Exile, post-traumatic life desire, and therapeutic empowerment

Empowerment can be considered a traveling concept, present in several spheres from community psychology to international development, with different definitions, theories, and applications. It became salient in interventions targeting marginalized and vulnerabilized communities. Through an ethnographic study of a trauma-therapy center for exiles in Sweden, this paper explores how psychotherapy, in addition to focusing on trauma, took on a new role of “women empowerment.” It analyzes the forms of power and empowerment in the trajectories of women exiles and the therapeutic space and encounter. With a lens that is attentive to life-desire, a concept developed by Eva Tuck, contrasting with the damage-lens that marginalized and exiled populations are usually portrayed through, this paper attempts to unfold how the therapeutic space became a space where new subjectivities of “empowered women exiles” emerged, and how they were sustained despite the structural barriers and challenges to fulfilling the lives they tend to live. Through the psychotherapeutic process, the women and their therapists construct selves aware of their strength and desire, and oriented away from “traditional interdependence” and toward “modern autonomy,” raising questions of how much control over their lives they are allowed to have but also illustrating the opportunities and limitations of therapeutic tools and practices.