4
What will you learn?
As participants go through the manual, they will discuss and understand the impacts that traumatic events have on individuals, their reactions to trauma, and why those reactions are so frequent, strong and distressing. By following a story, practising exercises, and being active in group work, the participants will explore understandings of trauma, and practice ways of dealing with traumarelated reactions. The exercises will give the participants new skills that are useful in their work with trauma survivors, and at the same time strengthen the respectfulness of their approach and attitude. The aim is to enable helpers to apply practically the skills, approaches and attitudes they learn during the training, whether they work with survivors over long periods or meet them more briefly.
The grounding exercises and role plays may initially seem difficult to participants who are not used to this type of work. They are nevertheless a vital part of the training because, in doing them, participants experience the physical and mental effects that grounding exercises have on the body.
The Butterfly Woman story, which runs through the training, has several functions.
• A fictional story can be a shared point of reference.
• Linking the acquisition of skills to a story can strengthen memory and learning.
• Because a story can show that everyone responds similarly to gender-based violence without touching on individual cases or a survivor’ s own experience, story-telling is a valuable tool for working with survivors.
• A story can describe, generically and using informal language, the changes that occur in a person who is traumatised: sudden alterations in her behaviour, reactions and feelings after the trauma; her physical responses; changes in her relationships with others and the surrounding world. Clinically, of course, reactions vary from person to person; but a story can capture general or frequent forms of response.
• It can assist helpers to understand concretely how particular tools and exercises can help survivors. By vividly embedding interventions in a context, it can strengthen and enrich learning.
Further information about trauma and trauma reactions is provided in Part III.