Psychosocial Trauma and Healing with Al Fuertes
Dr. Al Fuertes’s new Conflict 695 class titled “Psychosocial Trauma and Healing” grabs at your humanity within a given context. It is an engaging and very well-taught but very difficult class, because it addresses the subject of human pain. Individuals and communities that experience and live through conflict frequently become traumatized by events and pain associated with human conflict. When individuals and communities become traumatized, the events of the past remain, lurking as a shadow, influencing the present. This is important because conflict resolution practitioners who think they are helping parties with a current conflict may not realize that there is past trauma, a ghost flying around the room, that is also party to and influencing the conflict and must be dealt with in order for there to be resolution—otherwise the ghost returns and continues to haunt the present.
Despite trauma and healing being recognized as an important aspect of Conflict Resolution since the field's inception, this is the first class that has been offered to specifically explore the many categories and levels of trauma and the practice of trauma healing. Dr. Fuertes feels that this is an important class for S-CAR students, particularly future practitioners because, “conflict usually results in some form of human trauma and when this trauma is left unhealed it breeds more conflict which results in further cycles of conflict and traumatization in the future.” Many conflicts that are happening now days he explains, are “the result of something that happened many years ago, but the trauma from these events have never been healed.”
Dina Rubey, an S-CAR Master's Student, echoes Dr. Fuertes's sentiment that in order to break and to heal cycles of conflict, the trauma that people experience in these conflicts must be addressed. She states that this class has been pragmatic and practical for her as a practitioner and, even more importantly, as a human being.
Dr. Fuertes has engaged in psychosocial trauma healing around the world, particularly Melanesia, Northeast and Southeast Asia, and his home country of the Philippines. In the class he goes back and forth between teaching about trauma and healing and demonstrating the methods and techniques he uses when engaging in actual trauma healing. In one exercise, students were asked to bring physical metaphors to describe their concept and understanding of trauma. One student brought an unclear mirror to symbolize the difficulty of seeing one’s self clearly when traumatized; another brought in a large stone to symbolize the weight that is carried from trauma. All were unique and powerful and helped students to think about the unthinkable.
This is why this class grabs at your humanity—not only is trauma and healing rich and deep as an academic subject matter, but Dr. Fuertes engages and demonstrates actual trauma healing with the students, the students engage the subject not just academically but from the deep well of their own human experience. It reminds students that as human beings we all carry some kind of pain. Students leave the class knowing and feeling the heaviness of trauma and also with a hope that the mirror can be made clear, the stone laid down, and the specter put to rest.