I’m a counselor for men from the Middle East living in San Diego. Here’s what we all can learn.

As a marriage and family therapist at License to Freedom, a nonprofit in El Cajon supporting Middle Eastern refugees navigating domestic violence issues, there are tensions in sharing the following story.

© (Courtesy: Jay Wick)
Navid Zamani is a bilingual marriage and family therapist, the head of clinical services at License to Freedom and a lecturer at San Diego State University. (Courtesy: Jay Wick)

The Middle Eastern community is often targeted by racist characterizations depicting women as submissive and men as domineering and violent. It is an effective form of propaganda used to justify military intervention in the Middle East and the failures of rehabilitation here in the U.S. My work as a therapist in the domestic violence community in San Diego exposes this narrative as a doubly complicated one when it enters the American legal system layered with exclusionary Defense Department provisions.

Empathy is seeing ourselves in another. Solidarity is standing with those in whom we cannot “see” ourselves. The complex work with Arabic-speaking men in the Domestic Violence Intervention Program (DVIP) has taught me the politics of revolutionary love — how to invite accountability while staying connected and compassionate.

Imagine that you’re a 10-year-old boy in Iraq, and your nation has just been invaded by the United States intent on exacting a price for 9/11.

At 12 years old, you witness your best friend disintegrate from a drone strike.

Ten years into the war, at age 22, imagine your family’s business has been destroyed, along with your health and any sense of calmness. It’s a period in your life when you are supposed to begin creating loving relationships. You find that you cannot keep friends as the ripple effects of daily violence have shaped you to mistrust.

By a stroke of luck, at 25 you’re granted a visa to the United States. You imagine a life away from war.

With little money and scant English, you arrive in San Diego. Your knowledge of the United States is limited, beyond Hollywood movies. Enrolling in community college is your first step.

At college, for the first time, your heart flutters with the potential of love. Your halting English and cultural barriers frustrate you, making you insecure and overbearing. The relationship disappears when you go to her social media platforms. Her response is, “Please leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. You’re scaring me.” You cross a line by using threatening language to respond.

Police officers who knock on your door at dawn look like the soldiers from your Iraqi village who spoke in incomprehensible English. You are taken into a police car.

In the jail cell, an Arabic interpreter, who speaks a different dialect, tries to explain.

Now you are in a courtroom with an assigned lawyer guiding you to “plead guilty or it will be worse.” You are given several charges and court mandates, including attending a 52-week DVIP.

Now you meet me, an Iranian-American therapist who speaks Farsi and English. You’re asked to trust me, a man whose family fought against yours during the Iran-Iraq wars of the 1980s. Positioned by the county to “teach” you how to engage safely with women based on studies developed by White middle-class English-speaking communities.

This is a reality for Arabic families in El Cajon.

The services and communities trying to help these families unfortunately draw on a history of “us versus them.” “Get on our page fast or you’ll be back in jail even faster.”

Counseling may create a trap for Middle Easterners. For instance, the Department of Defense offers generous grants to nonprofits working with Middle Eastern clients, which mirror entrapments from our invasion of Iraq. The proviso is that the client must help identify “terrorists” within their own family and community.

I could have written about the women and children who have experienced abuse. They “deserve” and are “worthy of” fairness and justice, though they also experience racism and judgment from the system. Who are we to decide who deserves fairness or justice when our country created a war leading to these traumatic experiences, driving families to seek refuge and a home in the place that destroyed their country of origin? Our moral righteousness to correct entails claiming, “My violence is righteous, yours is barbaric.”

Imagine a whole life of suffering, coming to a new country, making a serious mistake and being thrown into a system that punishes you. An intentional set of relational ethics, commitment to care, reparations and practices of accountability can still make a connection possible. I laugh and cry with these men. We make space for histories of pain and suffering while not exonerating harmful actions to others. It’s an exceptionally complex and difficult task, but one that’s necessary to break cycles and intersections of violence.

Zamani is a bilingual marriage and family therapist, the head of clinical services at License to Freedom and a lecturer at San Diego State University. He lives in Normal Heights.