What Is Displacement?

Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?

Find a therapist to heal from anger

Genocide destroys not only lives, but the psychological foundations of collective existence.

Twelve years later, around 2,600 Ezidis remain missing and over 200,000 displaced.

Recovery requires restoring the conditions for safety, agency, belonging, dignity, and continuity.

Between 2014 and 2019, I treated many Ezidis who had fled Shingal, the region internationally known as Sinjar in northern Iraq, after attacks by the Islamic State. They had survived violence, abduction, enslavement, family separation, and displacement.

Yet Ezidis (also spelled Yazidi) who had lived in Germany for decades also came to me in severe distress. Although they had not been in Shingal on August 3, 2014, many experienced fear, helplessness, grief, sleep disturbance, and intrusive images. Some feared that an ancient religious community might disappear before the eyes of the world.

For centuries, the numerically small Ezidi community has endured massacres, forced conversions, persecution, and displacement across the Middle East. The 2014 genocide reactivated and escalated this historical threat. Its effects can extend across generations through collective memory, family relationships, silence, disrupted cultural transmission, and continuing insecurity.

Twelve years ago today, the Islamic State attacked Shingal. Thousands of Ezidis were murdered, more than 6,000 were abducted, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Women and girls were subjected to enslavement and systematic sexual violence; boys were separated from their families, indoctrinated, and trained for combat. In 2016, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that the Islamic State had committed genocide against the Ezidis. In January 2023, the German Bundestag unanimously........

© Psychology Today