On Being Invisible - published in Tribina Bosnjaka

During the war and ethnic cleaning in Bosnia Herzegovina, I am told, many individuals wondered, "Where is the world?" "Does anybody care?" "Can't anybody see what is happening to us?" However, amid the devastation and evil, amid the turmoil which followed, amid the choice to become refugees in the United States, another problem lurked. A similar problem. An unexpected problem. A problem that, for some, can make the war last forever and steal their personal identity in a way that turns life into a lived death. The problem of being invisible.
How does one become invisible? A person becomes invisible when they lose their personal identity. When they lose their place in society with no equivalent replacement. When all their past seems to become useless in facing today and building a future. When they are relocated away from all that is familiar - their land, their country, their society, their lifestyle, their extended family, their means of economic support, their ability to control their own life in ways that are acceptable to who they are as a person. Life becomes a vacuum. A black hole sits in the middle of reality stealing hope, stealing emotional security, and leaving only the black hole of nothingness on which to build the future.

This problem of invisibility for refugees haunts the work of World Relief as a resettlement agency. In a small way, we can help with cultural adjustment. We can point the way to housing, food, and entry level employment. We can assist with signing up for public welfare or disability income. We can listen, and talk, and love, and encourage. But despite these small gifts, when we see persons who are feeling invisible, persons losing hope or without hope, all we can do seems meaningless and unsatisfying. People need more, more than we can do for them or be for them.
This is especially true for many professional people, highly educated people, former leaders, disabled people, single parents, and senior citizens whether from the cities or the villages. Let me offer a few comments on some aspects of this problem. While I realize mine is an outside prospective, not that of a person who is himself a refugee, let me comment of some myths of resettlement, some external barriers to a new life, some internal barriers that sometimes are not recognized, and then, briefly on hope, help, and self-help.

"It isn't so." "I don't care what you were told. It's not that way."
"But - in (Germany, Croatia, Italy, wherever) they told me ..."

These kinds of conversations occur everyday. Some times they are between two persons. Often they are unspoken inside the resettling refugee. Pre-arrival high expectations and unrealistic promises particularly plague professionals and highly educated people. People know what they were told. Leastwise they know what the words meant to them. They know what picture of America, a new life, and opportunity the words formed in their minds. Because these refugees are not the kind of people who are used to misunderstanding or being misunderstood, they may not say what they think. They may fear that speaking out loud might make them look petty or stupid. They may not argue out loud but inside they feel betrayed.

One of the greatest problems in resettlement is incorrect information or incorrect visualization of what information means. People arrive in the United States expecting to quickly or immediately reenter their professions. They have been told that many things and opportunities will be made available to them. That adjustment should be quick maybe even easy for educated people and professionals. Their expectations are high. Too high for reality. Suddenly, this new dream that softened the need to come is crushed. Suddenly the hope that propelled the professional and educated person to resettle betrays them. After the war, after so many traumas, after years of exile or displacement, with the possibility of resettlement, hope dawned. Now once again hope is gone only this time thousands of miles separate them from the homeland, from all they know. Now there is a debt to pay. Money owed for a broken hope, a broken promise. Now there is a stranger custom and a difficult language and isolation.

When you start with nothing but terror, disruption, and nightmares, hope and a vision for a new future become precious treasures. If they are taken away, you again have nothing. When the dream is crushed, when hope betrays the resettling refugee, nothing seems left and the return to nothingness makes their life, their person hood, seem to melt away into invisibleness.

Having arrived. Having escaped the invisibility of betrayed hope. Having not escaped that trap. It does not matter. A refugee professional, like all refugees, soon learns there are other very real barriers. There are barriers outside themselves. Unanticipated barriers. Barriers different from the ones faced when they fled. The ones faced in camps. The ones faced in other countries of refuge. At a time when one's empowerment has been weakened, suddenly external barriers arise that call for tremendous human, emotional, spiritual, mental, and sometimes physical energy.

More than perhaps anywhere else in the world, language becomes a barrier. Americans usually do not know multiple languages, so communication is limited. Likewise Americans are not used to hearing foreign accents or foreign grammatical structures imposed upon English. You may say the right things, but they do not hear. You may even speak in English and not be understood.
Other external barriers are the lack of sufficient public aid to sustain life. Lack of adequate housing. Lack of start up funds for personal items, furniture, and the basics of cooking and housekeeping. There are new bureaucratic requirements many of which require transportation by unfamiliar means into unknown territory. Transportation for personal needs or to access the limited services available is also a problem.

Many individuals must settle into housing they can not afford. Even then they find themselves living in undesirable neighborhoods, high crime areas, areas with some of the greatest population densities in the world. Often these areas do not have access to reasonable basic services and supplies within the community. Locating even the simplest things such as clothing and the food items to which one is accustomed becomes a major task or barrier.

For professionals, the American systems for obtaining need licenses and credentials create extreme barriers. Overseas education and experience often are not accepted or must be supplemented with additional training and experience in the United States. Education is not free here, nor inexpensive. Financial help sufficient to maintain life and family are seldom available. In fact bureaucratic requirements for able bodied persons to go to work, any kind of work, in order to maintain the small public aid given robs individuals of the opportunity to get the education, English language training, or other skill and experiences needed to return to their professional field.

And there are many other external barriers. Some are anticipated. Many are not. They take time. They take energy. They sometimes make personal goals seem empty or hopeless due to the delays the barriers cause and the amount of time it takes just to survive. While in reality these are required first steps to resettlement and return to one's profession, these steps are so basic that they are not easily seen as foundations to anything with meaning. They are certainly not the kinds of steps a professional is used to listing in a life plan and so they do not feel like steps at all. The continuum from relaying a foundation for life to reentry into one's profession is so broad that the beginning seems disconnected from the desired end.

When a person is exhausted. When they are grieving the past. When they are without a foundation for the present. When their emotional, mental, spiritual, and, yes, sometimes physical energies are exhausted or being drained away, persons begin to lose the sense of their own independent being. Their past accomplishments, their former competencies recede into meaningless dreams unable to help them now. Life becomes a shadow of its former reality and even that shadow is being faded away by the demands of external barriers. Exhausted, their life, their person hood, seem to melt into invisibleness.

Again, many persons may escape the trap of betrayed hope and seem to handle well the demands of the external barriers and yet they can suddenly find themselves becoming invisible. Especially educated people, strong leaders, strong people, and professional people get caught by surprise in another set of barriers--internal barriers.

Trauma affects different people different ways. This is true. But trauma affects each person in some way. This is also true. Strong people, former leaders, successful people know this. But they seldom recognize what the past trauma is still doing to them inside. Surviving war, torture, rape, and trauma requires an internal change in how a person thinks, what and how they feel, and when and how they communicate. Old healthy patterns are replaced by new survival patterns. Patterns that are dysfunctional because they grew from the need to live in a dysfunctional situation. Because we are the same outward person we miss the inward changes. Because our image of our self and our expectations for life after trauma are based on what and how we were before, we do not realize how different we have become now and that we do not instinctively make the same decisions or respond in the healthy patterns that created who we used to be.

The most common change is that people do not feel, do not think, and do not talk.

Trauma has made the emotional life too difficult and it shuts down. The trauma situation highlighted many negative emotions and shut down the opportunities to cultivate and keep alive needed healthy emotions. To protect oneself from trauma, and later to protect oneself from the demands of change and loss of control, even more emotions shut down. Often whole ranges of emotion are forgotten and/or repressed. Is it any wonder that victims of trauma don't feel.
In the professional's life before deep meaningful thinking was a constant often unconscious pattern. To survive trauma, to survive massive change beyond their control often required numbing the mind in order to protect the emotions, numbing the mind in order to not be frustrated to despair by one's inability to do anything about the topics of thought or by the inability to apply one's professional knowledge. Now, because thinking was too painful, had negative rewards, was detached from its former reality, or because the memory of trauma invades the subconscious, professional people find numbness more rewarding that thinking. They find the pattern of settling into peaceful numbness has shut down the subconscious activity of the brain. Peaceful numbness becomes a substitute for meaningful creative thought. They not only don't feel, much of the time they also don't think.

Of course both of those changes lead to persons who do not talk. Leastwise they do not talk about anything more than the surface aspects of life or the past trauma. This move to don't talk was of course reinforced by the negative rewards for talking during the war. The need to hide oneself from one's captures and some times from one's fellow citizens in order to minimize the pain or risk. Now it is reinforced by lack of opportunity and by living in a land with a foreign language. It is not surprising that compared to their former healthy self life, professionals become people who don't talk.

Professional people know about trauma. They know about setting goals. They know about deferred dreams for the sake of laying a new foundation to build on. But they forget they are humans who are just as human as the people who do not know these things. They forget that internal change, internal collapse, internal injury are less easily identified. Most people do not realize how trauma and the life changes it produces, also changes their person internal patterns, expectations, freedoms, and enslavements. Don't feel. Don't think. Don't talk. These become the new internal barriers that must be overcome in resettlement, recovery, and reentry into one's professional field.

When you are becoming invisible inside, when you are dying or have died in the inner self, some day, some way, at sometime, it will kill your successes and undermine your outer life. Unfortunately, we are not good at recognizing the symptoms. Because we don't know or see the symptoms, we - our lives - often collapse before we begin to deal with these invisible barriers. When you are invisible inside and then collapse outside, what is left. Without help, you really become invisible.

Do you know what the good thing is about these myths and barriers that cause us to become invisible? The good thing is they can be recognized. We can deal with them. They do not have to be the final word. Oh, I did not say it would be easy. I did not say it would be fast. I did not say we would not lose anything along the way, but the good thing is we can deal with them. There is hope.

The funny thing about hope is that when all hope is gone, all that is left is hope. Hope itself never goes away. We lose touch with hope, but when we need it, it is there. Hope itself is always the first step to recovery and it is--whether we feel it or not--it is always there. The first step to resettling is to have hope. The first step to overcoming the next external barrier is to exercise hope. The first step to tearing down the internal barriers is--whether you feel it or see it or not--believe there is hope. If you can not find it inside yourself to believe, then get help finding hope again. You cannot live without hope. No goal is reached without hope. Recovery can not move forward without hope. Human beings shut down spiritually, then emotionally, then mentally, and, yes, eventually physically without hope. We can not live without it. The next step is never taken without hope. You must believe in and hold onto hope.

If you have hope, you will find there is help. At World Relief, there are people and programs to begin English language training. There are programs for finding initial jobs and then better jobs. There are case managers to assist with overcoming external barriers. There are trained staff to help identify and/or overcome internal barriers. Staff, volunteers, and resettled refugees help you find hope when it seems to get lost. There is help with legal status adjustment and preparing for citizenship. There is help for families and survivors of torture and trauma. There is help with career building in the United States and even help for starting your own business. And World Relief is only one agency among many in the Chicago area. Agencies are only one among may forms of help in our society. It may not be easy. It may not be fast. It will not make trouble go away. It can not take the place of your own effort. But there is help and people like World Relief would love to help you find that help.

Finally, at least in the United States, to resettle, to recover life, to regain your profession, to restore your dignity, to find your new meaning and your new place, you must exercise self-help. We tell our children, "No one is going to hand it to you on a silver platter." That means no amount of money, no amount of government programs, no amount of friends and associates can resettle for you. No one can recover your life for you. No one can hand you back your profession. No one can give you back your self-dignity. No one can find meaning or your new place for you.

Oh people can help. People can make it easier sometimes. We can hold you up and encourage you, but there is no possibility of resettlement and recovery of your life unless you help and continue to help yourself. Hope and self-help are what make all other helps successful.

To return to your profession or to become a new professional, you must take one step at a time. World Relief has identified five broad steps required to build your career in the United States: 1. English as a Second Language training; 2. A first job (remember it may be any job because it is a first not a last job); 3. Obtaining professional education requirements, then certification and endorsements (get a job in your professional field); 4. Join the appropriate unions or associations; and 5. Build the financing needed to own a business in your profession. These can be accomplished. Some take a short time. Some, depending on your goal, may take years. The final one may not even interest you. But not a one of them can happen without self-help and taking one small step at a time regardless of what level you are at.

Amid the devastation and evil of the war, amid the turmoil which followed, amid the choice to become refugees in the United States, the problem of invisibility lurks. If you have not already suffered from its subtle attacks, thank the good Lord above and beware of its symptoms. Remember it is always an unexpected problem. It is a problem that, for some, can make the war last forever and steal their personal identity in a way that turns life into a lived death. But it does not have to be this way. Hold on to hope. If you can't find hope, let someone help you find it again. Look for and accept help. It is not always easy to find, easy to use, or able to make things happen quickly, but find help. And then never stop doing taking the next step. No matter how hard. No matter how humiliating. No matter how unrelated it seems to your end dream. Take that next step. If you do not, you can never get there. Others can help, but no one can take the step for you.

Take that next step. Work hard. Believe in yourself. Exercise patience. And, in time, you will be settled. You will discover one day you have recovered. You will complete the new foundation and you live again as a professional, only this time you will be stronger, better, and making a greater contribution to those of us around you.