Ofra Ayalon, one of the creators of the COPE deck shares her experience of using PERSONA cards in a peace-training and reconciliation workshop…
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While politicians from the warring sides in former-Yugoslavia were negotiating a brittle peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, in mid-November of 1995 a group of 28 psychologists from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro convened in an isolated, snow-covered, hilltop hotel on the Hungarian border to negotiate the psychological prerequisites for reconciliation. Meeting under the auspices of UNICEF and U.K. Jewish Aid, our training team was composed of three Israeli psychologists (Ayalon, Lahad and Gal), experts in issues dealing with war-traumatized populations.
One of the leading themes in this workshop was exploring the archetypes of Shadow and Evil and learning to recognize the projections of internal evil on the image of the Enemy. Our purpose was to show how an “Enemy” attracts “demonic” attributes which “justify” hatred, persecution and annihilation.
The purpose of presenting this theme was to raise participants’ awareness of the duality of “good” and “evil” within the human psyche and to experience and understand the human tendency to project “evil” onto others. By re-owning these rejected parts of ourselves we take the first step toward accepting the “other.” This process of awareness demands increasing the ability to contain opposites — such as good and evil, right and wrong, et cetera — within ourselves and to integrate them into our personalities.
We used PERSONA cards as the trigger for these projections in a process which we called “Me and Not-Me (a Blind Date): a dialogue between the imaginary representations of inner dichotomization.”
The PERSONA images were used in two phases — first, to split, and, later, to integrate projections of the “me” and the “not-me.”
We asked the participants to choose two images from the PERSONA portrait deck, to bring them together as if on a “blind date” and then to create a dialogue between them. The instructions were as follows:
- Choose one image that you like and one image that you don’t like.
- Place them in front of you on a piece of paper. Divide the paper in two.
- Write whatever comes to mind for each image.
- Choose a real or an imagined space where these two people can meet. Who will be the first to notice the other? Let them tell each other about themselves — where they live, how old they are, with whom they live. What are their first reactions, feelings, thoughts toward each other? Let them respond to each other.
- See where this dialogue takes you.
- Sit in couples and share your stories.
- Reflect on the process and on the following questions:
Were you able to bring them closer to each other?
Did your feelings about them change at all?
Can these people co-exist or do they need to stay separate?
The process: Participants created imaginary dialogues with their personified portraits, wrote about them, addressed them directly, role-played and listened carefully to their own voices. These creative activities helped participants expand their self-awareness and acceptance of their inner demons. Later, this process moved from imaginary to the cognitive channel through a re-framing of the process and discussion of methods of bridge-building between polarized ethnic and political groups. The PERSONA cards were found to be very useful for triggering intense emotions (such as love and hate) because the images are portrayed in a way that makes them personal and archetypal at one and the same time. The same process that was used in this workshop for reconciliation and peace work between countries is often used successfully in my clinical work for couples and families.
Dr. Ofra Ayalon, psychologist, couple and family therapist, bibliotherapist
Tivon, Israel
Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, by Waltraud Kirschke.
