Running from Kabul: Hopes, Dreams, and Nightmares

ABSTRACT

I present a portrait of my ongoing work with Zarmina, a female Afghan student who escaped Kabul after the Taliban takeover and is now a refugee and student in New York. I consider the traumatic impact for her of growing up in a combat zone, living under a fundamentalist regime, leaving her family, and becoming a refugee. I also parse ways that culture, race, my unconscious stereotypes, and my family history emerge in our work, and the double consciousness and profound grief and loss that mark her new life in New York. I reflect on who we have become to each other and the enactments and silences that that have emerged as we each try to protect the other from sadness and disappointment. Finally, drawing on work with combat veterans, I consider what the future might hold as we confront the anguish, loss, and terror of all she has experienced.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Spyros Orfanos for developing the project that connected me to Zarmina, and for the support and encouragement of my colleagues in the Human Rights Work Group at the NYU Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. But most of all, I am grateful to the woman I here call Zarmina for opening her mind and heart to me, and for allowing me to share her story and our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Many veterans speak of Post Traumatic Stress (Bassin, 2017); it is not a disorder; rather it is a reaction to a brutal reality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Sandow Lyons

Lisa Lyons, Ph.D. is on the teaching and supervisory faculty of the New York University Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she is Co-Director of the Human Rights Work Group. She is also on the faculties of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and the Kyiv Institute of Relational Psychoanalysis. She has written and published, through a Relational and Object relations lens on topics including Political Repression, Inter-generational Transmission of Trauma, Dissociation, Integration of Relational Psychoanalysis and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and work with combat soldiers. She is in private practice in New York City and Teaneck, NJ.