Blog Post 1: What Is the Interpreter of Love Project?
THE INTERPRETER OF LOVE
A Blog for Survivors of Extreme Trauma
Hold on to love, or at least the hope of love.
If you hurt deeply, you don’t need to be told that what you’re living is wrong, unreal, imagined or madness.
Or that you should just buck up and “get over it.”
You do need to hear you’re not alone—
And that the darkness won’t last forever
A little background
If you experience extreme trauma, often your life goes off-track in peculiar ways. It can seem that no matter how hard you try, you can’t quite live your life in the same way “normal” people do.
I’ve spent decades pretending to be normal. Perhaps you’ve tried too.
Perhaps we’re wrong.
Perhaps our real job is to become ourselves.
When your life refuses to follow a beaten path, it may simply mean your path is going somewhere new. And wildly interesting, because it reflects the totality of who you are, not bits and pieces of you
The Interpreter of Love Project is that path for me. It is in many ways about that the intersection of language and compassion that can promote healing for survivors of extreme trauma. In particular, it focuses on two evidence-based healing practices:
The power of writing down—and safely sharing—our own trauma story.
Developing a vision for our life in words. The life we truly seek to live.
Simply put, this project’s purpose is to instill hope in survivors of extreme trauma. Hope for healing and fulfillment.
The project’s mission is to create a safe place where trauma survivors can share their story and support each other with affection.
The project’s vision is a world where every survivor of extreme trauma can enjoy a life of dignity, purpose and meaning.
This inaugural blog post will explain the project’s history, name and origins.
Why is this called The Interpreter of Love Project?
Why the word “interpreter”? And how, by the way, does anyone “interpret” love?
This is where things get a little odd. Be patient.
By “interpreter,” I mean that this project exists to render compassion lovingly in words. Right now, in this inaugural post, I am “interpreting” love in words. Love for my fellow survivors.
I hope you, in turn, will do the same for others, both within the project and your larger lives.
But the love and affection that I truly I bear for you, my friends, and that many of us bear for each other doesn’t come from us alone.
Love itself is out there. Like a substance, it is a raw, vital force more powerful than anything we can imagine. Those of us who have had near-death experiences can attest that this force is life-transforming.
Strange as it may sound (and it sounds very strange to me), I feel this force compelling me to give you love. In words.
This project, or rather the force that inspired this project, is a force I choose to call God because I find it conscious, benevolent and all-encompassing. It has gently but powerfully called me to this task.
My job for the remainder of my life is to find compelling ways to interpret the primal, nonverbal depths of love in words. Words for you, the survivor of extreme trauma. Words meant to buoy you. To raise your spirits and bring hope.
Words especially for those of you who may feel suicidal just now.
For anyone reading this who wishes to die, please know that you are my special, tender mission. Hold on a little longer. Please. You will find in this project that I often address you directly, and always from the heart. (Also: if you live in the U.S. or my native Canada, please consider calling or texting 988 for support. If you live elsewhere, here is a list of other countries’ crisis hotlines.) Please also consider viewing the short videos on the project vlog, “The Only Way Out,” especially the first series, Please don’t kill yourself.
For the rest of you—including allies and loved ones of survivors—please know that each of us may become an interpreter of love. Love for each other, and especially for those who suffer. Survivors who put love and compassion into words for others will feel it too, ourselves. It is perhaps my great life lesson: to give love and receive it, to share it safely, is simply healing.
Yet to reiterate: underneath human love, some force of love is universal. Love in its purest form. This project exists to find ways to channel that love to you, but please understand: it’s yours. This love belongs to you. It is your birthright.
You are human. For that alone, you deserve to live in love.
My career in the beautiful world of community interpreting
The reason I know how language can convey the kind of love that helps trauma survivors heal stems from my past career in interpreting and working alongside several astounding therapists for torture survivors.
Let’s look at interpreting first.
A little background. At 18, I decided to become an interpreter. My goal was to become a conference interpreter. I lived in eight countries and studied languages, linguistics, translation, pedagogy, psychology and writing at eight universities around the world. At age 22, I applied to a conference interpreting school in London, England, but that year they wanted native French and Spanish speakers. Instead I came to hold a bachelor’s and master’s degree in French and general linguistics from a French-speaking university in Québec. I was later a PhD dropout in Arabic linguistics at McGill.
I never became a conference interpreter. After moving to the U.S., I performed community interpreting and translation, primarily in healthcare and human services. For three years I managed a nonprofit community interpreter and translation service. In 2001 I founded my own small but national U.S. business that centered on training community interpreters and publishing textbooks and manuals about interpreting. I owned and ran that business for 21 years.
Community interpreting exists primarily to help people (typically immigrants or Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals) to access services in healthcare, schools, social and human services, refugee resettlement, mental health, legal services and other areas.
Today the world is experiencing the greatest wave of migration in the history of the planet. People in countless numbers need community interpreters to access vital services. Worldwide, more and more laws protect the rights of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals to interpreters.
My small business trained more than 20,000 interpreters from around the world who spoke or signed more than a hundred languages. My career focused on the intersection of language, culture and compassion. Community interpreting as a profession attracted the sweetest, kindest people! Their work is arguably as great a challenge as interpreting for conferences, courts or international bodies.
I had the humbling privilege of working with some of the most brilliant experts in our field, including national and international specialists.
What we can learn from the amazing skills of interpreters
Through it all, I learned that to give voice means first to listen. Feel. And sense.
(Signed language, of course, is visual, and interpreters for deaf and deaf-blind individuals develop astounding skills for “reading” touch.)
Listening matters. The goal of an interpreter is to faithfully render each message by transposing it as accurately as possible into another language while preserving not the source words but their meaning. That meaning is shaped by context, culture, a person’s history and beliefs, and each speaker or signer’s intent, communication needs and goals.
A tall order? Yes. So few of us understand how hard interpreting is! I stand in awe of interpreters (and translators). I salute them. Their work is complex and wildly under-appreciated. They move mountains and accomplish wonders.
Yet part of the interpreter’s job is to remain, if not invisible, at least unobtrusive. When the interpreting goes well (say, between a doctor and patient, or a social worker and a refugee), it may seem at times that no interpreter is there at all. As a result, the doctor and patient may experience the astounding illusion they are speaking directly to each other in the same language!
The Voice of Love Project
Beginning in late 2009, I was a board member for a local nonprofit that served torture survivors and saw how they could afford only untrained volunteer interpreters. Shocked (interpreting for torture survivors is incredibly difficult), I co-founded The Voice of Love Project as a national pro bono all-volunteer project to developing training for interpreters who worked with survivors of torture, war trauma and sexual violence and their therapists, lawyers and social workers.
That project changed my life.
I ran it for five years. The Voice of Love Project taught me the power of language to heal survivors by connecting them (through their interpreting) to deeply compassionate therapists, lawyers and service providers.
The project showed me how trauma is so deep that many interpreters become traumatized simply by interpreting for survivors.
I learned interpreter for survivors interpret far more than words or meaning. They interpret compassion.
Most of all, the clinicians and therapists for torture survivors taught me how they speak to survivors with the voice of love. Literally, their voices when providing therapy become gentle and nurturing. These national and international specialists transformed my view of how the human voice can generate and transmit loving, unwavering and unconditional acceptance for survivors.
The Interpreter of Love Project is a legacy of The Voice of Love Project.
Interpreting the language of love
Love is nonverbal. The force of love in the universe is compassion. That force is patient, forbearing and forgiving. It seeks to nurture and care for you.
Nurturing and caring conveyed in words can help us heal. Language has power.
Although I do not espouse a specific doctrine or religion—and fully recognize the many horrors that religions can inflict—I also honor the ways that religion at its best brings people together and convinces them God loves them. That we are worthy. This form of love brings peace and liberation to many believers.
For those of us with a history of trauma, however, religion may seem impossible to believe. If that is the case for you, I will say only that the force of love itself seems real to me. Indeed, I believe this force inspires all religions. Cosmic love takes us out of ourselves, away from pain and darkness.
The task of The Interpreter of Love project, through stories and resources, including those I hope you’ll share in the projects private members-only space, is to help survivors develop a meaningful vision for their lives and restore the love and life foundation taken away from us by traumatic acts we endured.
Trauma takes away our agency, trust and sense of safety. Traumatic acts often also rob us of our voice to speak as who we are. Hence the importance of sharing our own story and shaping a vision for our life in words. Our chosen words.
These two acts alone are so deep they can foster healing.
Love transcends trauma
Love is more powerful than trauma. Love is balm. We feel and sense and taste it. If we learn to both give and to receive it, love can heal.
Love comes to us in acts and words. Each of us, in our own way, can become an interpreter of love. That choice is ours.
For those of us with histories of deep and enduring trauma, sometimes we feel love most powerfully by supporting others who also have a history of trauma. I’ve had this experience myself as a counselor on sexual assault, youth crisis and suicide crisis hotlines; as a hospital advocate for sexual assault survivors; as a local and national victim advocate; as co-founder and executive director of The Voice of Love Project; and in other volunteer capacities .
Working with trauma survivors whether as a pro bono counselor or advocate, or later as an interpreter, I never spoke about my trauma. But my personal history made me keenly sensitive to the suffering of others. I worked hard to convey on hotlines, at hospitals and in my interpreting, both in my voice and expressivity, what some therapists call “unconditional positive regard.”
For me, that voice became a blend of compassion, humility and respect.
In this way, I’ve come to embrace my own strangeness rather than run from it. I have come to join you, my community of survivors, and become one “interpreter of love” among many.
I am no therapist or clinician. No expert on trauma. All I have to give you is this project. But I give it to you with all my heart and love.
Hugs and kisses,
Amira
