Restoring hope and promoting healing: spiritual and Jungian perspectives on refugee care

The predominant discourse on refugees associates them with "trauma". However, the loss of home is the only common link refugees share. Refugees lose home as a result of various upheavals and suffer many impacts, but not all develop post-traumatic-stress disorder. A multidisciplinary approach is needed to capture their human complexities and to show how they can heal and move towards meaning. Pope Francis' speech to Congress (2015) and his Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (2020) reveal what is needed and how to get there. In his speech the Pope advocates for HOPE and HEALING, while in the encyclical letter for the four actions: WELCOME, PROTECT, PROMOTE and INTEGRATE as the path for achieving these in practice. These have been both my inspiration and the driving force to examine how Refugee Care (RC) as the alternative discourse about refugees, goes about restoring hope and promoting healing. As a result, I have come to appreciate the RC model as a more balanced approach to refugees and to recommend that it is enriched through the spiritual and Jungian frameworks which can hold these perspectives and make them explicit. These frameworks allow for understanding of what religion and spirituality are, how they can be addressed and incorporated into coping. The same goes with the Jungian frameworks: they allow for better understanding of the psyche and its processes, of the role of the unconscious, and the way of working with it in practice. Through analysis and synthesis of the three respective epistemologies attached to these disciplines, I have created a fourth, which reflects the synergy between them. Therefore, this study is a synergetic approach to refugees and attempts to answer questions like: Who are refugees as human beings and what are the misconceptions about them? How does involuntary dislocation impact them? How can refugees be empowered to find hope and healing? What kind of therapeutic approaches are needed and can benefit refugees, therapeutic workers and the community at large?