Page 207 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

176 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

In closing, I want to express my gratitude to the people of South Asia for
their willingness to teach me expanded notions of psychosocial resilience.
Reading into this chapter’s opening excerpt from Jayawickrama, there may
be situations in which “traumatized victims” want neither mental health
interventions nor spiritual care interventions. Some people may simply
want restoration of tangible conditions (livelihood, schools) so that they
can control their destinies and address their inner lives in collaboration
with the people of their choice.
For those people, however, who are open to global exchanges of a psy-
chosocial nature, I will propose we work according to one last guideline:
planetarity.*While not congruent with our current notions of globaliza-

tion, the flattening of the Earth, or being green, my usage of planetarity
is an ethical call for how different people/nations relate to one another,
and when necessary, help one another in times of crisis. With regard
to psychosocial trauma, planetarity stimulates opportunities for demo-
cratic and symmetric relationships of stakeholders innovating optimal
interventions. New species of interventions—ones that no one can imag-
ine just yet—may arise in response to such calls as long as we have open
minds, nondomineering work processes, and curious spirits.

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* From Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003): A sociohistorical call for people to be ethically respon-
sible for each other.