Group work
Taking part in groups offer survivors the opportunity to meet others with similar experiences, enabling them to express feelings about torture, exile and loss. The group environment provides a transitional space that lessens feelings of isolation. It also encourages survivors to adopt a self-help approach by sharing their thoughts and experiences with other group members who can thereby offer mutual support.
The psychological, social and legal needs of torture survivors as they progress through the journey of seeking refugee protection in the UK are constantly changing. The MF group work service is generally designed to support the continuum of:
- Arrival: those who need help to survive and find their way in a new land,
- Adjustment and adaptation: those who are more settled but still adjusting, and
- Settlement: those who have been here a while and continue to have difficulties.
All groups endeavour to meet and support these different, evolving needs. Survivors may begin in one group and move to others to suit their progression.
Different media are employed in the various groups to connect with psychological issues, including talking, arts therapies (art, drama and movement), integrative arts, nature and breadmaking.
The MF offers activity groups, such as a chess club, as well as psychotherapy groups facilitated by psychotherapists and counsellors. Each psychotherapy group provides different levels of support and reflection in response to clients' readiness to address their experiences of torture, as well as addressing the process of claiming asylum in the UK.
Group work may be used as a client's primary treatment or may complement other services, such as individual counselling.
Single and mixed sex groups are offered. Groups are run in English, Farsi, French and Turkish and other languages, through the help of interpreters where necessary.
Most groups meet weekly and some fortnightly. Time-limited groups are designed to run for a specific length and vary from 8-14 weeks, others run up to two years and some are ongoing.
Groups offered at the MF:
Art therapy (women's group): art is a valuable medium through which clients can express the unspeakable, accessing emotions which they may not be ready to verbalise in direct counselling sessions. Techniques used by clinicians include painting, drawing and sculpting.
Chess club (men and women): transcends language barriers and enables communication across cultures.
Coffee Group (Amharic speaking women's group): coffee plays an important part in Eritrean and Ethiopian cultures. With survivors from both countries, clients are encouraged to reconnect with aspects of their culture, also exploring issues of identity.
Creating a Way (men and women): promotes the use of movement, drama, art and storytelling as a creative means of coping with problems of transition and uncertainty.
Drama Group (North West centre men's group): facilitated by Ali Jeffers from Manchester University, members use drama to arrange explore a range of themes chosen by the group, which also has staged public performances of its work.
Farsi Psychotherapy Group (Farsi speaking men and women): inviting survivors to share their losses and difficulties living in exile in their native language, this group encourages clients to work through their experiences of torture around the opposite sex.
Foundation Group (men and women): this group discusses cultural differences and provides information and advice about the rights afforded to torture survivors under the UK asylum system.
Kneading and Healing Bread for Life (men and women): recognising that bread, in one form or another, is a staple of most cultures, the group uses baking as a vehicle for members to come together through a shared common activity.
Men's Psychotherapy Group (North West centre): invites male survivors who have had a period of long term therapy at MF to share their past experiences and explore difficulties arising from living in exile.
Mixed Psychotherapy Group (French speaking group for men and women): fostering a culture of community, this group explores members' fears, anger and trust around the opposite sex and works towards living comfortably together in a mixed society.
Natural Growth Project (men and women): a combination of horticulture and psychotherapy, the cornerstone of this group is that everyone, whatever their experiences, has a continuing relationship with nature. Individual therapy occurs in a garden setting, while groups of clients are able to interact on allotments based in community plots in London.
Open Art Studio (men and women): clients are invited to drop by the art studio at any time during the open session to paint, draw and sculpt.
Re-finding Ourselves (Turkish speaking men's group): enables clients to reconnect with their previous interests by examining what was lost in the transition between life in their home country and the UK.
Surviving trauma (men and women): designed to support survivors who are open to sharing their past and present traumatic experiences with each other, with a view to moving forward.
The Next Step: What Now? (Arabic, English and French speaking men's group): designed for clients approaching the end of treatment at the MF, the group provides advice on how best to move on with life in the UK.
The Next Step (English speaking women's group): designed for clients approaching the end of treatment at the MF, the group provides advice on how best to move on with life in the UK.
Women's Psychotherapy Group (French speaking): seeking to provide a bridge between their old and new lives, this group invites French-speaking women from any country to speak about their experiences in their native language while developing their confidence in speaking English.
Textile Womens group (North west centre): three-month group using textiles to explore womens experiences in their home countries and in exile. The group publicly exhibits its work, most recently at the Exodus Refugee Arts Festival.
Write to Life / All Write (London and Scotland centres respectively, men and women): instructed by a writer in residence and various mentors, clients may use this as an opportunity to express their thoughts about their experiences of torture and of life in the UK, either through prose or fiction.
Young Adults Group (men and women): established for clients aged 18-25 years, this group accommodates survivors who have come to the UK either alone or as part of a family and aims to help them in their struggle with their past experiences and with the difficulties faced living in exile.
MF counsellor and caseworker Perico Rodreguez with letters of support sent to him in jail but kept from him until his release.
Handcuffed to the metal frame known to the prisoners as la parrilla (the grill in Spanish), Argentine town clerk Perico Rodreguez was conscious of an overwhelming solitude as he waited for his torturers to renew their efforts.
A committed socialist, he had been arrested within days of the 1976 military coup and spent the next three years in prison, experiencing repeated torture in the form of beatings, electric shocks and mock drownings. It was the loneliness he experienced on la parrilla, however, that left an indelible impression.
"It's an extraordinary sense of detachment," he explains." Perhaps you are saying goodbye to everything - you are starting to plan for the end. It's not a question of being pessimistic or depressed. It's a sense of emptiness, solitude. Your mind is trying to cut off."
From counselling clients at the MF, Perico knows that he was not alone in experiencing such a reaction. And he knows too the difficulties that someone who has been tortured can experience when trying to reintegrate with society.
Pain, shame and degradation, as well as a profound loss of trust and collapse of self-esteem can all conspire to ensure that after release a tortured person remains a victim, often a silent victim, the personality all but extinguished, the solitude all-encompassing.
Perico, however, also remembers the strength he and his fellow prisoners drew from each other when they were allowed to meet, albeit for limited periods, on a landing outside their cells. The discussions between them reaffirmed their humanity and reminded them of their inner strengths, of who they had been before the torturers got to work.
"We made it a rule. If you were a lawyer, you had to explain to the others about law, if a journalist, about being a journalist, and if a carpenter, how you made a table or a chair. It was education, but a lot of other things were going on too," he says.
His knowledge of the power of the group underpins one of the most effective forms of treatment that the MF offers group therapy.