Coping religieux/spirituel et traumatisme psychique chez des victimes de conflits armés au Cameroun

Abstract

The present study is titled: “Religious/Spiritual Coping and Psychological Trauma Among Victims of Armed Conflicts in Cameroon.” It falls within the domain of development and mal development, aiming to explore the contribution of coping focused on religion/spirituality in the psychological adjustment process of civilian war victims suffering from psychic trauma. To achieve this, specialized literature was reviewed around the central themes of the study. Hartmann (1967) observed that some individuals rely on personal resources of the functional self to alleviate psychological suffering experienced during particularly challenging events. While we agree with this observation, the concern lies in the omission of religion/spirituality as part of the self’s resources. During our academic internship at an organization that assists individuals with psychological trauma, it was noted that many of these trauma sufferers uniquely utilize resources related to their subjective connection to religion/spirituality to cope with post-traumatic stress. For example, these individuals, in order to manage or mitigate the effects of post-traumatic stress on their health and daily lives, draw upon their subjective relationship with God to develop coping strategies such as reading Holy Scriptures, prayer, belonging to a religious community, and participating in religious activities. This raises the issue of the contribution of religion/spirituality-focused coping in the process of overcoming post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for a Cameroonian war victim. To address this problem, the study made use of Pargament’s (1997) theory of religious/spiritual coping. The research was conducted with three civilian war victims of both genders, aged 35 to 43, from the city of Maroua in the Extreme North region of Cameroon, within the SIL Cameroon organization. The clinical method, specifically a case study approach, was employed to achieve the study’s objective. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, using the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Checklist for DSM-IV (PCL-S) as a psychometric tool. Thematic analysis of the interviews was used to process the collected data. After analyzing the data, it was found that the use of religion/spirituality-focused coping strategies significantly impacts the psychological adjustment process in war-affected civilians suffering from post-traumatic stress. Interpreting the results primarily from a psychodynamic perspective, collaborative religious/spiritual coping (as proposed by Pargament, 1997) emerged as an important adaptive strategy within the functional self (following Hartmann, 1967) in relation to traumatic intrusion in the participants of this study.