Amelie and Arielle’s interview with Trauma Therapist, Darren Abrahams
26 Aug 2020 – audio transcription
Arielle
Hi, my name’s Arielle and I’ve been working on Project Poppy since March with my school Hove Park.
Amelie
Hi, I’m Amelie. I’ve been working on Project Poppy for a couple of months.
Arielle
So today we’re talking to Darren Abrahams, trauma therapist and co-founder of The Human Hive. He’s also the wellbeing and trauma leader for Musicians Without Borders.
Darren
Brilliant. Lovely to meet you both.
Amelie
So, can you tell us about your work with refugees?
Darren
Sure. So I run an organisation called The Human Hive and five years ago now, we started a project working in the Calais refugee camp, which is an education programme. That was the beginning of my more direct work with people going through the refugee experience.
But now I mostly work with people who work with refugees and asylum seekers. So, a lot of the training and support that I do is to support people who are doing the support work.
Arielle
Wow, that sounds interesting. Why did you choose to work in this field?
Darren
For a number of different reasons. On a personal level my grandparents were both refugees back in the 30s and 40s, so escaping from Nazi Germany, so it’s very close to my own family history. And on a personal level from today, I live in Brighton and in 2015 there was a very large refugee camp building in Calais, which is not so very far away across the English Channel. And so I felt like I really wanted to do something to contribute and to a better life and support people going through that experience who lived almost on my doorstep.
So my grandfather came from Dresden in Germany, and my grandmother came from Yemen, and they both met in Palestine before it became Israel. So the stories are slightly different, so my grandfather’s story is that when he was eight years old, the Nazis took power and my great grandfather was a factory owner in Dresden, and the Nazis came to the door to find my great grandfather, who happened to be at the factory, and my grandfather went out the back and told him and he literally just got on a train and left everything behind and about a month later, the rest of the family joined, and they went to Strasbourg first, where they had family, and two years later they left, and they went to Palestine because the war was building. They were there basically living in a refugee camp for a number of years until they got settled. So what I saw in my grandfather was a great deal of anxiety, you know, he managed his anxiety very well, but it was always there playing underneath. I mean, he fought in seven different wars in Israel, the war of independence and various other wars. I think, he was very much shaped by his early experience. He was shaped by the disruption that happened in his family. They were a wealthy family in Dresden and they literally left everything. My great grandfather became a labourer in a quarry and my great grandmother became a cleaner in Palestine. So that was their experience, and they built that up from nothing.
And so I really recognised that in the situation of refugees and asylum seekers today, people who might be leaving professional positions in Syria or Afghanistan or other places and then arriving in a country like the UK, and having to live on £36 a week, and not allowed to work. We’re replicating that situation over and over again.
It’s not my personal experience but it’s my family experience, so I recognise it. It’s something that shouldn’t be happening today in the 21st century and we need to be doing more to support people.
My grandmother’s story’s slightly different. My grandmother’s family left Yemen – they were landowners, they had a vineyard – and they left Yemen just before the beginning of the First World War because my great grandfather needed a cataract operation. They could only have that in Palestine, so they literally trekked across the desert on camels, left everything behind, came to Palestine, had the operation, then couldn’t go back because the First World War broke out.
So my grandmother was actually born in Palestine as it was then. So, she’s not officially classed as a refugee because she was born, and they stayed there. But the family story is a refugee story, and they couldn’t go back, and again, they lost everything.
I know that your project is about PTSD and the First World War. So, my family’s story is a direct result of what happened at the First World War, the disruptions of the First World War. My grandfather’s family moved to Germany before the First World War. My great grandfather fought for Germany in the First World War.
Then, if you know your history well, you’ll know that the Second World War happened as a result of the First World War because of the reparations that Germany had to pay for the rest of Europe. So the First World War is a major pivot point in the 20th century that kicked off a whole load of other experiences that were very directly felt by my family, as a Jewish family.
Amelie
How are they affected by the trauma, people you work with?
Darren
People I work with? In all sorts of different ways. So, trauma really, if I give you a definition of trauma, then you can start to apply it to all sorts of different situations. Trauma is about how the nervous system responds to overwhelming experiences. When you get traumatised, so we have four different ways that we defend ourselves against a threat. Our body can go into fight mode – fighting off our attacker. We can go into flight mode – which is escape. We can go into freeze mode – which is getting very still and quiet so that you’re not seen. And we can go into faint mode – which is like full collapse as if you’re playing dead.
So, an overwhelming event, overwhelming experience will be something that pushes you into your defence mechanisms, but you fall down into the freeze and the faint space, which means that you can’t mobilize your body to fight off your attacker or run away. So being traumatised means that you’ve got all this defence energy trapped in your nervous system, but no way to let it out, so it’s just constantly playing all the time inside you. It’s a very human thing, all humans experience this and it can be all sorts of different experiences that push us into that trauma response. Some people can be traumatised from falling off their bicycle, and somebody else will just get straight back on a carry on cycling, so it very much depends on you and the kind of support mechanism you have around you and how connected you feel to the feelings in your body and your emotions.
Arielle
What kinds of treatment is available to the people that you work with?
Darren
There are various different kinds of therapies that will help. What you really need is something that is focused on the body sensation, not just a talking therapy. So there’s lots of really great talking therapies where you can talk about your problems but because trauma is trapped within the nervous system and in the body, it isn’t accessed by this part of the brain, which is the conscious part of the brain that you use to have conversations with. So you really need to direct people into their physical body sensations and their emotions to help them to access the original experiences that push them into trauma. What you want to do, is to support people to gain a greater capacity in their bodies to feel those feelings so they can then let go of them.
It can be a long process, depending on how much trauma there is trapped inside someone, or it can be a shorter process if the trauma is very recent. And around the trauma people feel OK in themselves and are quite well resourced. So it really depends.
But also, it’s not just about therapy it’s also I think, what’s very helpful for people, is a strong community, having strong supportive, loving relationships, having activities that people can do that help them to stretch their bodies and exercise themselves, so it can be anything from yoga, or sports, or drawing, singing, arts are also really good to help people get back into their emotions. I work with the arts a lot. There are lots of different things, I don’t think that people only need therapy. I think they need a whole range of different things to support them, to feel more safe, and to feel more human again.
Amelie
What about your work as a trauma therapist? How is that different from [your work] with refugees? What’s that like?
Darren
So as a trauma therapist, I work one-on-one with people. And that could be anyone, and I do have some clients who have been through the refugee experience but I work with all sorts of different people who have trauma for different kinds of reasons.
The difference between working with settled people, than people who are currently going through the refugee experience, is that if you’re living in a refugee camp or if you’re still on the road, you don’t have the time or the resources to really process your trauma. What you need is to still be in that space where you feel alert and you’re ready to take action, because you’re still living within what I call the trauma vortex, it’s the space where the trauma is happening.
So you can’t do really intense therapy work inside a refugee camp. What you can do is create supportive relationships. You can develop activities that support people to feel safe and comfortable. What you can do also is to teach them how to look after themselves and manage themselves. But you wouldn’t do therapy until people had settled and were ready to come to it themselves.
It’s a long process and it opens up a lot of emotion, a lot of pain in the body, challenge. So you need people to feel safe and settled with a good support network around them before they start that kind of work.
Arielle
What is PTSD and how does it affect people today, with their daily lives?
Darren
PTSD is a post-traumatic stress disorder and it mostly comes from very severe shock traumas. So there are different kinds of traumas that we have. A PTSD is often associated with people who have been in very difficult, shocking situations, so you’ll often find that soldiers coming back from war have PTSD, or obviously people who have gone through this refugee experience who might be running away from a war situation. And it will affect people on very different levels, so it’s exactly the same as other traumas in terms of the fight, flight gets trapped in the nervous system but with severe PTSD, those feelings of unsafety and fear and anxiety can be triggered by events going on around you.
So people with PTSD find it very hard to feel safe. They can be startled by noises, by car doors banging or loud noises. It might remind their nervous system of the thing that originally traumatised them. People with PTSD often find it hard to sleep or have nightmares, night sweats. They could find it difficult to eat because the digestive system is disrupted. It’s difficult to feel close to people because when you have that kind of trauma in your system, everybody feels unsafe, so it’s hard to open up to close loving relationships. Even if there are people around you who want to support you, it can be difficult to make those connections.
PTSD it can be very, very disruptive on every level, on a biological level, on a psychological level and on a social level.
Amelie
Do you think it’s important to hear the stories of those affected by trauma then?
Darren
Absolutely. The way that human beings process their emotions is by talking about them. So often we don’t know how we feel about things until we start talking about those things. And in the process of talking and sharing, we start to make meaning from the experiences that we’ve had, so it’s a very important part of the process.
But what’s important is that we don’t push people to tell their stories until they feel safe and comfortable to do so, so if you’re working with someone who has trauma in their nervous systems, it’s better to wait for them to start to tell you and to feel comfortable and safe enough with you to do that before you ask loads of questions. If you ask lots of people questions, you can push them off guard, you can re-traumatise them, so it’s very important for us to hear the stories, because also for people who have not been through these kinds of situations, it’s difficult for us to understand why people might be behaving in the way they’re behaving now.
Part of us is as a society and a community, being able to support and understand those people, we need to know what they’ve been through. So, I think the sharing of stories is important, but it has to be done in the right way and it has to be when people are ready to do it.
Arielle
And if we’re not hearing their stories, what do you think the consequences are from that?
Darren
I think if we don’t hear the stories, then they can often stay locked up inside for years and years on end, and then the trauma doesn’t release. It can be difficult to then reconnect with your community and your family because people don’t understand what you’ve been through. They can’t empathise because they only see you back in the situation where they live and they only see you through the behaviour’s that you’re now displaying. If they don’t understand what’s driving the behaviours and what it is that you’ve experienced yourself, then it can create a huge gap. I think there’s lots and lots of examples of people who’ve come back from really challenging experiences, like being in war, and their relationships falling apart as a consequence of that.
Many veterans end up on the streets as a consequence of having PTSD because it’s difficult to live with someone who has those kinds of presentations. And if you don’t hear their stories and support them to tell their stories, then it can often lead to much worse situations. It can lead to addiction. It can lead to really difficult behaviours, there’s a whole load of things so I think for us as a society, we need to be prepared to listen to people and believe them. That’s the other really important part of this is to believe people when they tell you the things they’ve been through. Quite often people don’t believe, and they tell others that they’re lying.
This is a situation that we have with the immigration system here in the UK and other parts of the world, is when somebody who is seeking asylum, who’s come from a war zone or walked across a continent, the first thing that happens to them when they go into the asylum process is that their story is pushed and pushed and probed and probed because the immigration authorities are primed to believe everything you’re saying is a lie.
So, if you are told that what you’re saying to me is a lie, then that just re-triggers the trauma constantly. So we have a responsibility, I think, as a society to believe people when they tell you what’s happened to them.
Amelie
How can we help change the situation of people suffering from trauma?
Darren
Well, there’s lots of ways on a personal level, it’s to do things like this, is to get more information and learn more about how the nervous system works and why people might be behaving the way they’re behaving. To learn to come into contact with yourself, so that you can recognise when you feel overwhelmed, so that you can manage yourself to be an open and safe, non-judgmental presence for other people. I think that’s really important for us to learn, for all of us as human beings, to learn how to be in contact with other people who might be more vulnerable than us, who might be going through difficult things so that we always feel safe for others.
If we feel like a safe person, people will be able to let their guard down, trust and open up to you a bit more. I think that we need to inform all of our public services about trauma and how it works. We need to have trauma informed schools, and trauma informed police service, and trauma informed fire service, and trauma informed hospitals, and trauma informed social workers.
Everyone who comes into contact with people who have been through challenging situations, not only people who’ve been through the refugee experience, but people who might be experiencing homelessness or people who might have gone through domestic abuse or have childhood developmental trauma, all of those people will be displaying behaviours that come from that dysregulated nervous systems. So if we have a full system that recognises that, I think we’ll have a much kinder society and will be able to help people in the way they really need to be helped rather than punishing people for the behaviours they display because of their difficult backgrounds.
Amelie
Wow
Darren
I hope I’ve answered your question.
Arielle
What could prevent the trauma of people that you’ve worked with so far?
Darren
Ooh, that’s a very big question! So, because I work with people from lots of different situations, there’s no one answer. I think if we’re talking about people going through the refugee experience, what would prevent their trauma, was not starting wars. And also thinking much wider about what it is that starts wars: it’s our economic system, it’s our political system, it’s our environmental system. There are a whole load of reasons why people might be experiencing disruptions in their home countries. It’s because of larger policies that are going on around the world. So if we really want to stop trauma on that level, we need to address poverty. We need to address inequality. We need to address climate change. We need to address our big, big systems – the way we run our planet. So that’s a very, very big, big answer to that question.
On a societal or community level, we need to support parents a lot more. A lot of trauma comes from challenging relationships between parents and children. And we set our children up for failure if we have disrupted childhoods. Supporting parents, teaching parents how to understand how the nervous system works, how to understand how children develop and to support people who are struggling would be massive, go a massive way to eliminating trauma in our society.
And that extends into schools as well, so we need our schools to be able to understand how that works and to support young people and parents rather than – we have a system at the moment which is all about exclusion and punishment. Often the behaviours that lead to exclusion and punishment have come from dysregulated nervous systems that have been set up by challenging relationships. So the majority of the clients that I see that are based here in my hometown are people who have had developmental trauma, disrupted childhoods, and then that feeds into every other part of their lives.
Amelie
Could you tell us a bit about your work with Musicians Without Borders and Human Hive?
Darren
Sure, The Human Hive is my organisation. I set that up with my business partner, Kate McCallister, who is a secondary school teacher. And, as I said, we started our work working directly with people going through the refugee experience in Calais, and we set up a whole education programme. And very quickly we started to train other people.
What we do now is that we train people to build bridges between themselves and people they would never normally meet, so that could be anyone. We work with volunteers working in refugee camps, we work with teachers, we work with social workers, we work with people in large corporations and businesses, we work with young people, we work with old people – so its anybody who really wants to create better relationships in their communities. So that’s The Human Hive work.
For Musicians Without Borders I’m their wellbeing advisor, which means that I take care of the wellbeing of the team. And I’m one of the trainers and I train musicians to work in post-conflict situations using music as a tool for conflict resolution and community building. All the people that we work with are musicians and they create music projects in… we have permanent projects in places like Rwanda and Palestine and El Salvador and Northern Ireland and Kosovo, so countries that have been through conflict, and so we use music as a tool to bring the community back together. But for the last four or five years, we’ve also been training musicians in Europe and other more settled Western countries to welcome refugees. So using music as a tool to build community for people who are arriving from other places.
Arielle
That sounds so interesting. And what are you working on at the moment?
Darren
Lots and lots of different things. So I have a private practice, I work with clients one-on-one a couple of days a week. I’m also building big projects within The Human Hive. So at the moment we’re developing a full support program for volunteers working in refugee camps.
We’re also building training right now for parents who want to home-school if their children have been disrupted by COVID-19. So that would be a big global training programme. We’re actually building a school in Dominican Republic right now, so that’s also going on, Kate’s out there at the moment doing that.
And I have various other smaller training programmes, so I’m doing a big project with Glyndebourne Opera and Minnesota Opera starting on Saturday, so bringing young people together to talk about: what would the place beyond tomorrow look like? So, it’s about thinking about the future and how you’d want the future to be. And that’s a that’s an artistic, creative project. So those are the top things that I’m working on right now. But there’s lots of other smaller stuff.
Amelie & Arielle
Wow. That’s incredible. Yeah, it’s amazing.
Darren
Thank you.
Arielle
Thank you for your time and thanks for answering our questions.
Amelie
Thank you.
Darren
My pleasure.
Amelie
It’s been really interesting.
Darren
Lovely to meet all of you. Thank you.