'Trauma is not in a vacuum, it’s always in relation to other people'

When did you leave Albania?

26 September 2001. I started in Oxford, and then I went to St Andrews, and then I came to Nottingham, then on to London, Oxford again, Staffordshire, back to Nottingham.

Is the work that you do now grounded in Nottingham as a place? Do you engage with the local community?

I try as much as I can. I have more connections internationally, in Kosovo and Albania, but I'm slowly building networks in Nottingham. Sadly, in terms of trauma, there is a need in Nottingham as well.

I'm working with two organisations. One is East Midlands Councils, doing some research on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and their experience of care and leaving care. It's a six-month project, very intense, really interesting work. The other collaboration is just starting now with Juno, a domestic violence and abuse organisation based in Nottingham and colleagues at Nottingham University.

So the thread through all you do is trauma of various forms.

Yes, but I'm a trauma psychologist and a social psychologist. I look at collective processes, whether it is connection with others, or accessing engagement and satisfaction with services. For the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, it's about the support provided and how it's experienced from both sides: those providing support and those receiving support. 

It is looking at trauma as it has happened, but also how the person is supported in the aftermath, and how they make sense and cope with their experiences. It's not in a vacuum, it's always in relation to other people.

I saw your film ['Blood in the blackbirds' field: A story of war, justice and resilience'] as part of the Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section one-day conference in Leicester, and that was a particularly striking aspect of it – how people are collectively affected by the human rights violations.

Yes. They experience the traumatic events collectively, and they respond to them collectively. People who have gone through war and conflict, they don't have the illusion that this world is safe. They say, 'This could happen. I've seen this happening.' I mean, look at the world now. I can't remember a point in the recent past where there hasn't been some form of war or conflict. It's always there.

Help provided is also collective. Albania has about 3 million people, and during the war, we received about 700,000 refugees within a few months. We were really not prepared, but help was widespread. Albania is very deprived, economically, struggling, having just come out of the Civil War as well. You couldn't not witness it. And when you're so close, there's always that question, 'is this going to spread?' And you live it in a very different way if you were in a neighbouring country and refugees were coming in.

During the Kosovo war, I worked in a refugee camp. I was a student, the first generation of psychologists in Albania, actually, and we were told, 'just do what you can'. You apply, you go to the refugee camp, and you just do what you can. A lot of it is just listening to people's stories, because there isn't very much you can do.

You did much more than just listen. At what point did you decide you wanted to help share and preserve those stories?

There is always that sense that this will be forgotten. I finished working there at the end of the war, and finished my studies. During my PhD, I went back to Kosovo.

I wanted to see the life afterwards, and how people cope with it. There was that sense that people are dying, nothing is happening. We're not learning from this. The next generation is going to experience war again. The absolute need to be heard, to be seen, to be believed, it felt like a responsibility. I can't just leave it. 

I can't just forget about it. In the documentary, which is about missing people, there's a phrase: it feels like the war hasn't ended, you're still fighting with your soul. You have to deal with what you've experienced, and it's still alive. It's still maintained because then you're fighting for justice, and part of justice is documenting and making sure it doesn't happen again. It's absolutely horrendous that you have to hold on to what you have experienced for the good of others, for the good of democracy and peace.

It must be difficult for you, requiring people to relive that trauma. You hesitated over the word 'enjoy'. Do you actually enjoy it, but you don't think it's right to say that? Or in that moment, is it just very painful for them and for you as an extension of that?

I enjoy being a researcher. I love being a researcher.

I can't think of what else I could do. You're creative all the time, there's so much independence in it. Every single day, I learn something new. I enjoy feeling that I'm doing something that matters. But I don't enjoy the trauma at all. Once you start researching trauma, it becomes difficult to then engage with other topics, because you realise how widespread and how impactful it is. 

When I give talks, my voice goes down and becomes sad… let alone what it's doing to the audience. So, I'm mindful that it impacts me. I'm mindful that it impacts students. The first thing I do when I teach is raise awareness of this and give strategies to cope with it. So, I try to create boundaries, but you can't not be affected by it.

Do you get help for that?

All universities have support for staff, but at NTU, there are a few of us involved in research, teaching and practice on the impact of trauma. I think that's the most helpful, peer support. I've learned over the years how to manage the challenges… sometimes better than other times. We all have our own boundaries. Now I have children, there are things I can't engage with very much, around trauma and children. 

It's learning what impacts you the most, and if you're not able to cope with it, you shift. To be honest, working in the psychiatric hospital was much more difficult for me, in part because I was there in a role to help, and I felt I couldn't. With research, your role is to understand and then disseminate that knowledge and education from other people's experiences.

Do the people you've researched with, whose stories you shared in the film, do they feel helped? I remember at the conference you readily admitted that some survivors felt that in the past they had told their stories and these hadn't actually led to justice.

We went back to the survivors, and we gave them a copy of the documentary. This isn't just my work, it's a collaboration including other people who are in Kosova, including Kosova director Gazmend Bajri. We give them the opportunity to engage with us, but in a way, asking for further engagement is also asking for more of their commitment and time and energy. We've tried to do it in such a way that they don't feel that they have to. Take your time. This is here. These are our contacts if you want to debate and engage with this.

It's also important that we're inserting ourselves into daily conversations rather than generating them. When you walk into the village where the documentary is based – into celebrations, family meetings –the war is there. The level of detail that people shared within a few minutes of meeting me was quite amazing.

You couldn't escape it. Children hear all the time about the war. It's inevitable. It's part of it. There's a belief that if you don't educate your children, this happens again. It's that responsibility not only to protect your children, but to protect peace and democracy.

That's such a difficult balance to strike. You're weaving generational trauma into the very fabric of society – it needs to be there, but it's also what is presumably traumatising future generations.

There are layers of this experience. Look at the history of the First World War, Second World War… so much art, museums, the books and the teaching about the wars. So many conversations based around the importance of learning about the past. That's how we learn as humanity. That's what makes us more human… understanding that if you act in certain ways, bad things happen.

Yeah, that's working out well…

But would it work out worse without it? Perhaps our education system is doing more than we think, but there's still more for us to do, so that remembering is part of our humanity.

It becomes a very different conversation if your own ancestors have experienced that conflict and you're still experiencing the negative impact. Our research is asking questions about how the knowledge is passed on: what makes families decide to pass it on, and what impact that has on the new generation in terms of their health and well-being, and the relationship between the new generation and the older generation. 

Our research already shows that there is an increased bond, a better understanding. But at the same time, it's passing the pain of the suffering… we love them and we feel the pain that they experienced. And it's passing the responsibility for justice. It's teaching people that, actually, they are still suffering the consequences. It is making them realise that there are inequalities. Deal with it, don't just forget because it's painful.

You've described it as intense work, and you've said before it has changed the way you see the world.

It's just deeply impressive.

I guess the challenge with academia is not just writing the articles, it's what you do with that knowledge. So I feel there is so much more to do with taking the knowledge forward and creating impact. That's one of the hardest balances – combining our passion for teaching, for research, for wanting to bring positive change, with admin work, generating income, relationships with colleagues, with family life and social life and physical health and mental health.

I have to create boundaries around this work. So it doesn't feel impressive to me… I get upset sometimes that I don't have the time, or sometimes the energy, to take it forward more.

I'm sure you've done more than a lot of people have, but I understand your frustration. What are the next steps?

In terms of dissemination, I would love to hear from your readers if they can help us get the documentary out there and incorporate into teaching and practice as well. If you want to understand how people are affected by war, there are so many elements in the testimonies in the documentary, around justice and gender and communities. 

Relating to the documentary, the questions about intergenerational trauma and trauma and art, are occupying my mind. I desperately want to write them up. But I have to wait until I complete the work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

Tell me about that newer work, then, with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, and did you also mention domestic violence?

The domestic violence work is at the very beginning… we have just recruited a PhD candidate to work on it. I'm really excited about it, and it has so many components of what it is like to work with trauma. It's about how people engage with the service and in peer support, the impact it has on them and how you can support them. 

With the asylum-seeking children project, we have completed the interviews. It is a very holistic project, looking at children who come into the country under 18, and their experience of a legal system, health system, the care system, education system, the opportunities for employment, apprenticeship and so on, their mental health, their physical health. We've spoken with so many different stakeholders to get the bigger picture.

Yours is a very multidisciplinary way of working generally… across history, politics, sociology, human rights, art, literature…

Yes, and that's what makes things take longer! You need to speak to different fields, because we're all doing similar things, like history, sociology, and social work. How can we look only at family sharing stories of trauma, when so much of the media has stories of trauma, when they might feel that they don't have the same opportunities in education and employment because of their background, because their parents would have suffered from trauma, or they would have ended up in care? They're all connected. You can't just look at one system without understanding that this system, these relationships, exist within the wider social system.

From what I know about your work, it seems to me that underlying it is a desire, a need, to consider more than just 'surviving'… it's about how people make the most of awful situations and genuinely live. That requires a multidisciplinary approach to what it means to be fully human.

Absolutely. Take one example, which I think is helpful in illustrating the complexity. Some of the work that I have done, during my PhD but afterwards as well, is on gender-based violence and war. There's a whole literature on the historical and political reasons women and men are targeted through gender-based violence – rape and sexual assault in war. 

They've survived huge potential physical and psychological impact, and then their families and the communities do not know how to support them. In fact, they're further stigmatised. In Kosova, the war ended in 1999, and it's only in 2018 that the survivors can come forward to seek formal recognition as war survivors.

Meanwhile, they haven't told their families, haven't told their communities. You live in a rural area, chances are you don't work, so accessing that level of psychological support to cope with what has happened is difficult if you can't get the right help and recognition, and if you're worried and stigmatised. 

We call this the 'double insult' – they're experiencing further trauma from their communities, sometimes their families, and the state. They're not recognised, they're not supported. There is no justice. So, looking at just what the survivor has experienced and their own individual coping strategies is so limited. Yes, it's important to look at individual responses, but you also need to bring about wider change.