 This month we take a welcome break from the politics of therapy in the UK and offer a range of contributions which touch on the experience of cultural difference and integration.
Priska Imberti gives an unusual insight into what she descibes as the ‘bittersweet’ experiences of the immigrant’s journey. To the outsider, she says, it may seem as if the journey stops when a person arrives safely in a new country, perhaps secures a job and somewhere to live and is able to send money home to the family they have left behind. But through her own and her clients’ stories, she illustrates very movingly how complex and painful adjusting to the reality of life in an unwelcoming country can be; how relationships with family are held together by phone calls, financial support and the dream of one day being reunited; the impact of the loss of family networks, language and command over one’s surroundings. Priska trained as a psychotherapist because she saw patterns in other people’s ways of coping which echoed her own experience: in order to get through each day many people who have immigrated have a tendency to live purely in the present moment for fear of what the future holds and also a tendency to detach from their emotions and to avoid thinking about what they have left behind. Therapy, she feels, can give these people a much needed space to express their pain, to reflect on what they have achieved and to reconnect with parts of themselves they may have lost. In her view, while therapists today are likely to take into account the way that race, class and gender impact individual psychology, we are less likely to consider the way that immigration experiences may have affected a client’s internal world.
Meera Kapadia reminds us of the need to pack our ‘adaptors’ when we go to work with people from non-Western collective cultures where the ‘We-self’, as opposed to the ‘I-self’ is dominant. She makes some interesting points about assessment of normality and pathology. For example, she asks how does our own assessment of psychological health affect people who come from a collective culture in which interdependence and interconnectedness, rather than independence and self-reliance, are considered healthy? In an example of an assessment tool being colour- and culture-blind, Meera describes a research study that found an abnormally high level of eating disorders in the Indian population. This result had been brought about by one of the statements used for the study: ‘I am preoccupied with food’. It is of course normal to be preoccupied with food in the Indian culture. Furthermore, a proportion of people questioned for the study were starving.
The highlighting of collective cultures links nicely with Bodhakari’s article which is an introduction to some ideas from Buddhism which throw light on our view of the self and suggest that much of our mental suffering comes from the illusion that we are separate from others.
Sarah Browne
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