This is certainly our experience of rural trauma work. Individuals are helped to unpack their painful stories, layer by layer, to a respectful group and with facilitators who are able to contain and help process the stories. The process of revealing the story in a group, with a less involved facilitator, but in the presence of others who survived the same or similar events, has enormous benefits in terms of trust, normalisation, and re-establishing oneself as a survivor, not a victim. Normalisation and Coping Strategies Group brainstorm sessions regarding effects of traumatic experiences on the individual, family and community are powerful in terms of psycho-education and normalising. Although most South African victims of violence have not received appropriate compensation and justice for what has happened to them, many survivors report that being able to do something active for others has helped them cope with what happened to them personally.
Community groups offer a unique way of promoting advocacy, lobbying and preventive approaches.
By listening to the stories of others and by engaging in joint projects, many survivors of voilence report a sense of hope for the future, where before they felt lost, alone and helpless. From early on, group members are encouraged to chair group meetings and hold their own separate meetings at a different time during the week. Although dependence is not encouraged, much of the work tends to be long-term, with groups running from 6 months to 2 years, depending on their needs. Often, the least successful groups have been run where facilitators have clear ideas of the problems to be tackled and tend to prefer working with these to working with the presenting problems of each unique group. As facilitators, we tend to want to push the trauma work, whereas many community members have other, more pressing needs.