My Long Journey Home: How the Acadian Exile Shaped My Life as a Therapist

Abstract

Although attachment patterns and early relational interactions are very important in creating implicit and procedural memories, I contend, along with many authors (Gentile, 2010; Sucharov, 2012), that the historical, cultural, political, and social contexts give them meanings. Grounding myself in a relational systems theory of trauma and therapeutic healing (Brothers, 2008), I attempt to capture how a historic traumatic event in my ancestors’ lives, the Acadian Deportation, has shaped and affected my life and work as a therapist. Different themes and meanings—for example, submission and surrender (Ghent, 1990), autonomy and liberation, and restorative efforts in the aftermath of trauma that involve the reduction of complexity (Brothers, 2008)—will be revealed as part of the legacy of the historical traumatic exile and return of my Acadian ancestors. After briefly describing the tragic history of the Acadian people, I retrace my own initiatory, and never completed, journey back home as an Acadian woman therapist, through traumatic submission and its active counterpart, the impulse to dominate. A brief vignette from my work with a patient serves to illustrate how my Acadian heritage is still an active and conflictual process for me.

Notes

¹ See the documentary film Pour la cause (For the cause: A portrait of an open and avantgardist religious community), produced in 2010 by Rodolphe Caron for the National Film Board of Canada.

² A version of this clinical vignette was included in my plenary session presentation at the 35th Annual International Conference on the Psychology of the Self in Washington, DC, October 2012, and has been published in the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (Richard, 2013).

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Notes on contributors

Annette Richard

Annette Richard, M.Ps., is Chair and Co-Founder of the Groupe d’Étude sur l’Intersubjectivité, a Montréal affiliate of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. She is in private practice in Montréal, Québec, Canada.