Living with Trauma and Learning to Feel - An Ethnographic Approach to Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga in Berlin

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this thesis analyses the lives of women living with complex forms of trauma and their experiences of the feeling-facilitating practices of Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) in Berlin. Positioning the research in psychological anthropology, the author investigates affected and marginalized perspectives by firstly, asking what women living with trauma experience in TCTSY settings, and how their actions of feeling and making choices are initiated and sustained. Secondly, by scrutinising the question of what can be learned from TCTSY and participants’ experiences regarding their everyday life with trauma more generally. The thesis enquires into healing practices and expert discourses and zeroes in on questions such as how far an ethnographic analysis of TCTSY can influence or alter dominant understandings of trauma and trauma healing. The author argues for an understanding of trauma which is more rooted in the experiences of trauma survivors and proposes the approach of “trauma-as-ongoing-lived-experience-in-context”. Moreover, the detailed analysis of the TCTSY practice and spatial emplacement as fluid and dynamic affective arrangement that considers socialities, affects, subjectivities, spaces and the arrangement of objects and feelings within them, gives indications of what healing and empowering contexts can look like in the wake of (complex) trauma.