Armand Volkas
Psychotherapist Armand Volkas, a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters, uses techniques of ritual and drama therapy in his workshops, Healing the Wounds of History, which bring together groups with a history of collective trauma between them.
Individual and Collective Trauma
Can you talk a little bit about how you work with collective trauma?
I look for where the personal experience and the collective experience come together, how people carry the collective trauma. The symptom of a father’s alcoholism could really be the result of the Vietnam war, a story that he has experienced but also an experience that any men and women from the war had. There is a way in which it is transmitted to the child through osmosis. In a way it affects identity: the historical trauma lives in the crack of someones identity abut themselves and their feelings of being an American. Where a person is a carrier of a larger story of the collective story.
Everybody is a carrier, but some people are chosen by the parents to hold the burden or they choose themselves to be the carrier. My brother is a Holocaust survivor himself, so there's more direct trauma. My younger sister inherited my father’s anxieties. Somehow I was handed this or I took it on, because of my mothers non- stop sharing of the story.
The Traumatic Narrative
Can trauma be passed down through the generations?
Trauma continues on past the second generation, absolutely. It's also the way they tell themselves the stories and the way the history books share the collective narrative, Where I can see it is with the Armenian genocide. There is a way in which Armenians in the United States have kept alive the trauma. The 4th generation experiences the genocide as if it happened to them because it is imparted in schools and families, what the Turks did. These kids are traumatized, they have a hatred of Turks. [ Armenians] who immigrated here from Turkey, from Lebanon, from Syria were mostly the orphans, so these are the descendants of these wounded kids who were so deeply hurt. And the enraged story gets transmitted through the generations. So its striking for me how in the 4th generation, the Armenians feel it has happened to them. On the other hand the people in Armenia have a completely different relationship, it's kind of gone into the background, They don't share the hatred. I don't really know why because I haven't been to Armenia. But in doing a workshop with Armenians where you have someone who grew up in Armenia and someone who grew up in Fresno there is such a striking difference between them. Maybe because of the Soviets, because they have some land , whereas here their identity is organized around the victimization. It all comes down to identity, how you hold the story.
What happens in your workshops to deal with victimization?
I have primarily dealt with it as the child of Holocaust survivors and working with other children of Holocaust survivors. I've found that people seemed to be perpetuating their own victimization by just wallowing in it. So for me some active transforming of it, moving through it and turning it into something else. Each person becomes more of an individual the work that I’m doing. The work that I'm doing is a counter to the victim situation.
Humanizing the Enemy
One of the things that does seem to help in this situation, I forget exactly how you phrased it, but it's...humanizing the enemy, putting a human face on the enemy.
Certainly that is one of the first steps, A lot of times people don't know each other. Just the act of bringing people together. The Chinese and Japanese, for example. The Chinese see the Japanese and say "Oh my god, they aren't so bad they're kind of cool." Humanizing is just one part of it. The difficult part of it, lets say the Japanese and Chinese relationship or the German Jewish relationship. The Jews need to be able to express their anger and rage, the Germans need to hold it without crumbling in the face of it but also without becoming the container for all evil. So it depends on the story what happens
What about justice?
What about justice? Can historical traumas be healed within a situation where injustices are still being perpetrated by one group on another?
That's a hard thing. Healing requires a little more psychological and emotional distance. Yes and no. Slavery happened a long time ago but the effects of slavery are still observable. Is there an apology? That's humanizing each other. For me the stickiest intercultural conflict is African Americans and Euro-Americans because we are so in the thick of it its hard to get distance. So I'm looking at what are the steps of repairing collective trauma. Certainly it's acknowledging privilege, overcoming racism.. But also I do a lot of work with apology. Is an apology alone useful? The issue of reparations, whether it's monetary or psychological or some other kind of gesture, becoming an ally. Are those steps to repair? The United States apologizing, or Clinton going to Africa and apologizing.
Meaningful Apologies
Do you think an apology is an important step?
It depends on the context.
In some places its deeply meaningful. I cannot make a blanket statement, it depends on the story. A Turk apologizing to an Armenian is deeply meaningful. A Japanese person apologizing to a Chinese person for the Rape of Nanking is deeply meaningful. In the Asian collectivist nature they are not just apologizing for themselves, .they are bringing shame upon their parents, their ancestors. And you can see whats happening to Japan and China now; they are fighting about these islands. But it’s not about the islands, its really about World War 2 and the Chinese rioting and vandalizing Japanese businesses. That rage is the result of humiliation. I’m exploring the art of apology in different cultures. I there a benefit to it? I believe so but it needs to be followed by a promise or some sort of reparation. It doesn’t have to be monetary, but some sort of acknowledgement and recognition. It needs to be followed by some kind of action, a promise not to do it again, to be vigilant, some kind of repair.
What would you say to a white American who says, "Well I don't see why I have to apologize for what my ancestors did. I'm not them, that was in the past."?
I don’t go to a shaming place about it, that’s the impulse often times in diversity work, to shame that part that doesn't want to acknowledge it or is scared to acknowledge it, or is just ignorant, who doesn't understand their responsibility. On the part of African Americans, of people doing this work there's such an impulse to shame them, to call them racist, selfish. I approach this as a therapist. As a therapist I need to have compassion for the ignorance or fear. "Not my fault"—what would I say to them? It depends on their stance. If they want to understand, or if they refuse to understand and say its not my problem.
Sins of the Fathers
But there is a way that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. It's really about the transgenerational transmission of trauma, that .the slaves and slave owners could not reconcile. The second generation could not reconcile. So it gets passed on until it goes underground. There's some tension; people are unaware of what the original trauma was. Looking at slavery and acknowledging the trauma of slavery so that its not invisible is much more important than trying to legislate feeling, where political correctness is trying to govern people's feelings and behavior. So much diversity work is done badly in my opinion, where its just political correctness without really acknowledging the potential racist or perpetrator in each of us. I think its a more useful process to go back to the roots of the trauma which is the humiliation and subjugation and degradation of the African people, and that we acknowledge that that happened, that the story be shared and understood.
Compassionate Revolution
How does your work contribute to the idea of Compassionate Revolution?
I think compassion for the perpetrator and compassion for the victim is a key idea in peace building and resolving collective trauma. That’s different than forgiveness. My parents did not forgive the Nazis but they made a distinction between the Nazis and the Germans. I have more room for compassion. I wasn't operated on like my mother. Part of the job of the second generation is to resolve the trauma of previous generations.
Beyond Dialogue
What would a workshop look like? What kind of specific techniques do you use?
Drama and expressive arts can give shape to things for which there are no words. I’m going beyond dialogue. We try to get to the deep wound that people are carrying, It’s a dialogue, it's also creating a place where people can grieve, This is grief work, the perpetrator and descendants and the victims have to grieve, also rage the violation and the deep loss. In the Palestine- Israeli conflict they both consider themselves victims and the other perpetrators. We can disagree about history but peoples feelings are never wrong. I stay away from facts and history books and treaties and stick to what people feel; what they need.
Can you give some anecdotes of how you have witnessed healing take place?
Japan was doing a playback theater performance about World War II. I introduce my own story and then I invite the audience to share feelings about the legacy of World War II. A guy shared his feeling and started to rant at me about "Why are you here? How dare you come here? Look what China did, look what America did." We did some playback theater--we played back his feelings until he felt empathized with and finally sat down.
Other examples:
Last year I was with young Palestinian refugees and Maronite Christians who hate each other. We were doing a psychodrama with a Lebanese Christian man. He was doing a story about his father showing him the land he was going to inherit. We enacted the father looking at the olive trees, saying "This one day will be yours." He cast a Palestinian man to play his father. The Palestinians have no rights, they have no land. The emotional generosity that this man cast him as his father, the deep empathy, is part of the encounter.
Another workshop was with Holocaust survivors and Germans. A German woman whose mother had been in Hitler youth felt enormously guilty, Her mother had committed suicide, and the daughter was working through her feelings. The woman started to sing a German lullaby. All the women in the group started to sing, supported and witnessed by Holocaust survivors.
The Double Bind
You create double binds where you ask over and over again, how can I hate this person and have empathy for them at the same time? At one workshop, Palestinians and Israelis in a circle were passing around imaginary objects like fear and hope. A Palestinian woman was passing around a flame of hope There had been a restaurant bombing in Jerusalem that same day. She passed the flame to the Israeli woman and all of sudden it drops on the floor. There is a scramble to keep it from dying out. The Palestinian woman holds her as she sobs. This was in the first 15 minutes of the workshop, where there can be profound encounters. Half of the job is just getting people together.
Tilling the Soil
Where do you see your work going in the future?
I’ve gotten involved with the field of peace building. I think it’s a very useful idea because basically there's a continuum of going in to till the soil, preparing the ground, in the face of hopelessness, for peace treaties and beyond. A lot of time people say, "This is all very well and good but what's the point, what' s the impact?" Depending on which culture I’m working with, where they are in their evolution towards reconciliation, I see myself coming in and keeping hope alive. A lot of times there's a taboo against speaking to each other. I'm breaking a taboo, tilling the soil.
In Japan and China it's happening at a higher level, at the universities. It becomes political. China has a very strong memory and Japanese has amnesia. Energetically there a retribution impulse. I see that by doing these more public kinds of gestures, we're nipping something in the bud. There are ways to apply this to policy making. It's not conflict resolution, it's conflict transformation.
-Interview conducted by Lisa Gale Garrigues, posted 5/23/13
Individual and Collective Trauma
Can you talk a little bit about how you work with collective trauma?
I look for where the personal experience and the collective experience come together, how people carry the collective trauma. The symptom of a father’s alcoholism could really be the result of the Vietnam war, a story that he has experienced but also an experience that any men and women from the war had. There is a way in which it is transmitted to the child through osmosis. In a way it affects identity: the historical trauma lives in the crack of someones identity abut themselves and their feelings of being an American. Where a person is a carrier of a larger story of the collective story.
Everybody is a carrier, but some people are chosen by the parents to hold the burden or they choose themselves to be the carrier. My brother is a Holocaust survivor himself, so there's more direct trauma. My younger sister inherited my father’s anxieties. Somehow I was handed this or I took it on, because of my mothers non- stop sharing of the story.
The Traumatic Narrative
Can trauma be passed down through the generations?
Trauma continues on past the second generation, absolutely. It's also the way they tell themselves the stories and the way the history books share the collective narrative, Where I can see it is with the Armenian genocide. There is a way in which Armenians in the United States have kept alive the trauma. The 4th generation experiences the genocide as if it happened to them because it is imparted in schools and families, what the Turks did. These kids are traumatized, they have a hatred of Turks. [ Armenians] who immigrated here from Turkey, from Lebanon, from Syria were mostly the orphans, so these are the descendants of these wounded kids who were so deeply hurt. And the enraged story gets transmitted through the generations. So its striking for me how in the 4th generation, the Armenians feel it has happened to them. On the other hand the people in Armenia have a completely different relationship, it's kind of gone into the background, They don't share the hatred. I don't really know why because I haven't been to Armenia. But in doing a workshop with Armenians where you have someone who grew up in Armenia and someone who grew up in Fresno there is such a striking difference between them. Maybe because of the Soviets, because they have some land , whereas here their identity is organized around the victimization. It all comes down to identity, how you hold the story.
What happens in your workshops to deal with victimization?
I have primarily dealt with it as the child of Holocaust survivors and working with other children of Holocaust survivors. I've found that people seemed to be perpetuating their own victimization by just wallowing in it. So for me some active transforming of it, moving through it and turning it into something else. Each person becomes more of an individual the work that I’m doing. The work that I'm doing is a counter to the victim situation.
Humanizing the Enemy
One of the things that does seem to help in this situation, I forget exactly how you phrased it, but it's...humanizing the enemy, putting a human face on the enemy.
Certainly that is one of the first steps, A lot of times people don't know each other. Just the act of bringing people together. The Chinese and Japanese, for example. The Chinese see the Japanese and say "Oh my god, they aren't so bad they're kind of cool." Humanizing is just one part of it. The difficult part of it, lets say the Japanese and Chinese relationship or the German Jewish relationship. The Jews need to be able to express their anger and rage, the Germans need to hold it without crumbling in the face of it but also without becoming the container for all evil. So it depends on the story what happens
What about justice?
What about justice? Can historical traumas be healed within a situation where injustices are still being perpetrated by one group on another?
That's a hard thing. Healing requires a little more psychological and emotional distance. Yes and no. Slavery happened a long time ago but the effects of slavery are still observable. Is there an apology? That's humanizing each other. For me the stickiest intercultural conflict is African Americans and Euro-Americans because we are so in the thick of it its hard to get distance. So I'm looking at what are the steps of repairing collective trauma. Certainly it's acknowledging privilege, overcoming racism.. But also I do a lot of work with apology. Is an apology alone useful? The issue of reparations, whether it's monetary or psychological or some other kind of gesture, becoming an ally. Are those steps to repair? The United States apologizing, or Clinton going to Africa and apologizing.
Meaningful Apologies
Do you think an apology is an important step?
It depends on the context.
In some places its deeply meaningful. I cannot make a blanket statement, it depends on the story. A Turk apologizing to an Armenian is deeply meaningful. A Japanese person apologizing to a Chinese person for the Rape of Nanking is deeply meaningful. In the Asian collectivist nature they are not just apologizing for themselves, .they are bringing shame upon their parents, their ancestors. And you can see whats happening to Japan and China now; they are fighting about these islands. But it’s not about the islands, its really about World War 2 and the Chinese rioting and vandalizing Japanese businesses. That rage is the result of humiliation. I’m exploring the art of apology in different cultures. I there a benefit to it? I believe so but it needs to be followed by a promise or some sort of reparation. It doesn’t have to be monetary, but some sort of acknowledgement and recognition. It needs to be followed by some kind of action, a promise not to do it again, to be vigilant, some kind of repair.
What would you say to a white American who says, "Well I don't see why I have to apologize for what my ancestors did. I'm not them, that was in the past."?
I don’t go to a shaming place about it, that’s the impulse often times in diversity work, to shame that part that doesn't want to acknowledge it or is scared to acknowledge it, or is just ignorant, who doesn't understand their responsibility. On the part of African Americans, of people doing this work there's such an impulse to shame them, to call them racist, selfish. I approach this as a therapist. As a therapist I need to have compassion for the ignorance or fear. "Not my fault"—what would I say to them? It depends on their stance. If they want to understand, or if they refuse to understand and say its not my problem.
Sins of the Fathers
But there is a way that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. It's really about the transgenerational transmission of trauma, that .the slaves and slave owners could not reconcile. The second generation could not reconcile. So it gets passed on until it goes underground. There's some tension; people are unaware of what the original trauma was. Looking at slavery and acknowledging the trauma of slavery so that its not invisible is much more important than trying to legislate feeling, where political correctness is trying to govern people's feelings and behavior. So much diversity work is done badly in my opinion, where its just political correctness without really acknowledging the potential racist or perpetrator in each of us. I think its a more useful process to go back to the roots of the trauma which is the humiliation and subjugation and degradation of the African people, and that we acknowledge that that happened, that the story be shared and understood.
Compassionate Revolution
How does your work contribute to the idea of Compassionate Revolution?
I think compassion for the perpetrator and compassion for the victim is a key idea in peace building and resolving collective trauma. That’s different than forgiveness. My parents did not forgive the Nazis but they made a distinction between the Nazis and the Germans. I have more room for compassion. I wasn't operated on like my mother. Part of the job of the second generation is to resolve the trauma of previous generations.
Beyond Dialogue
What would a workshop look like? What kind of specific techniques do you use?
Drama and expressive arts can give shape to things for which there are no words. I’m going beyond dialogue. We try to get to the deep wound that people are carrying, It’s a dialogue, it's also creating a place where people can grieve, This is grief work, the perpetrator and descendants and the victims have to grieve, also rage the violation and the deep loss. In the Palestine- Israeli conflict they both consider themselves victims and the other perpetrators. We can disagree about history but peoples feelings are never wrong. I stay away from facts and history books and treaties and stick to what people feel; what they need.
Can you give some anecdotes of how you have witnessed healing take place?
Japan was doing a playback theater performance about World War II. I introduce my own story and then I invite the audience to share feelings about the legacy of World War II. A guy shared his feeling and started to rant at me about "Why are you here? How dare you come here? Look what China did, look what America did." We did some playback theater--we played back his feelings until he felt empathized with and finally sat down.
Other examples:
Last year I was with young Palestinian refugees and Maronite Christians who hate each other. We were doing a psychodrama with a Lebanese Christian man. He was doing a story about his father showing him the land he was going to inherit. We enacted the father looking at the olive trees, saying "This one day will be yours." He cast a Palestinian man to play his father. The Palestinians have no rights, they have no land. The emotional generosity that this man cast him as his father, the deep empathy, is part of the encounter.
Another workshop was with Holocaust survivors and Germans. A German woman whose mother had been in Hitler youth felt enormously guilty, Her mother had committed suicide, and the daughter was working through her feelings. The woman started to sing a German lullaby. All the women in the group started to sing, supported and witnessed by Holocaust survivors.
The Double Bind
You create double binds where you ask over and over again, how can I hate this person and have empathy for them at the same time? At one workshop, Palestinians and Israelis in a circle were passing around imaginary objects like fear and hope. A Palestinian woman was passing around a flame of hope There had been a restaurant bombing in Jerusalem that same day. She passed the flame to the Israeli woman and all of sudden it drops on the floor. There is a scramble to keep it from dying out. The Palestinian woman holds her as she sobs. This was in the first 15 minutes of the workshop, where there can be profound encounters. Half of the job is just getting people together.
Tilling the Soil
Where do you see your work going in the future?
I’ve gotten involved with the field of peace building. I think it’s a very useful idea because basically there's a continuum of going in to till the soil, preparing the ground, in the face of hopelessness, for peace treaties and beyond. A lot of time people say, "This is all very well and good but what's the point, what' s the impact?" Depending on which culture I’m working with, where they are in their evolution towards reconciliation, I see myself coming in and keeping hope alive. A lot of times there's a taboo against speaking to each other. I'm breaking a taboo, tilling the soil.
In Japan and China it's happening at a higher level, at the universities. It becomes political. China has a very strong memory and Japanese has amnesia. Energetically there a retribution impulse. I see that by doing these more public kinds of gestures, we're nipping something in the bud. There are ways to apply this to policy making. It's not conflict resolution, it's conflict transformation.
-Interview conducted by Lisa Gale Garrigues, posted 5/23/13
