Inhumanity

Photographer: DG. Model: myself

I mentioned David Alan Harris and Global Well-Being  in a previous post.  This Denver based therapist has done amazing healing work with former child combatants from Sierra Leone, doing a project using dance movement therapy in Africa, helping the young men to come to terms with their past and becoming reintegrated within the community. For this he won a prestigious prize. He is currently raising funds for another project in war torn Africa, this time working in the Congo.
I attended a workshop with David, who is currently visiting the UK,  for the whole of yesterday. I was interested in learning more about his work and see how it could help me to develop as a psychotherapist. How do you work with people in a non-judgemental way, people that have committed horrific crimes, often under the influence of drugs,  and yet are themselves victims?
To say I was deeply affected by the experience is an understatement. There were fifteen of us, David facilitated. The workshop was a mixture of presentations with videos by David, theoretical discussions on PTSD and then practical experience through role playing and movement.  At the start David warned us that if at any point during the workshop we felt we could not take it we were free to leave.  When he said so I thought it was an unusual warning - why would I want to leave? I was there to learn something new!
It started hitting us soon enough, when we watched the evidence on video given by a survivor to a war tribunal. I cannot repeat what I heard, it was too horrific, I will just say that she had been forced to witness her son's merciless killing and then forced to perform unspeakable sexual acts with the corpse.
Then we heard more. David helped us to get in touch with our feelings through a series of exercises and again offered us to get out of the workshop if we needed to. We had a break and worked through some of the theory about PTSD. Then we began the role playing, again with the choice to opt out. We had to either enact a moment from the survivor's story which had affected us most or from another story, that of a boy whose family had been decimated under his very eyes, with him forced to join the rebels, earning himself the protection of the leader for whom  he would get entrails of infants which the leader was fond of eating. Whilst a rebel combatant this young boy was on a mixture of coke and other drugs, which gave him courage, desensitised him and made him feel invincible. Sexual abuse was also part of his story.
 When I read the "script" I felt sick in my stomach and began to cry. My group chose the story of the boy and I was the leader of the rebels. I took  the role because I hated it so much, I wanted to see what it would be like to be "evil".  I had severe problems getting into character, I kept on stopping myself. I was only able to do it when I let go and totally immersed myself in the role. Then I realised  I actually relished the power I suddenly had over the boy, acted out by another workshop attendant. I was in shock. I felt terrible afterwards but during the reflection it was clear it had not been only my feeling, others who had taken on the same role in the other group - we worked in groups of five - had felt the same. We realised then that we all have the capacity to be "inhuman" beyond race, class, nationality or any other division. We can all flip and do horrible things to one another.  The whole point is to be aware of this. Only through awareness we can overcome  our very own "inhumanity". We can all be murderers, but we choose not to be.
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