Psychological First Aid and Therapeutic Storytelling

ISSA Member: AMURTEL, Romania

What happened?
At the Ukraine-Romania border in Siret, AMURTEL Romania recognised a gap: while many agencies provided physical aid to refugees, few addressed children’s and families’ emotional well-being.

What was needed? How did they respond?
To nurture collective resilience and care, AMURTEL provided Psychological First Aid (PFA) to refugee children and parents. Led by a trained emergency psychologist, the team offered empathetic, immediate emotional support tailored to diverse family needs. They also adapted therapeutic storytelling methods, developed in Lebanon, into translated resources for Ukrainian families.

Key challenges:
Young children and parents arrived traumatised, but resources focused on basic needs left psychosocial care unmet.

Solutions:

• AMURTEL filled the gap with Psychological First Aid training for volunteers and staff, building local capacity to provide warm, emotionally sensitive response care.
• They created therapeutic stories with Ukrainian refugees, translated them into Ukrainian and adapted them for families, making community-rooted healing accessible.

AMURTEL’s community-based approach relied on local coordination and cultural relevance. Rather than importing methods, they crafted psychological and healing support rooted in community networks, storytelling, and empathetic presence, creating a new type of emotional safety space at the border.

What's in place? What's missing?
AMURTEL’s approach underscores the power of community-rooted healing during crisis, mobilising compassionate Psychological First Aid and culturally resonant storytelling to foster resilience. But without wider institutional adoption of such practices, community-based healing remains inconsistent across regions.

Recommendations

National policymakers:

• Support community-driven psychosocial response by recognizing and collaborating with trusted local organizations and cultural practitioners.
• Fund culturally resonant healing modalities, such as therapeutic storytelling, music, art, and metaphor, embedded within affected communities.
• Build policies to formally integrate PFA capacity and community storytelling into local-level emergency and refugee response protocols.
  

Local/national actors

• Establish local forums or group sessions using community-based healing practices—e.g. therapeutic storytelling circles, art or movement therapy, shared rituals.
• Mobilize multidisciplinary local teams (psychologists, volunteer storytellers, art facilitators) to deliver inclusive, culturally sensitive community care.
• Use participatory storytelling and group events to weave refugee and host communities together—supporting collective resilience.
  

Private donors

• Fund localized, participatory psychosocial projects, including community-based training, story creation, and healing arts approaches.
• Support multilingual therapeutic materials and their distribution—through workshops, digital media, and print—to build resilience across cultural contexts.
• Include networking and peer-sharing for community resilience practitioners as part of grant objectives—helping adapt and scale approaches.
  

Professionals/practitioners

• Train in community-based healing techniques—therapeutic storytelling, group art, yoga, qigong, and culturally grounded rituals—to enrich psychosocial support.
• Facilitate or co-create therapeutic story workshops with families, enabling children and parents to express experiences through metaphors and narrative creation.
• Integrate community resilience practices into ECD programming: combine storytelling circles, group movement sessions, shared art-making, and performance events to nurture collective well-being.

Explore Further:
AMURTEL Romania provides psychological first aid to refugee children and parents | ISSA
therapeutic-stories.amurtel.ro

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