security and trust in people. Without our being aware of it, in our everyday consciousness we rely on society and the world forming a symbolicweb that carries us.
– Erik Erikson has conceptualised this state of affairs as “basic trust”. He describes how the experiences of the first year of life shape attitudes towards oneself and the world. The manifold interactions with the primary caregivers, especially their positively resonant reflections and confirmations, give the child a feeling of the world’s fundamental reliability, both in terms of the credibility of others and the reliability of itself.
– When people are traumatised, we are confronted with the fact that precisely this basic trust in a safe world, which has become second nature to us, is destroyed and permanently robbed of its quasi-naturalness.
– The trauma creates an irreversible breach of trust in a predictable and safe environment. This rupture does not heal. In this sense, the trauma is a “social wound” (Morris) with existential consequences. Of course, the severity of the trauma is also relevant here. But we always find an unconscious feeling of having been abandoned by the protective power of the parents or by all good powers.
– It is one of the deepest dimensions of existential experience, which is activated by the trauma and does not allow the traumatised person to feel at home in the world.
