Getting back to the garden

The MF considers some 2,000 new referrals every year of people seeking help as a result of torture in their home countries.  It offers medical consultation, psychological support, legal documentation of injuries and practical help.  Doctors, caseworkers, counsellors and psychotherapists are all part of its staff.

Sixteen years ago, a number of gardens were established across London for clients of the MF to work in.

Mary Raphaely, co-ordinator of the MF’s Natural Growth Project, describes the work as follows:

‘Nature, with its cycles of growth and decay, provides a ready metaphor, access to the healthy part of our clients, restoring some balance to their lives and preventing a complete collapse into illness and despair. It allows a re-engagement with their pre-traumatic capacities. Nature itself becomes the means of communication, transcending widely diverse cultures and languages.’

The clients of the MF are asylum seekers or refugees who have to deal with the bureaucracy of their present situation as well as the scars of the past.  Some will still be fighting for leave to remain in the UK, many will be damaged physically as well as psychologically.  Few will have fluent English.  All of these factors make it unlikely that traditional psychotherapeutic approaches will be of much help.

The MF has several plots of land - one is based in its London headquarters where work begins with some of the most acutely traumatised clients.  There are an additional two sections of public allotments in Ealing and Colindale where clients can work on the gardens every day if they wish, but are at least committed to come once a fortnight, when they work alongside a professional gardener and a psychotherapist. 

One of the psychotherapists is Jochen Encke.  He says it is a very different experience from his conventional practice. 

'I'm quite a traditional 'fixer' in the sense that I've worked for 27 years in private practice doing one-to-one talking psychotherapy.  Then when I started this project 2 years ago I was confronted with people who firstly hardly spoke any English and secondly didn't come from a background which was suitable for psychotherapy in the traditional sense.  They were actually so damaged they were not able to talk about things.  And so I was with them in nature with a spade and some seeds, and I started off digging with them.  Often they came very, very distraught to the allotment.  Sometimes I was able to talk a little bit, but basically I said "Well let's not talk, let's dig, let's see what happens here".

'It was quite a challenge for me because my instinct, especially when I got a bit insecure, was that I didn't know what to do with these very distraught people.  I asked them how they were and what they were doing and went back into my safe thinking, analysing, talking mode.  But more and more, I could see that by being with them on the allotment, they got distracted by things, ridiculous things.

'There was one guy distraught with pain - it was physical pain - so we sat in the middle of the plot, and as we were sitting there, a robin appeared and sat on his shoe.  And something suddenly shifted - we looked at it, looked at each other and smiled and then he said "God, this is the first smile I've had for months."  

Encke says working at the allotments has altered how he approaches the pain of his clients and has affected his private practice too. 

'It's so tempting to go back where it's painful - if I hurt my leg I  hold it.  But I also think that behind all the pain and suffering there's something within us which is immensely powerful and is not touched by the pain we have seen or endured, and that's when I call it the soul.  It's something in us which is absolutely healthy and we forget about it.  With refugees and torture victims in particular, we focus so much on their pain that we forget their personalities. 

'There are practical matters we need to deal with  - getting them through the whole legal system - and then we need to talk with them about their suffering.  But I think the allotment should mostly be a space for the soul to open up and breathe again.  And so when a robin landed on this man, we were suddenly connected with nature, something much bigger than individual suffering.

Refugees are often drawn to work in the garden because it is something they can still enjoy from the past.  Many may have been farmers in their own countries.  It allows the MF to reach people who they may not be able to engage in any other way.

'I have one couple in particular: she is severely paranoid and depressed and doesn't talk at all, and her husband has great difficulties with his own problems.  There was no way we could sit them in a consulting room - they wouldn't even enter the office, they were so terrified of any official building.  So it was obvious to give them a little shed, a little bit of land and say "well do something then".  Over the months you could see how slowly she came out of her shell. 

'I think one of the most moving moments ever in my life was a hot summer about a year ago. I encouraged her to use a hose to water her plants and she did it, but her eyes were really cold and frightened, with no contact.  And then I encouraged her to splash my feet, she splashed my feet, no emotional response.  But suddenly it was as if somebody switched her lights on, her eyes flickered, first her eyes.  Then she took her hose and soaked me from head to toe and screamed with laughter.  I had never heard voice before, or her laugh.'

 This isn't the story then of swift, radical transformations.  But it does offer the MF a very simple structure for dealing with the 'whole life' difficulties of people who may feel unreachable in any other way.  For Encke, it's led him away from a straightforwardly interventionist approach: 'Where there's a problem I want to do something, and in nature if there's a problem we stay with it, we don't do anything and maybe we don't focus on it, we do something else'.

Get a complete picture of the work of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture on their website.