Abstract
This article examines the traumatic impact of migration on displaced individuals and communities across the globe. Because migrants flee their homelands due to war, poverty, natural disaster, political violence, social injustice, and colonial oppression, migration trauma is inherently a collective, cumulative, and intercultural experience. The article argues that the prevailing model of trauma that is largely based on Western psychology and psychiatry is insufficient to address and examine the intercultural and contextual dimensions of migration trauma. In addition, the current biomedical model of trauma often overlooks the significance of religion and spirituality in people’s experience of transnational migration. Thus, an intercultural understanding and treatment of migrants’ traumatic experience requires a sociocultural analysis to understand how migrants, individually and collectively, engage resources, such as religious rituals and indigenous spiritualties, to cope with their losses and make new meaning toward recovery and healing.
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Notes
There are two types of disasters: natural and human-caused. But, recently the distinction between the two types has been much more difficult to determine because some disasters are caused by both natural and human actions. To describe these kinds of disasters, the World Health Organization has begun using the term “complex humanitarian disaster” (Zibulewsky, 2001, p. 144).
For instance, refugees and asylum seekers from North Korea who settle in the United States struggle with intense social isolation because they are not able to join Korean American communities, most of whose members are South Koreans. Due to the historical and ongoing political tensions in the Korean Peninsula, North Korean migrants in America experience great difficulty joining ethnic communities that are predominantly South Korean.
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I would like to express my appreciation to Jill Snodgrass and Jan Holton for their guidance and helpful feedback on this paper.
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Cho, E.D. Migration, Trauma, and Spirituality: Intercultural, Collective, and Contextual Understanding and Treatment of Trauma for Displaced Communities. Pastoral Psychol 72, 403–416 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-023-01067-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-023-01067-x