Prepared for a journey into wounded communities – and into the self

Abstract

Abstract Community development workers inevitably engage with communal wounding, inflicted over generations by systemic oppression and deprivation. By ignoring this complexity and focussing on surface-level activities, we can unconsciously inflict new wounds. Or, we can consciously engage with the wounds and facilitate healing. The latter implies a complex process, because a journey into the heart of community implies that the workers look into the mirror of their own lived experiences and thereby becomes a journey into the self. Careful preparation of the workers is thus critical. The complexity of in-depth work with communities receives limited recognition in the literature; with the result that there is gap in research on the deliberate and systematic preparation of workers for such work. The aim of the article is to identify critical aspects of such preparation. A family support programme in South Africa was used as case study. The article suggests the healing journey of the workers (‘start-with-self’) as the basis of the approach. Increased self-knowledge is used to guide content and facilitation and protect workers from projecting unconscious issues onto participants’ processes, conflating the different journeys and compounding the fear-to-risk. The benefits of reflection/mirroring, metaphors, integrating the insider/outsider roles and ‘healing questions’ are discussed. The mentor plays a critical role. The article concludes that communal wounds cannot be allowed to fester; instead it is possible and critical to prepare workers to engage with integrity with intergenerational wounding, thereby limiting the unconscious inflicting of new wounds to the community and the worker.