Name: Healing the Community | MASCON 2019
Uploaded: 2020-08-18T19:36:35.000Z
Channel: Najwa Awad
Description: Licensed therapist Najwa Awad describes how trauma can impact faith and how our communities can begin to heal.

<p>Licensed therapist Najwa Awad describes how trauma can impact faith and how our communities can begin to heal.</p>

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A psychological and spiritual perspective on enduring emotional pain and suffering. This topic explores healing mechanisms found within Islamic traditions and modern psychology.

Trauma

Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You | Trauma Series Introduction

Why Do Bad Things Only Happen To Me? | Trauma Ep. 1

How to Cope with the New Zealand Mosque Shooting Tragedy | Trauma Special

I Should've Gotten Over It by Now | Trauma Ep. 2

Why Bother Living if the Future is Filled with Pain? | Trauma Ep. 3

How Can I Ever Trust Again? | Trauma Ep. 4

Why Does Allah Hate Me So Much? | Trauma Ep. 5

Addressing the Topic of Trauma and Faith - Sh. Omar Suleiman | ISNACON 2019

The Impact of Trauma on Faith - Sarah Sultan | ISNACON 2019

The Duha Approach: A New Model to Treat Trauma - Najwa Awad | ISNACON 2019

How Islam Addresses Grief - Dr. Altaf Husain | ISNACON 2019

Everything is Falling Apart | Trauma Ep. 6

The Impact of Grief on Faith - Sarah Sultan | ISNACON 2019

Understanding Traumatic Grief - Najwa Awad | ISNACON 2019

I Must Have Done Something Wrong - Is It My Fault? | Trauma Ep. 7

How Can I Ever Get Past This? | Trauma Ep. 8

Why is Everyone's Life Better than Mine? | Trauma Ep. 9

3 Reasons Why You Think the World Is Against You

Healing the Community | MASCON 2019

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Najwa Awad

Written by licensed therapists Najwa Awad, LSCW-C and Sarah Sultan, LPC, LMHC, this series of articles and videos seeks to address trauma through The Duha Approach, a comprehensive and Islamically sound approach to treating trauma from a spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical perspective. Each article and video in the series will address one of the ten most common types of cognitive distortions, or unhealthy ways of thinking, linked to common faith-based questions that may arise after having experienced adversity. The primary purpose of this series is to provide a refuge and healing for those who have silently endured trauma, perhaps not fully understanding what is happening to them and not knowing how or where to get help. The articles will work through depressive feelings, worries, and doubts that may impact faith while helping promote growth and healing.

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This section provides research on trauma and adversity from a psychospiritual perspective and theoretical and empirical research on the psychological processes involved in belief, doubt, and religious identity.

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Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You

 During the past decade, we have really been pushing the importance of mental health in  Muslim communities. And we've been talking a lot about anxiety, a lot about depression,  and de-stigmatizing getting help, letting people know that it's not haram to go and  seek treatment. And in these talks, we focused a lot about anxiety and depression. However,  the missing piece in our discussion is trauma. And it's not to say that all anxiety and  depression is caused by trauma, but a lot of anxiety and depression is caused by trauma.  And so if we are overlooking this piece, then people are not looking at the root cause of  what distresses them. And so we are not able to get treatment effectively or comprehensively.  So it's really important for us to know what trauma is, how it affects us as individuals  and groups, so that we can be more proactive in coming up with a plan to heal ourselves  and the community. So when we look at the definition of trauma, trauma is a psychological  or an emotional response to a deeply distressing event. And so what is traumatic for one person  might not be traumatic for another person. In fact, you might have the same trauma twice  in your life, and in one part of your life, it might affect you, and in another part of  it, it won't. And so it really varies from person to person and throughout the span of  your life. When we typically hear about trauma, we usually hear about PTSD, which is post-traumatic  stress disorder. That's when there's a lot of impaired functioning, there's nightmares,  hypervigilance. The person really has a disturbed, can develop a disturbed view of viewing the  world. However, in my practice in working with people who are Muslim and not Muslim,  my experience has been that the average person with trauma doesn't walk around with PTSD,  meaning that you don't have to meet this significant criteria of PTSD to have trauma affected you  in your life. Most of the people that I see in my office who have some sort of trauma  actually present more as anxious or depressed. They might be sad, they might be chronically  have anxiety. And so people are walking around with these symptoms, not really know what's  going on. And just to show you the significance of why it's important to know when you have  trauma and when you don't. They did a study with children, and particularly children with  ADHD. And upon further evaluation, they found out that these kids with ADHD actually didn't  have ADHD. They actually had symptoms of trauma. And so I do believe in ADHD, and I believe  that sometimes it's significant enough to warrant medication. But in this situation,  these kids who seemed hyperactive, were not able to follow directions, were not able to  concentrate in class, they were being misdiagnosed with something that they didn't have. So if  you think about it, say that they had developed a 504 or IEP, those are interventions in school  as a result of the ADHD. And so you have these well-meaning teachers trying to put an intervention  in place. And so while intervention might be useful, it's not going to address the root  cause of the issue. And in some situations, imagine that these kids who are presumed to  have ADHD, and they don't. So the teachers are trying all these interventions and they  don't work. And so they're like, okay, well, let's put them on medication, which I don't  think is wrong in some cases, but in this case, it would be right. So now you have a  child on medication for something that they shouldn't be on. So it just goes to show you  the importance of us knowing when there's trauma and when there's other issues. So what  does trauma, how does trauma affect individuals? First, it causes a lot of distress day to  day, like I mentioned, anxiety, depression, but it also prevents people from living to  their full potential. So not only are people walking around suffering, but also the potential  that they have, they're not able to reach it, that potentially they can go further in  life than they think they can. And then also what trauma does is it causes cognitive distortions.  Cognitive distortions is an unhealthy way of thinking. And so when you experience trauma,  sometimes it can alter the way that you look at the world. So for example, say that you  were robbed at gunpoint. And so now because of it, you feel like the world is unsafe.  Someone's coming to get you. You can't leave the house. And so it starts to alter those  cognitions that you wouldn't ordinarily have if the trauma didn't happen to you.  And this is really important, especially for us Muslims to take into consideration, because  they found that a group of people with PTSD, it not only causes cognitive distortions,  but it also can cause unhealthy ways of thinking about religion. And it doesn't just apply  to Islam, but to other religions as well. So sometimes the trauma can be so detrimental  that it can start to cause doubt or even a person to leave the religion altogether.  So an …

Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You

Najwa Awad

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