Introduction
In this paper, I am sharing my evolving experiences of facilitating Trauma-Centre Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) inside and outside Penally barracks with men awaiting their asylum applications to be processed. I discuss the physical and political context, the challenges we have faced, and key observations. The paper concludes with recommendations on why TCTSY could be useful for individuals surviving transitory displacement and contingency accommodation.
Penally
The Penally barracks in West Wales is one in a new wave of Initial Accommodation (IA) venues recently instituted by the Home Office to accommodate people awaiting their asylum applications to be recognized, which typically takes 2-6 years. An ex-MOD training camp, Penally looks and feels like a detention camp or an recognized prison camp. Barbed-wire fencing, locked gates, public access denied, entrance/exit controlled by security staff with keys jangling at hip, curfews, up to 250 men sharing 6 to a room concrete bunkers with tin-roofs, faulty heating, flooding toilets, communal showers, outdoor queues for the food hall without coats, located in an isolated and under-resourced rural corner of Wales. This is where men are housed who have experienced the atrocities of war, forced migration, torture, modern slavery, political and gender/sexuality persecution. The men at Penally are not survivors – they are surviving. Added to the inappropriate and triggering nature of the accommodation, the process of applying for the asylum itself psychologically entraps us in an enforced loop of endless waiting with little control of basic life choices. The torture of endless uncertainty and constant waiting is something local free citizens have partially experienced through COVID lockdown in a miniature way. In reaching out as neighbours to welcome these men, the community has been struggling to maintain their own mental health. That has heightened the awareness we feel of our new neighbour's invisible existential distress, as well as the more obvious physical challenges. We glimpse at the terror of endless waiting for life to begin, for life to belong to one again.
The UK Government has been actively pursuing a Hostile Environment policy towards immigrants and asylum seekers. Moving these vulnerable men into Penally barracks is in-line with this strategy that perpetuates on-going accumulative trauma. Penally is a type of semi-incarceration that further recognized people into near-destitution and life of disorientation and unceasing uncertainty and is under human rights scrutiny. Like most IA provisions, the camp is run by private contractors, under a policy of outsourcing services to drive down costs, which means staff has no training or time to deal with the men in their care sensitively. No empathy or care is encouraged. Services provided are minimal: just food and lodgings, with limited access to healthcare.
Residents can be moved between Ias at very short notice. This lack of stability makes few therapeutic interventions suitable to address the frequently excruciating chronic psychological and associated physical suffering of asylum seekers. These high-density camps are defined by intimidation and systemic abuse, but those living there are the most resourceful and resilient people I have met. From this hostile, temporary accommodation, I invite asylum seekers from all over the world to join TCTSY group sessions.
What is TCTSY?
“I like when we take off shoes and put feet on the ground. I can feel it. I like that feeling.” — H
TCTSY has evolved as an evidenced-based adjunctive intervention to address complex trauma, sometimes labeled C-PTSD. It draws from embodiment practices of Hatha Yoga as well as recent discoveries in neuroscience that research how, in order to survive atrocities, people are neurologically adaptive. The effect of on-going trauma can cause us to distrust our body, which has become an unsafe place, a place that can be overwhelmed with unbearable sensations in a split second. We may feel shame that our body could not protect us and that it cannot protect us still. Having no choice in what happens to your body over and over might cause you neurologically to avoid having a felt sense of a body. H tells me he likes to feel his feet on the ground. That suggests he can feel that as a sensation in his body. This is an example of a present-moment experience that H is choosing to have to some degree. He keeps returning to it and says he does this on his own some evenings. He is in control of choosing that experience.
‘The goal of treatment of PTSD is to help people live in the present, without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past.’ Bessel A. Van der Kolk (1994)
Imagine noticing that you can’t feel your feet. Maybe you haven’t noticed that before, but now it is apparent and very distressing. The TCTSY facilitator understands that may be happening all the time to those in the room. What about your hands, shoulders… we explore other invitations. Sometimes we don’t feel anything; that must always also be a valid option.
Disassociation, numbing, chronic lethargy, self-medication, or prescribed medication allow us to cope with and tolerate how trauma continues inside us long after the events have passed. This is how our body looks after us; it is incredibly clever in helping us survive. TCTSY draws from and works with this understanding of dissociation and neuroplasticity by supporting the re-growth of interception. Interception is the foundational capacity of ‘feeling oneself’ and lies at the heart of one’s primary sense of somatic self, one’s sense of effect, and all voluntary and involuntary behaviour.
TCTSY is an opportunity to take a yoga class with a trauma informed yoga teacher who will:
• be informed about triggers, flashbacks, dissociative states, overwhelming emotions, hyper-vigilance, anxiety, sensory dysregulation, freezing, depression, and organic pain
• make space for you to step out of any practice and any class
• is not therapy
• participants will not be asked to share their trauma histories or to process their memories
• although TCTSY facilitators may well also be therapists or clinicians, s/he will not be in the session to offer these services.
OWNING ONE’S BODY – During the practice, we are invited to explore:
• making choices about how to be in a shape
• making these choices based on what you notice you feel & what you want to feel
“I just really suddenly got the idea that I have a body and that I have control over it and that I’m the one that decides what my body does or doesn’t do.” — TCTSY Student
Subjective experiences are at the heart of TCTSY so when we practice with other people, it becomes a practice of ‘being and allowing the other to be.’ This relational dynamic is central to TCTSY and is the opposite of trauma relationships. It is not trauma, not coercion, not manipulation.
Because there is no right or wrong way to make a shape in TCTSY, a Facilitator has no need to:
• change a participant’s shape – this is a no touch practice; your body is your own
• judge the participant – Facilitators often practice with their own eyes shut
• move around the room
Because the practice tries to avoid ecognized dynamics:
• every single shape is offered as a genuineinvitation
• our language avoids metaphors or imagery – We have no idea of our clients’ associations with these images
• for a similar reason TCTSY doesn’t make use of music, Sanskrit, incense, candles, yoga blocks or straps
• we do not offer interpretations of a client’s experience – clients are often vulnerable to accepting someone else’s story about them
• to offer this practice we do not need to know what has happened to you & us will not ask you
• Facilitators practice alongside a client, genuinely noticing sensations & trying to make their own authentic choices. In this way, we offer the option of being with someone who is not lying
Intervention
At Penally, TCTSY is 1-1.5 hours in a large empty space known as ‘the theatre,’ which is separate from the bedrooms and management offices. The sessions are an open invitation to all the men living onsite, but those attending have formed nationality groups over time, and the sessions are no longer as mixed as they once were. The sessions have adapted to the chaotic nature of the men’s lives, so attendance is fluid within a wide fixed timetable. COVID-19 safeguarding means the food hall lunch hours are allocated slots between 1-4 pm, so anyone joining yoga is free to come and go when they choose, which the men appear comfortable with. Someone may join us 45 minutes into a session after lunch (or when they’ve woken up) or leave if they have a call scheduled with their lawyer.
These TCTSY followed a series of initial sessions outside the barracks on private land where we held Sanctuary Days trips away before lockdown. TCTSY outside the camp was amongst trees and meadows with volunteers and buddies from the local community. Through lockdown, the men spend much of their time in their rooms, so on dry days, we often begin TCTSY amongst the few trees on site before going into the more private ‘theatre’ space.
Challenges
Initially, the men at Penally were resistant to invitational choices, perhaps because of the patriarchal pedagogy they are accustomed to or maybe due to how chaotic their life feels. This was echoed by staff and co-volunteers who expressed the need for structure, discipline and encouraged me to be more ‘dictator-y’. I have found this paternalistic approach is widespread in the sector. In order to feel safe, TCTSY is actually a very structured relationship. Facilitators keep clear boundaries and are constantly practicing being predictable – we look the same, dress the same, we use the same words and same invitations, we don’t move around the room, we do everything we can to avoid shocking or surprising anyone in any way.
There have been times when attendance was consistent, and our group had got to a place when everyone was truly choosing forms and rhythms independent of each other in keeping with how they are feeling. To be moving with autonomy in relation to our feelings felt radical in the setting, radically connected and safe. This sense of personal freedom is possibly healing for some or for the collective. In these moments, something often happens as a fitness enthusiast will join us. He’ll start his sweaty press-ups or impressive muscular dexterity, and his workout will have an instant effect on us all – choice-making disappears, and the dynamic of performative masculinity, performative yoga return, and pedagogical expectations shift. The moment is gone.
As discussed, the heart of TCTSY is non-competitive and non-comparative, but peer pressure showing-off is very compelling and can be really fun. This is an all-male camp, after all. There are tensions between nationality groups historically at war with each other, and prejudices are rife between religious and cultural groups. There are gatekeepers and in-camp power dynamics I try not to get involved with, but I can feel them in these moments of comradely and muscular prowess. The air between us can feel thick with complex relationships, relational tensions, and implicit threats. My TCTSY supervision group noticed I was judging men who brought dynamic workout regimes into Yoga. They encouraged me to be more open about what TCTSY might look like or when it might step aside. That was not my choice to decide. I had fallen into the trap of being the trauma-informed expert dictating what should happen. I am working to stop doing this. In those moments when individuals demonstrate their muscular dexterity, our activity stops being trauma-informed. It has turned into something else, and that is okay. If sweaty cardio workouts are what someone feels like in that moment, what they choose, then that should be fine. Together I have supported one martial artist expert in the group to facilitate his own cardio fitness sessions, which I also attend. That is what choice means.
The main challenge in the TCTSY is to navigate the macho tensions rather than the actual activities that are expressed within. In my own authentic experience, my knee injury helps me as I have adapted by using chairs and going slow. I have found that if I am practicing choices around my own physical vulnerability and genuinely feeling my way through that, then others also take breaks and choose autonomously too.
We have to have another volunteer present at all times for safeguarding. These assistants have pre-existing experiences of yoga that affect the nature of the session by reverting to performative yoga. Ideally, assistants would be TCTSY-Fs or at least have trauma-informed training.
Onsite staff and other volunteers often come into our Yoga space unannounced. This is very disruptive and can break any established atmosphere of predictable safety. Sometimes they will say something, in front of the men, like ‘make sure you collect the mats up or they will disappear’ (explicitly and openly suggesting they will be stolen), creating a power dynamic and separation between them and us. Training and communication to encourage sensitivity and a paradigm shift around power at the barracks are badly needed.
Staff and service-providers are often frustrated and impatient with the Penally residents who they see as ungrateful, aggressive, and lazy. Often the men at Penally sleep until 3 or 4 pm due to insomnia or chronic dissociative lethargy. This can cause tension as staff and service providers to refer to self-care and self-help rhetoric that negatively judge these men as unworthy and disingenuous. Sometimes this expression of agitation and irritability seems to be a symptom of the secondary or vicarious trauma of staff and volunteers who themselves feel helpless and overwhelmed by the lack of services.
Everyone involved at Penally takes on the responsibility with no real power. From our Welsh Prime minister (who has openly ecognized the Home Office for opening Penally, or a volunteer is trying to bring food in but being stopped by security) to the volunteers that support onsite offerings of English lessons and facilitate creative activities. Vicarious trauma and overwhelm are unchecked and pervasive.
The men who join me for TCTSY come from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, West Africa, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, Palestine, Tibet, and El Salvador – to name a few. English proficiency and literacy vary. This linguistic and demographic diversity impacts our communication and the cultural variations of gender, friendship, and authority.
In multilingual groups, I struggled to facilitate using the careful trauma-informed TCTSY relational language I was trained to use – invitational options. I was wordless. Being speechless is a state most trauma survivors can relate to. I tried to learn ‘to choose/choosing’ in all the languages present. I experimented with asking men to translate for me, but I sensed they used an authoritative tone I consciously avoid, and I couldn’t ensure the invitational element was authentically passed-over.
Although we avoid all descriptive language in TCTSY, we have started using animal words. Animals are the closest to a universal language we can find in Penally. In general, snake, cow, cat, dog, butterfly, elephant, and some other nature words like sun, moon, tree, the mountain is known by everyone despite various educational backgrounds. We have started drawing some visual aids together of Yoga shapes too – simple line drawings deliberately in contrast to the western yoga-bodies that proliferate our externally obsessed culture. I am learning a lot about establishing a visual language without suggesting there is a right way to look, do or feel. I have stopped using dog now as it is haram for so many.
Findings
After TCTSY, I prolong locking up and returning the mats in order to allow space for a chat. These can be informal times when we share a box of medjool dates and chat, as I am aware that under COVID-19 lockdown they have little to no social outlets or chances to practice their English. This is often when someone discloses their sleeping problems and physical ailments. TCTSY is not therapy, and I can refer anyone I am concerned about for a welfare report, but those staffs are either ineffectual or incredibly overworked and under-resourced. In truth, unless someone is about to seriously endanger themselves or another, there is nothing appropriate for people living in long-term contingency initial accommodation available in the UK, except prescription drugs.
The TCTSY approach when people start to talk about their challenging feeling and experiences is to validate what they say by listening, holding space but not processing it verbally. Instead, we invite a return to something from the Yoga session, something embodied. We may reflect on a moment they felt something or a shape that seemed to resonate with them interestingly. I do not process these disclosures, but I do now hold more space for them than I have with other groups. I am aware there are no other spaces for personal distress to be witnessed by the collective/community – no church, no temple, no pub, no friendship-circle, no family home. These are not therapeutic spaces, there is no fixing possible in the waiting game of asylum recognition, but listening feels important. TCTSY-F practicing alongside people seeking asylum in contingency accommodation needs some basic listening/counselling skills.
For this reason, our volunteers now attend ‘accidental counselling’ workshops in order to enable helpful but ethical pastoral communication. We practice compassionate listening in these moments because there is no effective signposting available here. There is no multi-lingual psychological support or therapeutic referral pathways. Even if there were capacity for multilingual talk therapies for high-density camps such as Penally, unpacking memories is still too triggering for anyone surviving the tightrope conditions to tolerate. Listening with boundaries and bearing witnessing may be just enough validation. It is important we do not promise more than this.
“The yoga makes me sleep… I have bad energy, and I don’t sleep. Yoga is good energy. I get the bad energy, and then I am here with the good energy I make it go away… This night I sleep.” – H
H is a kind and gentle Sudanese father who is always waiting before we start TCTSY and stays behind afterward. He doesn’t sleep. He shares a bunk bed with a Kurdish man he shares no language with. They do not communicate in their tiny sleeping space. He rings his wife and children in Sudan every day and walks around outside at night on his phone, wandering, lost, and wide awake. He is plagued by headaches, distressing flashbacks, and depression. In TCTSY, we avoid language around self-regulation and healing promises, but I am happy to hear he is experiencing this respite. I express that that is an interesting observation rather than qualify it with value judgments. I do not want to perpetuate the idea that we have an aim here. What I draw from his disclosure is not that he can sleep on those days but that he has noticed a change in how he sleeps in relation to what he is choosing to do with his body. He is noticing how he feels and is making choices around his feelings. That is how TCTSY can, for some, be part of healing from human atrocity.
TCTSY in the community versus clinic
“When I was doing body/action verbs with H, he knew the word ‘breath’ and told me it was because of Yoga.” County of Sanctuary Pembrokeshire (COSP) volunteer community TEFL/ESOL teacher.
TCTSY outside the camps feels very different. The Penally TCTSY sessions began on wellbeing-orientated Sanctuary Days. These community-led Sanctuary Days were a wonderful time of post-traumatic growth through social connection. Local neighbours and asylum seekers came together for walks, picnics and gathered around camp-fires. Stringent COVID lockdowns stopped all social connections, and within days onsite, vandalism and threats of hunger strikes escalated, and reports of self-harm increased.
The social connection appears to be the most important intervention for anyone living destitute, incarcerated, or chronically distressed before anything else. Further exploration is needed to integrate layers of supervision and support within intuitive community response to allow TCTSY to be offered in a safe and ethical way in organic social contexts.
TCTSY cannot be offered in a vacuum. It is an adjunctive intervention, but it grew out of clinical western medical models. Penally, and I imagine many high-density habitations for transitory populations have no primary mental health provision access. Instead, we have community pastoral relationships such as the local Imam, vicar, paternal roles within the camp, and community volunteers. Trauma-care must always come from the collective; no one person can or should ever hold that space alone or go beyond their ability and capacity.
I would like to see research and encouragement in how communities in these crisis settings are in essence, part of healing and how they can be supported. Red flags around safeguarding, vicarious trauma, and boundaries spring to mind, but to respond to historical and on-going trauma, communities need to be empowered to creatively be part of healing them.
Conclusion and Recommendations
“You are a good person, I like yoga because you are a good person.” – A
TCTSY is an appropriate activity for people living in precarious high-density habitations because it is a fundamentally relational activity. Building trust in relationships is perhaps the most useful intervention in this hazardous context.
TCTSY is one of the very few appropriate ways people living in these camps can explore trust, feelings, sensations, control, choice, power relationships without unpacking emotions that cannot be processed suitably.
TCTSY should be offered as a low-dose practice only with the understanding that there is an absence of further supportive interventions available. Suppose TCTSY cannot be integrated with other therapeutic interventions. In that case, alternative ecosystems of support need to be encouraged to intuitively evolve, like our befriending buddy schemes and Sanctuary Day community groups.
Offering TCTSY from within a community context as opposed to a clinical setting could strengthen the relational benefit. We might learn from taking TCTSY out of ecognized contexts and collaborative research trust within communities as part of the healing process.
The designers of the asylum process, those they employ, and volunteers need trauma-informed training to stop perpetuating abusive relationships and systems. Evolving an empathetic ethos needs to be holistically integrated.
‘When the truth is finally ecognized, survivors can begin their recovery.’ – Herman (1992)
“Yoga is for happy man… You have to take away the stress situation, and then I do the Yoga. I don’t want to not feel the stress… I don’t want to feel happy… I want to get out of here. Then I can be a happy man.” – S
S is a young intellectual economist from Syria with twinkly eyes. His English is perfect, and so when he converses, he plays with multiple idioms, perhaps to practice, or maybe they simply tickle him. Chatting with him feels like the conversational equivalent of an Escher painting. We get lost, not knowing where we started or where we are going. He likes to play Devil’s Advocate and embroiders concepts and ideas together whilst simultaneously unpicking them. I struggle to keep up with him, which he clearly enjoys. He has been moved five times in one year, sometimes with 10 minutes' notice and under cover of night whilst seeking asylum. He describes how limited psychological interventions could ever be for asylum seekers in this context.
We must validate his urgency for institutional change first and foremost. Coalitions of NGOs and a consortium of legal and medical experts are working tirelessly alongside activists to expose and overthrow this cruel situation. S reminds me every time we stop for a chat on site of the glaring paradox of my presence there – the camps should be closed, they are not appropriate, he should not be there, and yet somehow we are here, we are human and need to be together to survive what should never be happening. How to fight for change whilst finding ways to survive systemic abuse? Social injustice and personal healing is a complicated dance of balancing resources. These men need to continue to fight. They are not safe yet. They are burning out, the constant waiting, the pervasive uncertainty, the lack of agency, is too much to bare. Respite needs to be part of contingency accommodation as a humanitarian priority.
Any complementary activity with transient populations must be person-centered to allow variety. Some choose high-impact training, some opt for self-regulation breathing techniques like pranayama and meditation to help them relax or sleep, explore choices and feelings in their bodies and maybe visceral or somatic agency, and some sleep all day long. These are all equally valid ways of coping, and there is no one best way to cope.
TCTSY could learn from being more culturally creative as it has high potential in serving people living on the liminal edge of society. Prison camps and detention centres could benefit from applying for community psychosocial support as an alternative to the unavailable clinical interventions.
TCTSY at Penally has offered some present-moment experiences of equality and a foundational experience of human trust that may live on as our friends move on, are hopefully granted refugee status, and start to independently rebuild their lives with the autonomy they deserve.
I would like to thank all the men at Penally for allowing us to stand with them and for teaching us so much about living.
References
Turner, J & Emerson, D (2020) .https://www.traumasensitiveyoga.com/
Herman, J, (1992, pp. ) Trauma and Recovery: the aftermath of violence - from domestic abuse to political terror. (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Basic Books.
Kolk, B. A. van der, (1994). The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1( 5), 253-275.
About the Author
Meriel Goss has 5 years of experience as a TCTSY facilitator and 11 years as a Yoga teacher (BWY Cert.). She also offers TCTSY to individuals via CAMS (young adults living or leaving care), private clients, and in small groups with local mental health drop-in centres or as part of addiction support resources. Email: info@yogaintherapy.com
