Introducing our mixed-gender therapeutic support groups
News 23 February 2015
When Room to Heal began in 2007, it took the form of a weekly social gardening session at the Culpeper Community Garden attended by a handful of men, and facilitated by our Founder and Director Mark Fish. Following our first ever major grant from Comic Relief in 2009, our fledgling community grew to include women as well as men, and from that point onwards, we ran single-gender therapeutic support groups on different days, with all of our staff and community members coming together at Culpeper on a Friday to tend our small plots together, and share a meal around the fire.
Eight years later, Room to Heal has blossomed into a varied, vibrant community of more than eighty men and women from all over the world, supported by numerous private donors, the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, and the City Bridge Trust, among others. What we have learned over these last eight years is that our members have much more in common than single-gender therapeutic support groups might suggest, from the events that forced them to flee their home countries, and the devastating symptoms of trauma that they continue to endure, to their struggles through the asylum process, and their hard work to rebuild their lives in the UK. In the course of our mixed-gender activities – intensive therapeutic rural retreats, creative activities, and our weekly Culpeper session – members of both groups have expressed a desire to work more closely and regularly together, in a formal therapeutic setting.
Following a successful time-limited, mixed-gender pilot therapeutic support group, which ran from October – December 2014, as of 2015 we no longer run separate men’s and women’s groups. Instead, we run two mixed-gender groups concurrently on a Tuesday morning, both of which are open to new and longer-term members of the community. The groups are facilitated by four specialist trauma therapists, some of whom have both been at Room to Heal for several years, and of whom others – Ahmet Caglar and Kirstin Hubert – recently joined us in 2014, bringing with them a great deal of clinical expertise and enthusiasm.
These new mixed-gender groups are carefully facilitated and supervised. As with all of our activities, we actively invite our members’ reflections and feedback, through our annual general questionnaire, fora such as our quarterly community meeting, and ongoing informal discussions. For women who have suffered gender-based persecution and continue to have difficulty interacting with men in the wider world, to men who have experienced sexual violence, or are struggling to come to terms with the loss of wives, mothers, and children, we hope that these mixed-gender groups will act as a crucible for deep and enduring healing.
This change represents significant and welcome progress in consolidating several years of learning, and in the flourishing of the Room to Heal community as a whole. If you would like to join our community, or refer someone you know or work with, please take a look at our referral pages here, or email Tom Mayer at tom@roomtoheal.org.uk.