Introduction
Childhood abuse can pose negative and long-lasting impacts on individuals when not addressed. Individuals who depict traumatic symptoms exhibit some mental conditions that are either conscious or unconscious. Psychodynamic approaches are considered to be among the methods that can be used to assist individuals to cope with their abusive past experiences. Psychodynamic therapy has the potential to influence the emotional well-being and mental challenges that face individuals during childhood.
Incidences of child abuse are relatively high in Arabic countries. Moreover, high incidences of physical and psychological abuse have been recorded among girls more than boys. There has been very little research on the subject of Arab Speaking immigrant women, as a minority group, who experienced childhood abuse and used psychodynamic approaches in their recovery from trauma. It has been indicated that psychodynamic approaches are some of the most significant aspects that can be used in assisting those who had traumatic experiences during their childhood. In the US, Arab speaking women who use psychodynamic approaches in healing from child abusive experiences have not studied significantly (Al-Maross, 1997).
Through this research study, I seek to illuminate the role that psychodynamic approaches have had in the process of healing the wounds of childhood trauma and deduce the clinical significance of psychodynamic strategies in the lives of Arabic Speaking immigrant women. I will explore the psychological state of the participants from childhood to adulthood. I will also distinguish the main themes contained in the narrative of the research participants and interpret their potential meaning for individuals and their psyche, as well as for humanity.
The purpose of this study will be to investigate the personal understanding of life experiences of Arabic-speaking immigrant women who experienced trauma as children. This study will include stories of using psychodynamic approaches as a coping mechanism in the women’s recovery. Narrative inquiry methodology will be used to ensuring a better understanding of their lived experiences and clinical implications for individuals and clinical professionals. These stories will be a collective account that will include but not limited to life stages of these women, their childhood memories, and stages of transition through different life stages. I am seeking to understand how those women made sense of their childhood events throughout their journey to recovery as they turned to psychodynamic to maintain calm within their lives.
Relevance for Clinical Psychology
There has been a significant increase in the immigrant Arab population in the US. Results from the 2000 census indicated that the number of American Arabs was slightly over one million. Other studies have indicated that there are over three million Arab Americans in the US (Ahmed, Keating, & Tsai, 2011). Despite the increasing number of Arabs in the US, there is limited information on Arab Americans regarding their shared experiences and how this affects their mental health. The lack of adequate research on this population calls for the need for increased studies that will help in the creation of sufficient therapeutic models for treatment. The American Mental Health Association and the American Counselors Association have been on the forefront in calling for cultural specific research in mental health. However, very few studies have been carried out on the mental health needs of the Arab Americans. This study will purpose to investigate the personal understanding of the life experiences of Arab immigrant women who experienced trauma as children. The study will focus on the use of psychodynamic approaches as a means to cope with the traumatic experiences during childhood.
Personal interest statement
The researcher of this study is an Arab Speaking American woman, who seeks to present a deeper understanding of this under-studied population. The researcher aspires to utilize her academic skills and cultural background of her understanding to the culture she shares with the participants in this study. It is the intention of the researcher to present appropriate and accurate findings from this study in order to present necessary and needed scholarly research in the field of psychology that is focused on multicultural counseling. The researcher is also hopeful that women participating in this study will find more understanding to their healing process in narrating their own heroic stories regarding their survival. The focus of this research will be on the clinical significance and implication of psychodynamic approaches in understanding childhood abuse experiences among Arabic Speaking immigrant women.
Literature Review
Among Arab-Americans, healing is often considered a journey towards completeness. Similar to people from other cultural background, completeness entails bringing the broken fragments of lives back together. This is especially for individuals who experienced childhood trauma. In a recent research, Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado (2012) assessed 4, 467 Arab students for experiences of abuse by their parents, and others, using standard scales on multiple types of abuse. More than 68% of the students that participated in the research reported that they have been exposed at least six times. The research also supports that girls had a significantly higher scores of abuse than boys (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012).
In the Arab conservative culture, child abuse is relatively prevalent and widely experienced among Arab children by caretakers and others. There are noteworthy cultural obstacles in Arab countries that make society content regarding the subject of child abuse. According to the UN Committee, there is a lack of a specific prohibition in the legislation system in these countries when it comes to punishing children (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012). The authors of the research also concluded that in this part of the world children are exposed to several types of abuse, and that this huge problem is ignored by society in general as a form of discipline. There is a lack of nationwide studies on the subject of childhood abuse and its negative effect from those countries (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012).
The 2000 US Census estimated Americans of Arab ancestry living in the United States in 2000 to be about 1.25 million. Other resent resources estimated a higher number of 3.5 million Arab Americans living in the U.S. It is vital to consider socio cultural adversities as well as cultural resources because both account for a huge amount of variables when it comes to psychological distress. Additionally, Arab Americans are at high risk from distress due to ethnic minority immigration status, religion, social marginalization, and language (Ahmed, Keating, & Tsai, 2011). It is extremely important to access cultural resources for this under-served group in order to decrease the level of distress among Arab Americans.
Philosophical and theoretical background
Psychodynamic Therapy focuses on the unconscious aspects that are exhibited in the patient’s behavior. The main objective of psychodynamic therapy is to promote self awareness among patients and ensure that the influence of the past experiences on the present behavior is well understood. Essentially, this approach of treatment ensures that clients are able to review the unresolved conflicts that emanates from the dysfunctional past. It has been noted that psychodynamic strategies aims at promoting personality coherence, as well as the healthy development of an individual, as opposed to focusing on the alleviation of the symptoms alone. Psychodynamic therapy is one of the earliest forms of therapies that are in use in the modern times. The psychodynamic forms of therapy are embedded in the psychoanalytic theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud. There are various perspectives of psychoanalytic theory and all of them have had an influence on the psychodynamic therapy. The various perspectives include the Freudian perspective, the Ego Psychology perspective, the Object Relations perspective, and the Self Psychology perspective.
Purpose statement
The proposed study is a narrative analysis of Arabic-speaking immigrant women who experienced verbal, physical, or sexual abuse as children. The focus will be on the role of psychodynamic approaches in their recovery process. This narrative study intends to identify and examine various psychodynamic approaches that the immigrant Arabic-speaking women adopted in addressing there previous traumatic experiences. Individual stories need to be told to gain personal experiences from the women who have experienced childhood abuse first hand. Although there is a large amount of literature on child abuse on minority groups, no substantial literature exists on Arabic-Speaking immigrant women.
Research Questions
What do participants understand by participants understand regarding psychodynamic therapy? How did participants use psychodynamic approaches to survive childhood trauma? To what degree were the participants able to integrate their understanding of the meaning of psychodynamic therapy?
Methodology
The narrative Inquiry method will be used for the purpose of this study. This method is the most suitable because it will reveal the participants’ understanding of their own life experience in their recovery from childhood abuse. Three Arabic Speaking women will be interviewed three times for two hours to collect the narrative of their stories. Narrative inquiry facilitates the re-telling of an individual’s story as data to describe human experiences. Narrative inquiry utilizes interpretation to understand human experience. In this study, the research will obtain data about the participants’ experiences from those women’s life stories, and will compare themes that emerge in the participants’ stories. The researcher will involve participants in creating annals and chronicles to help create a framework on which the oral stories are constructed (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
Participants
Participants in this study will be Arabic speaking women. Three women will be interviewed three times for a total of two hours each session to gather the necessary data. The Arab American participants will be adult women (18 years and above). The participants could be born in the United States, but they have to be from any Arab country. This study will be focused on the experience of Arabic Speaking women who experienced abuse in their childhood and used psychodynamic therapy in their journey to recovery.
Data Collection
Potential participants will learn about this study through flyers that will be posted in the Arab American Association website, mosques, and by word-of-mouth. The purpose of the study will be explained in details to all participants. A preliminary phone interview will be conducted with each participant before conducting face-to-face interviews. The phone interview will aim at obtaining a short history and descriptive information from participants. Data will be collected from semi-structured and open-ended interviews that focus on spiritual healing from abuse to recovery. Confidentiality agreements will be signed for the protection of the privacy of all participants in the study. The interviews will be audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by using ATLAS software.
Data Analysis
The researcher will be closely listening, repeat the listening of the recorded interviews multiple times, and transcribing to reach a deeper understanding and insight into the participants’ personal experience. After the recording of the interviews is transcribed; field notes will be made as the researcher reads, listens, and re-listens to the recordings, and read the field text of the women’s stories. The researcher will examine the meaning encoded in the interviews, and expand outward. The aim of this process is to identify the underlying propositions that make the words of the participants sensible in order to construct a chronicled or summarized account of what is contained in the data collected. The compilation of the analysis will be directly linked to the research questions. The initial analysis will deal with character, place, tension, plot, end point and tone. Narrative codes will be used such as places where events and action took place, story lines that interweave and interconnect gaps or silences that take place, tension that emerge, and continues and discontinues during the interviews. The researcher will examine patterns, narrative threads, tensions, and themes that will arise across the participant’s experience in their social setting (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
The themes that will emerge will be grouped and identified into categories. As the data is reviewed, the categories will be inductively identified directly from the participants, and not from the researcher’s preconceived preset themes. Qualitative analysis is not only used to identify categories that provide identity to specific factors from the data collected, but it seeks a deeper level of analysis that identifies the connections or the relationships that hold between and among those categories. This is aimed at revealing how those categories are linked to each other. Those relationships will be interpreted from each participant’s data to better understand their personal experience.
Reflexivity
The researcher is an Arabic Speaking American woman who will be able to listen and understand the stories told by the participants in this study. The shared gender and ethnic background may create an atmosphere of trust that will draw further crucial data necessary for this study. In this respect, there is a close understanding of the culture and the background that is common between the researcher and the participants. Therefore, the interpretations and the findings might be more accurate and culturally appropriate in this study. The researcher will seek to recognize her preconceived themes in order not to influence the authenticity of the study.
Ethical Considerations
Efforts will be made to ascertain privacy and preclude harm to all participants in this study. Participants will sign a consent form explaining the procedures, benefits, risks and rights of all participants prior to their participation in the interview. Details of the research and its purpose will be explained and discussed thoroughly by the researcher. Each participant will be assigned an alias that will be used in the research to guarantee confidentiality, and all identifying information will be removed from the study. Participant-generated materials, such as the recordings of the interviews, will be stored in a safe location in the researcher’s home office. The data collected will be discarded after five years in order to avoid any misuse of the data by other researchers. Participants will be notified that during the research, they may experience emotional problems and that they have the option to withdraw from the study at any time, and withdraw the information that was gathered during the research. If participants need emotional support because of participation in the study, the researcher will provide them with referrals to therapists in their area. Childhood abuse can pose negative and long-lasting impacts on individuals when not addressed. Individuals who depict traumatic symptoms exhibit some mental conditions that are either conscious or unconscious. Psychodynamic approaches are considered to be among the methods that can be used to assist individuals to cope with their abusive past experiences. Psychodynamic therapy has the potential to influence the emotional well-being and mental challenges that face individuals during childhood.
Incidences of child abuse are relatively high in Arabic countries. Moreover, high incidences of physical and psychological abuse have been recorded among girls more than boys. There has been very little research on the subject of Arab Speaking immigrant women, as a minority group, who experienced childhood abuse and used psychodynamic approaches in their recovery from trauma. It has been indicated that psychodynamic approaches are some of the most significant aspects that can be used in assisting those who had traumatic experiences during their childhood. In the US, Arab speaking women who use psychodynamic approaches in healing from child abusive experiences have not studied significantly (Al-Maross, 1997).
Through this research study, I seek to illuminate the role that psychodynamic approaches have had in the process of healing the wounds of childhood trauma and deduce the clinical significance of psychodynamic strategies in the lives of Arabic Speaking immigrant women. I will explore the psychological state of the participants from childhood to adulthood. I will also distinguish the main themes contained in the narrative of the research participants and interpret their potential meaning for individuals and their psyche, as well as for humanity.
The purpose of this study will be to investigate the personal understanding of life experiences of Arabic-speaking immigrant women who experienced trauma as children. This study will include stories of using psychodynamic approaches as a coping mechanism in the women’s recovery. Narrative inquiry methodology will be used to ensuring a better understanding of their lived experiences and clinical implications for individuals and clinical professionals. These stories will be a collective account that will include but not limited to life stages of these women, their childhood memories, and stages of transition through different life stages. I am seeking to understand how those women made sense of their childhood events throughout their journey to recovery as they turned to psychodynamic to maintain calm within their lives.
Relevance for Clinical Psychology
There has been a significant increase in the immigrant Arab population in the US. Results from the 2000 census indicated that the number of American Arabs was slightly over one million. Other studies have indicated that there are over three million Arab Americans in the US (Ahmed, Keating, & Tsai, 2011). Despite the increasing number of Arabs in the US, there is limited information on Arab Americans regarding their shared experiences and how this affects their mental health. The lack of adequate research on this population calls for the need for increased studies that will help in the creation of sufficient therapeutic models for treatment. The American Mental Health Association and the American Counselors Association have been on the forefront in calling for cultural specific research in mental health. However, very few studies have been carried out on the mental health needs of the Arab Americans. This study will purpose to investigate the personal understanding of the life experiences of Arab immigrant women who experienced trauma as children. The study will focus on the use of psychodynamic approaches as a means to cope with the traumatic experiences during childhood.
Personal interest statement
The researcher of this study is an Arab Speaking American woman, who seeks to present a deeper understanding of this under-studied population. The researcher aspires to utilize her academic skills and cultural background of her understanding to the culture she shares with the participants in this study. It is the intention of the researcher to present appropriate and accurate findings from this study in order to present necessary and needed scholarly research in the field of psychology that is focused on multicultural counseling. The researcher is also hopeful that women participating in this study will find more understanding to their healing process in narrating their own heroic stories regarding their survival. The focus of this research will be on the clinical significance and implication of psychodynamic approaches in understanding childhood abuse experiences among Arabic Speaking immigrant women.
Literature Review
Among Arab-Americans, healing is often considered a journey towards completeness. Similar to people from other cultural background, completeness entails bringing the broken fragments of lives back together. This is especially for individuals who experienced childhood trauma. In a recent research, Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado (2012) assessed 4, 467 Arab students for experiences of abuse by their parents, and others, using standard scales on multiple types of abuse. More than 68% of the students that participated in the research reported that they have been exposed at least six times. The research also supports that girls had a significantly higher scores of abuse than boys (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012).
In the Arab conservative culture, child abuse is relatively prevalent and widely experienced among Arab children by caretakers and others. There are noteworthy cultural obstacles in Arab countries that make society content regarding the subject of child abuse. According to the UN Committee, there is a lack of a specific prohibition in the legislation system in these countries when it comes to punishing children (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012). The authors of the research also concluded that in this part of the world children are exposed to several types of abuse, and that this huge problem is ignored by society in general as a form of discipline. There is a lack of nationwide studies on the subject of childhood abuse and its negative effect from those countries (Al- Fayez, Ohaeri & Gado, 2012).
The 2000 US Census estimated Americans of Arab ancestry living in the United States in 2000 to be about 1.25 million. Other resent resources estimated a higher number of 3.5 million Arab Americans living in the U.S. It is vital to consider socio cultural adversities as well as cultural resources because both account for a huge amount of variables when it comes to psychological distress. Additionally, Arab Americans are at high risk from distress due to ethnic minority immigration status, religion, social marginalization, and language (Ahmed, Keating, & Tsai, 2011). It is extremely important to access cultural resources for this under-served group in order to decrease the level of distress among Arab Americans.
Philosophical and theoretical background
Psychodynamic Therapy focuses on the unconscious aspects that are exhibited in the patient’s behavior. The main objective of psychodynamic therapy is to promote self awareness among patients and ensure that the influence of the past experiences on the present behavior is well understood. Essentially, this approach of treatment ensures that clients are able to review the unresolved conflicts that emanates from the dysfunctional past. It has been noted that psychodynamic strategies aims at promoting personality coherence, as well as the healthy development of an individual, as opposed to focusing on the alleviation of the symptoms alone. Psychodynamic therapy is one of the earliest forms of therapies that are in use in the modern times. The psychodynamic forms of therapy are embedded in the psychoanalytic theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud. There are various perspectives of psychoanalytic theory and all of them have had an influence on the psychodynamic therapy. The various perspectives include the Freudian perspective, the Ego Psychology perspective, the Object Relations perspective, and the Self Psychology perspective.
Purpose statement
The proposed study is a narrative analysis of Arabic-speaking immigrant women who experienced verbal, physical, or sexual abuse as children. The focus will be on the role of psychodynamic approaches in their recovery process. This narrative study intends to identify and examine various psychodynamic approaches that the immigrant Arabic-speaking women adopted in addressing there previous traumatic experiences. Individual stories need to be told to gain personal experiences from the women who have experienced childhood abuse first hand. Although there is a large amount of literature on child abuse on minority groups, no substantial literature exists on Arabic-Speaking immigrant women.
Research Questions
What do participants understand by participants understand regarding psychodynamic therapy? How did participants use psychodynamic approaches to survive childhood trauma? To what degree were the participants able to integrate their understanding of the meaning of psychodynamic therapy?
Methodology
The narrative Inquiry method will be used for the purpose of this study. This method is the most suitable because it will reveal the participants’ understanding of their own life experience in their recovery from childhood abuse. Three Arabic Speaking women will be interviewed three times for two hours to collect the narrative of their stories. Narrative inquiry facilitates the re-telling of an individual’s story as data to describe human experiences. Narrative inquiry utilizes interpretation to understand human experience. In this study, the research will obtain data about the participants’ experiences from those women’s life stories, and will compare themes that emerge in the participants’ stories. The researcher will involve participants in creating annals and chronicles to help create a framework on which the oral stories are constructed (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
Participants
Participants in this study will be Arabic speaking women. Three women will be interviewed three times for a total of two hours each session to gather the necessary data. The Arab American participants will be adult women (18 years and above). The participants could be born in the United States, but they have to be from any Arab country. This study will be focused on the experience of Arabic Speaking women who experienced abuse in their childhood and used psychodynamic therapy in their journey to recovery.
Data Collection
Potential participants will learn about this study through flyers that will be posted in the Arab American Association website, mosques, and by word-of-mouth. The purpose of the study will be explained in details to all participants. A preliminary phone interview will be conducted with each participant before conducting face-to-face interviews. The phone interview will aim at obtaining a short history and descriptive information from participants. Data will be collected from semi-structured and open-ended interviews that focus on spiritual healing from abuse to recovery. Confidentiality agreements will be signed for the protection of the privacy of all participants in the study. The interviews will be audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed by using ATLAS software.
Data Analysis
The researcher will be closely listening, repeat the listening of the recorded interviews multiple times, and transcribing to reach a deeper understanding and insight into the participants’ personal experience. After the recording of the interviews is transcribed; field notes will be made as the researcher reads, listens, and re-listens to the recordings, and read the field text of the women’s stories. The researcher will examine the meaning encoded in the interviews, and expand outward. The aim of this process is to identify the underlying propositions that make the words of the participants sensible in order to construct a chronicled or summarized account of what is contained in the data collected. The compilation of the analysis will be directly linked to the research questions. The initial analysis will deal with character, place, tension, plot, end point and tone. Narrative codes will be used such as places where events and action took place, story lines that interweave and interconnect gaps or silences that take place, tension that emerge, and continues and discontinues during the interviews. The researcher will examine patterns, narrative threads, tensions, and themes that will arise across the participant’s experience in their social setting (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
The themes that will emerge will be grouped and identified into categories. As the data is reviewed, the categories will be inductively identified directly from the participants, and not from the researcher’s preconceived preset themes. Qualitative analysis is not only used to identify categories that provide identity to specific factors from the data collected, but it seeks a deeper level of analysis that identifies the connections or the relationships that hold between and among those categories. This is aimed at revealing how those categories are linked to each other. Those relationships will be interpreted from each participant’s data to better understand their personal experience.
Reflexivity
The researcher is an Arabic Speaking American woman who will be able to listen and understand the stories told by the participants in this study. The shared gender and ethnic background may create an atmosphere of trust that will draw further crucial data necessary for this study. In this respect, there is a close understanding of the culture and the background that is common between the researcher and the participants. Therefore, the interpretations and the findings might be more accurate and culturally appropriate in this study. The researcher will seek to recognize her preconceived themes in order not to influence the authenticity of the study.
Ethical Considerations
Efforts will be made to ascertain privacy and preclude harm to all participants in this study. Participants will sign a consent form explaining the procedures, benefits, risks and rights of all participants prior to their participation in the interview. Details of the research and its purpose will be explained and discussed thoroughly by the researcher. Each participant will be assigned an alias that will be used in the research to guarantee confidentiality, and all identifying information will be removed from the study. Participant-generated materials, such as the recordings of the interviews, will be stored in a safe location in the researcher’s home office. The data collected will be discarded after five years in order to avoid any misuse of the data by other researchers. Participants will be notified that during the research, they may experience emotional problems and that they have the option to withdraw from the study at any time, and withdraw the information that was gathered during the research. If participants need emotional support because of participation in the study, the researcher will provide them with referrals to therapists in their area.
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