This paper is based on analytic work with immigrant and refugee patients, and material from the classroom of the Certificate in Counselling for Refugees at Birkbeck College, University of London. It explores the impact on people of the loss of home and the adaptation to life in an unfamiliar culture. It describes the traumatic effects of war and its related horrors on the psyche. The experience of trauma can result in a fragmentation of the ego and a rupture in the continuity of being. People who have fled from home and from the trauma of war face a double challenge, external and internal. They have lost their homes and their internal worlds have been violated. Can the catastrophe of trauma be healed? In this paper I consider whether recovery is possible and ask how people rediscover a sense of meaning. I suggest that the lives of many survivors of these experiences can regain some meaning and purpose.

Refugees Recovery of meaning Loss of home Rupture of being trauma

human immigrant adaptive behavior refugee homelessness psychotrauma cultural factor mental capacity massage Article support group survival community care patient counseling immigration wellbeing life event war