Trauma and Recovery: Religious Conversion and Tortured Body

This presentation focuses on tortured and violated refugees who have converted from Islam to Christianity after their arrival in Finland. During the last years, a number of deeply violated refugees have become members of Christian charismatic movements eg. Pentecostal church in Finland. Based on the clinical experience, traumatised people may sometimes feel healed through the conversion, and pain, suffering, and trauma can be explained through the religious experience and change into something new.

I am interested in finding out, how this conversion is related to suffering of body and mind, and how the conversion helps people to cope with their earlier experiences when it contrasts with their background values and cultural tradition.

I will first present conversion theories of anthropology and religious studies, and then combine them with the refugee experience and perspectives of trauma and body. Approach of the presentation is theoretical, even though it has its background in on-going empirical research and anthropological fieldwork.

Religious conversion can be a way to continue the life in a difficult, often controversial life situation. It may explain the suffering, and it may give the experience of acceptance and healing community. It gives a change into something new. In trauma therapy, experiences of violence are typically processed in trauma-focused treatment but I claim that conversion offers people an alternative way to cope with the losses and unbearable, irrational pain.

Moreover, conversion is connected to immigration policies as it may affect on people’s connection to their own community, homeland and need for asylum.