The trauma counselor trainings: Promoting the community-based psychological care and services in Myanmar

EMDR Myanmar Association in collaboration with EDMR Cambodia Association, Trauma-Aid, Tdh Germany and BMZ has been providing the system building of trauma treatment and therapy under the projects named Mekong 2 and 3, benefitting 46 EMDR therapists, 21 Trauma Counselor Trainers and providing the services for more than 1,100 clients in the past 5 years. Being a third world country, the health seeking behaviour in Myanmar is low, like most of the Asian countries and the number of clients seeking the EMDR as well as other professional psychotherapy is very limited due to lack of awareness, even though trauma related disorders are very abundant in the community. In order to bridge these and fill this gap, the Mekong 3 project designed and developed the specialised “Trauma Counselor Training”, a sister therapy of EMDR, as it is based on the “adaptive information processing model”, the fundamental component of EMDR therapy. The objective of this training is to train the para-professional from the community-based organizations to reach to the unreached population and strengthen the referral from community to the mainstream EMDR Therapy. This training also provides various stabilization techniques used in the EMDR therapy. This training curriculum was developed in close collaboration with Trauma-Aid Germany, modified from the TPSS+ manual, to fill the needs of Myanmar. The pilot trauma counselor trainings were conducted in 3 places of the country and some 36 trauma counselors were trained from 21 community-based organizations. This presentation will explore some of the principles surrounding trauma capacity building to the para-professionals – how success stories, challenges and lessons learnt from this project, which can be applied not only to the other Asian countries but also globally where there is a need whilst at the same time recognising the importance of cultural differences and diversity.

Conference

English

Sithu Pe Thien

Thien, S. P. (2020, January). The trauma counselor trainings: Promoting the community-based psychological care and services in Myanmar.   Presentation at the 4th EMDR Asia International Conference, Bangkok, Thailand