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We live in a violent country; yet violence is rarely acknowledged as emerging from our own psychic lives. Instead, it is split off and enacted in the wars we fund, and the historic, structural, and racist violence all but the cis, straight, and “able” whites among us are forced to experience every day. To participate in transforming violence, we all must own it. I began doing the work I have called accompaniment through Madre, a US women’s organization that engaged activists to support and learn from women in countries experiencing the brutal wars our government organized to suppress popular uprisings.
One program engaged activists with technical skills to teach them on-site. But technical skills were not what was needed—rather the presence of an outsider who could contain the overwhelming isolation and dread engendered by constant exposure to extremely violent events mattered much more. Working together, we realized that communities in crisis could use outsiders to contain, as well as witness, terrible experience, so that the bizarre objects of terror constituting daily life could be metabolized.
Working with a colleague from Uganda’s Ministry of Education, we discovered that meeting in the IDP camps where local teachers lived and worked in the midst of conflict, teachers could think and formulate ideas more clearly when we accompanied them. Feeling known by us, they could hold us in mind, as we held them in mind. It required that we connect to our inner capacity to know and contain the terrible realities the community faced. So, accompaniment evolved as one form of the psychic process of recognition and acknowledgment named by Jessica Benjamin. Community members exposed to extreme violence could feel less tainted by the knowledge of that violence, less psychically alone.
I’ve also been supporting the development of counseling and social work programs in the public university system in Afghanistan. In 2016, as we began a second round of research and curriculum deve