When familiar social structures stopped functioning, it could be as traumatic as when physical structures collapsed in the case of a natural disaster. Strategies of adaptation that worked under the old order were no longer useful. Therapists working in Kosovo in 2000, for example, discovered that people who had for years been victimized by being told what to do now longed to be told what to do. Liberian refugees in the United States, encouraged by well-meaning American therapists to seek support in their own community, re-created patterns of corruption and exploitation: becoming victims of
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