Community Counselor - The Challenges

The Challenges

A community may be defined as a group of people with a sense of common history, language, race, mores, values, attitudes, knowledge structures, and purpose. However traumatic events, such as a natural disaster, spawn new “transitory communities” and establish new dynamics that transcend natural communities. In such transitory communities the blow is not just to the individual psyche, but to the tissues of social life and the bonds that bind these communities together.

The 51 Tsunami affected villages in Cuddalore District, Tamilnadu, are geographically removed from urbanization. These villages had not been exposed to the effects of Globalisation before the Tsunami. The fishing community, in these villages, is a very “closed community” that does not broach interaction even with neighboring communities except for their trade. Therefore the biggest obstacle to any kind of psychosocial intervention was the community’s lack of openness to “outsiders”. This accentuated the role of ethnocentricism that has been recognized as the single most powerful impediment to trauma counselling and which probably represents the vestiges of an ancient avoidance of strangers (Chemtob,1997). Thus such “closed communities” tend to assume that their experience of the world “is the world”. An influx of the “outside world”, such as in the aftermath of a natural disaster, could be an impediment or an advantage. It could either make the community withdraw into itself, or develop a bond with the outside world that has seen and experienced a similar peril. According to the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), Washington, D.C, likelihood of defensiveness will be high, based on pre-exposure conditioning, due to the need for security and social resonance. The fishing community in Cuddalore district had been closed to differences for centuries. Their ethnic identification was an irreducible entity, central to how the people in that community organized experiences. They used a unique "cultural prism" (Parsons, 1985) in perception and evaluation of reality.

Ethnocentrism is central to understanding help-seeking behavior, what the people in the community define as a "problem," what the individual understands as the causes of psychological difficulties, and the unique, subjective experience of traumatic stress symptoms (Parsons, 1985). Cultures also create meaning systems that explain the causes of traumatic events (De Vries).

While the threats to life associated with psychological trauma are universal, the perception and interpretation of the threats varies across cultures including: the perception of what type of threat is traumatic, the interpretation of the threat's meaning, the nature of the expression (presentation) of symptoms in response to such threats, the cultural context of the responses of traumatized people, as well as the cultural responses by others to those who have been traumatized, and the culturally prescribed paths to recovery from experiencing life-threatening events. Finally, it is also useful to consider the process by which the exposure of individuals and groups to traumatic events is made useful for the entire culture (The National Organization for Victim Assistance, 2003). According to Chemtob (1997), all this is not possible to grasp for newcomers who enter the community for the first time in the aftermath of a disaster, and may not be possible even for those who are professionally trained, to understand in the emergency situation.

Another barrier to counseling in the aftermath of a disaster is language. Language differences and patterns among diverse cultures are common and complicated. The national languages, and even the nuances of local dialects spoken, weave into the delicacy of working with local communities, who are little exposed to the world outside. One can learn Spanish, English or Russian but not understand the synthesis of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and phrases that result in common understandings among those who are a part of the culture. Languages including regional dialects dictate how one forms ideas, translates sensory perceptions, and interprets the world. The phrasing, silences, speed of delivery, and pitch or tone of voice, even when using the same word or phrase, means different things to different people and form the crux of the counseling skills. (The National Organization for Victim Assistance, 2003).

While interpreters can be used, training is needed for speaking through an interpreter. Interpreters or translators contribute to the ambiance of any crisis setting. They become the interpreters not only of the survivor but also of the intervener. In some cultures it may be appropriate for them to translate with additional flair. In other cultures such interpretation may be offensive. In the counseling situation such differences alter the healing relationships (The National Organization for Victim Assistance, 2003) In any case such training was not possible in the immediate aftermath of the Tsunami.

In a post disaster setting the counselor, besides meeting the basic needs of the affected individuals, needs to understand the grieving process and psychological trauma, and the needs of the survivors in a culturally appropriate manner. Also counseling of disaster survivors may require to be undertaken in informal settings. A supportive conversation or a focused problem-solving session during a casual home visit could very well be a counseling session.

Last, but not the least, counseling has proved a challenge in India even to contemporary Indian families (Kashyap 2004). While the average Indian is ready to accept physical explanations for symptoms of psychological trauma, they are less likely to attribute psychological origins to them and therefore less amenable to formal counseling.