In the early 1980s I left my work in Government Social Services and set up a small counselling centre. There, Jenny Biancardi and I saw clients and ran courses. We also travelled all over the country giving trainings to nurses and social workers. We taught people how to communicate with patients and clients as people, rather than as diagnostic categories. This has always been a foundation for my work.

Today we had a wonderful seminar given by Yaya de Andrade, a Brazilian psychologist, who has worked in a wide range of very difficult situations around the world. The seminar was billed as Working with Post-Traumatic Patients. Would she provide a way to deal with this difficult group of clients? Post-Trauma is a term one hears very frequently these days as a diagnostic category. Is there a way of working with post-traumatic patients specifically?

She told us about her model of care. What was most striking and gratifying to me was that there was really nothing in this model of care that was really specific to the post-trauma condition. It was simply a straightforward description of how to treat another human being in a decent and caring manner – any human being, any time, anywhere.

After she had talked about many fascinating cases of working with the victims of harm (people suffering the after-effects of war, torture and natural disasters) somebody asked her if she could say something about working with the perpetrators of harm. Her response made it clear, from her own experience of working with such people, that there is again really no fundamental difference: people are people.

Whether a person is a victim, or is a guilty party is not really the point. The point is that one is caring for a suffering human being. And we all suffer. Dukkha is a universal. Dukkha is in the life of ordinary beings and dukkha is also a truth for Nobel Ones. Enlightened or deluded – we are all in the same boat. The difference lies more in that the Nobel Ones are those who accept this truth and continue undaunted. To understand the Truth of Dukkha is true wisdom.

Our western approach is so often grounded in the question whether an action can be justified or not. It is essentially judgmental. I’ve come to believe that this is a useless question. Whether a person’s actions can be justified or not, they are an outcome of the conditions that impinge upon that person. Although people do do the most stupid things sometimes, there are always reasons, always contributary conditions; and whatever it is, that they have done, it makes sense one way or another. I’m always interested in knowing what that way is.

Whether the person is Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. Whether they are the client who confesses to having committed a murder or the refugee whose parents were murdered, whether it is a nondescript person, who always feared to take the least risk in life, or the bold person, the risk-taker, whose story leaves one wondering how she could possibly have survived through it all – my interest remains the same: beyond the label there is a person.

We all suffer, we are all guilty, we have all sinned.
Compassion is universal
and care and kindness are not really complicated.

Namo Amida Bu
Thank you very much

Dharmavidya
David

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Replies

  • Thank you so much for the transcriptions, Tineke

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