Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 3, Issue 11, 1 May 2019 | Page 36

I asked her for the details I needed to compose a vivid story: “How were
the militia men dressed? What time of the day was it? How did it smell at
the market where they sold you? What did they say to you? What happened
to your parents? Did you see them being killed? What did it look like along
the road?”
Ahok told me everything that I wanted to know. While talking she looked
down on the ground, drawing lines in the sand with a stick.
In that moment an uncomfortable feeling lingered in my body. I would get
my story. But something else worried me: What would happen to Ahok
when I left her with the memories that I had made vivid again, reminding her
of her. A thought came to my mind: “I don’t want to take another story from
people who suffer and leave them with the pain.”
I knew it is important to write about atrocities and people’s sufferings to be
able to raise awareness about different issues as in this case of child
slavery.
This was not the problem. But to get the stories I had to ask re-traumatising
questions without having anything to offer to ease the pain I caused.
When I went back to South Sudan ten years later, in 2013, it was an
independent nation, I was able to teach people how to deal with their
traumas of war and slavery.
The tool for my own personal change and what made all our work today
possible was a training in TFT, Thought Field Therapy. TFT is the original
tapping technique invented by Dr. Roger Callahan. In the handouts there
was one article that caught my interest more than anything else. It was an
article about five psychologists who had been using tapping in Kosovo to
assist people who had been traumatised during the Balkan wars in the late
1990’s. I thought to myself:
“This is what I have to do. I will go to places where the need for trauma
relief is great but recourses are small or none existent, and teach tapping.”
Because, if that technique was as good as it was portrayed to be, it had to
be spread.
I could not do it alone. I needed somebody who could teach me how to
work with severe traumas. A mentor. I got the names of the authors of the
article about Kosovo and started searching for them on the internet. After