Following the Tsunami, India will never be the same again. As I listened to people from numerous different states and various walks of life, they all recounted on the one hand their sense of horror, and on the other a sense of pride in discovering that they and their fellow-countrymen and women had responded as generously and practically to the disaster without recourse to foreign aid.

It felt almost as if this great nation had awoken to a consciousness of a coming of age. The January US economic report that predicted India overtaking most of the world’s national economies by 2050 only added to this sense of emerging identity.

At one of the conferences I attended in India during January a group of people working for Christian NGOs reflected on the Tsunami. All of them had been involved directly or indirectly in some of the relief efforts since 27th December 2004. I asked them what thoughts and emotions had been provoked by the news of this great natural event that resulted in such a scale of human suffering and loss. Next I asked them to discuss what had motivated their organisations to react as they did.

Then I asked them to imagine a single child standing on the shore of the ocean where days earlier the Tsunami had struck. This boy or girl had lost all human relatives whether siblings, parents, extended family, friends and neighbours as well as their home and neighbourhood. The groups were asked to imagine themselves into the feelings and thoughts of this child and to ponder them.

Finally I asked the groups to sum up all their reflections and discussions in one word. I had, of course, no idea what the result would be. What had become clear to me during the 90 minutes of this exercise was the wholesale engagement of every member of each group.

To my surprise the word that emerged was “hope”. This was not the result of denying the tragedy and loss the child had experienced, or the resulting trauma and the likely accompanying psychopathology. It was, in my view, a deep insight, influenced in part by Christian theology, into the resilience of children and childhood.

The image of a child standing on the shore of the ocean is a powerful one. It evokes numerous memories and associations in each of us, and I chose it consciously following the memorable description of the great reformer Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) of a child-widow standing alone in the twilight in the middle of a famine.

Ramabai found that she simply could not leave this child behind as she was about to take a cart full of other widows to safety. Her own experiences and feelings of loss of parents and siblings in a previous famine welled up within her. By stripping the scene bare in each case it allows us to identify with the child and to bring our own sense and experiences of anxiety, anger and loss into consciousness.

One of the ways in which people have sought to help thousands of Tsunami children is by counselling them. I do not know the nature and content of most of this counselling but there have been examples of pictures drawn by the children portraying the tragedy when they were too traumatised to put anything into words. I also know of the work of the Pavement Project pioneered by Dr Gundelina Velazco of the Philippines using carefully chosen pictures of animals and associated stories.

My 30 years practice of being alongside children and young people who have suffered life-shattering experiences has taught me two things above all else. The first is that the timing and nature of any counselling must be guided by the feelings and wishes of the child.

It is simply not possible to programme such interventions at a specific time for a planned number of sessions. Emotions and healing do not work like that. The second lesson I have learned from innumerable children is that the essence of any comfort or counselling is about the child’s life-story.

On the plane back from India I had the good fortune to read a deeply insightful book, Intimate Relations, by the Indian psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar. He argues that: “psychoanalysis is essentially telling and retelling the story of a particular life. Explanation in psychoanalysis is then narrative rather than hypothetical-deductive. Its ‘truth’ lies in the confirmatory constellation of coherence, consistency and narrative intelligibility. Whatever else the analyst and the analysand might be doing, they are also collaborators in the creation of the story of an individual life.” (Kakar, Penguin, 1990: 4/5)

In a paper delivered to a conference on the life and work of Ramabai in Pune I described how this gifted and far-sighted scholar and educationalist had made the life-story the core of her approach to understanding, relating to, and helping each girl-child she cared for.

The “stranger on the shore” needs perhaps above all else, someone to be alongside them and unconditionally committed to them, helping them to discover at least some of their life-story. Through this committed relationship there can begin a process to construct and develop a continuing life-story in which none of the pre-trauma story that can be retrieved is discounted or neglected.

It is surely in such a process that the real seeds of hope lie.