T is for Trauma. And Tea

something I wrote for a friend who asked me to contribute to a d.i.y. health zine she was preparing...

T is for Trauma. And Tea.

Possibly one of the most inspirational projects I’ve ever worked on, the T-Team began as just an idea thrown about in an organising meeting for Queeruption Tel Aviv. There was a suggestion that, considering the event would involve direct actions in the Palestinian Occupied Territories we should organise a safe-space where people could come, chill out, drink tea, and talk to someone after the actions. I got in touch with Lucy who I’d worked together with on the Trauma safe-space at the G8 protests in Scotland and we started to discuss the idea of expanding the Queeruption safe-space into something bigger, longer term and desperately needed – an activist-trauma group for Israel-Palestine. The T-team was born.

A few months later the team had grown to 12 members and we organised ourselves a training programme from friends and contacts in post-trauma, rape-crisis, reiki, street medicine, thai massage, listening skills etc so that we could offer a range of emotional first-aid therapies to activists burnt out, traumatised or otherwise affected by their work in Israel/Palestine. We made contact with other groups, other future trainers, and other activist groups like Anarchists against the Wall and ISM who we hope to work with in the future. We’re still organising the safe-space during Queeruption next month and hope it will provide a good first experience of using our training as a group.

That’s the logistic stuff. But for me the process itself of forming the group and receiving training has been intensely emotional. Much of the training has involved deep emotional work shared with the group. We’ve also put a big focus on group cohesion and bonding events so that at the end of a day of supporting people outside the group, we’re still capable of supporting each other, as activists, and as friends. In the end I think that might be the most important thing to grow out of this beautiful project.

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