Surviving trauma in exile and the integration-conundrum : navigating therapy and the imperatives of a host(ile?) society

Sammanfattning: “Undesirables” of the contemporary world (Agier, 2008), refugees are often considered “Others” whose lives can be wasted, at deadly borders, in detention centers, or at the margins of societies. Proving their suffering is a condition for accessing the right to asylum, but the current migration policies in the host countries expect them to quickly overcome it, and integrate, as a way to pay back for the protection they received. This is partly because some countries offered protection to refugees as an investment to tackle their own challenges of aging societies, and labor shortages, in other words, to reap the so-called “refugee-dividend” (Hansen, 2021). Thus, refugees face what I call an integration-conundrum whereby they are expected to overcome trauma to integrate _as a needed proof of their deservingness of being accepted_ while healing is a struggle hardened by the instability due to the difficulties of integration, the structural exclusion, and the impossibility of belonging.Through an ethnography of a trauma therapy center for refugees in Sweden, this anthropological study explores the experiences of refugees navigating their pain and sufferings, in a context where the focus is on them overcoming trauma and integrating. It closely analyses the consequences of borders, migration, and integration policies on exiles’ experiences of suffering, resisting, living, and healing. In parallel, it explores the roles of trauma therapy, trauma discourses, and therapeutic apparatuses in the refugees’ journeys, narratives, possibilities for healing, and attempts to lead dignified and fulfilled lives, despite structural exclusion and being “othered”.While trauma used to be mobilized to legitimize the victim status and to identify “real refugees” (Fassin & Rechtman, 2007), this study argues that we are now witnessing a trauma regime of survival. And in the particular case of refugees, this survival paradigm gets intertwined with integration and seems to create new hierarchies and categorizations: the good and the bad refugees, the good being the ones able to survive, overcome their trauma, and integrate into their new communities. The bad are the ones who don’t recover and continue to be a burden on the welfare states, unable to “integrate”. With this categorization, therapeutic spaces take on a new role, one of strengthening the capacities of survival of the “not-yet integrated” refugees, and integration becomes transformed not only into a moral imperative by the host society but also into an individual psychological competency; an equivalent of recovery and survival that refugees need to acquire to prove both their healing and their deservingness.