This document summarizes lessons learned from the Traumatized Adolescents Seeking Asylum (TASA) project from 2016-2018. It discusses how adolescents seeking asylum have special needs as they transition to adulthood, including needing family and emotional support. However, these individuals may have developed self-reliance and survival skills from difficult experiences. The document also notes that the asylum process can deprive adolescents of autonomy and coping mechanisms they developed. It describes the TASA intervention program, which included psychoeducation, stabilization, and trauma-focused therapy. A key lesson was that while introducing non-trauma topics is important, directly addressing traumatic memories cannot be postponed and is essential to recovery.

1. Traumatized Adolescents Seeking Asylum
(TASA)
- Lessons learned from Academy Project 2016-2018 -
Kirsi Peltonen, PhD.
Tampere University

2. | 1

3. Adolescence alone
• Same needs as any young person, such as need to:
• be part of a family
• be comforted when the world crumbles
• rely on the help of a more experienced person to step into adulthood
• At the same time, all these things are something that a young person has long had to deny
himself/herself. He/she may…
• have lived the life of an adult for a long time with the skills he/she had (self-responsible)
• have developed skills that have helped him/her to survive in a situation at hand
| 2
.

4. -> In a new country: becoming the object of care
again
-> Supervision as part of the asylum process
depriving the experience of autonomy
->Developmentally important to ask: if we take
away some of the coping mechanisms, what is
left or what will we replace ?
| 3

5. https://research.uta.fi/tasa/
| 4
- 10 session group based
intervention
- Psychoeducation and stabilization
- Supervised by housing unit staff
members
- Followed by trauma focused
intervention (Narrative Exposure
Therapy) for those who need it

6. Sequenced- or ”Just trauma focused”
interventions?
• Multicomponent therapy models imply that sequencing is necessary for
PTSD recovery in those with complex forms of PTSD (Cloitre, Courtois,
Charuvastra, Carapezza, Stolbach & Green, 2011; De Jongh & Broeke,
2014)
• In contrast, some researchers have dismissed the importance of additions
to trauma focused therapies, and proposed that delay in confronting
traumatic memories with add-on interventions reduces the efficacy of the
treatments by encouraging avoidance of the trauma (Van Minnen, Harned,
Zoellner & Mills, 2012).
• A lesson learned from our project: Introducing a ”tradition to talk” (as a
first step) is essential, but postponing the trauma work (as a second
step) is a) impossible and b) harmful.
| 5