Community reintegration for widows suffering religious minority violence: personalism as therapy

Abstract

Each year around the globe millions of people experience religiously motivated, traumatic violence. In the absence of assisted care those affected often suffer permanent psychological impairment, failing to reintegrate successfully into stable self-subsistent communities. We report here on the success of a personalistic therapy used to assist community recovery in a dispersed widow population suffering religiously motivated violence. In 2008, Orissa Hindu nationalists blamed local Christians for their leader’s assassination; the subsequent retaliation led to murders, destruction of churches, schools, homes, and physical assaults. Subsequent recovery efforts were premised upon a psychotherapeutic restoration keyed to a personalistic, Catholic/Christian psychological framework (Vitz, 2011) as a necessary contingent for community reintegration and economic self-sufficiency. Assaultive trauma, personal valuation, interpersonal psychosocial functioning, agency, and sense of trust in committed care were monitored. Our results indicate, among others, that self-valuation generally paralleled growth in trust commitment, but the latter depended on the perception of the caregiver’s commitment to faith values. Therefore, we propose an assault recovery model in which self-esteem and trust in committed care are constructed through the perception of a personalistic commitment grounded on faith values. ©2014 European Journal of Research on Education by IASSR.