Holding Refugee Women Through Healing

Here in East London, you pass people every day whose stories you will never fully know. Women carrying groceries. Women waiting for buses. Women dropping their children at school.

Some of them have crossed borders, oceans, and warzones to stand here now. They have lost homes, families, futures they once imagined, and yet they walk among us with extraordinary quiet strength.

Behind their gentle smiles sits a weight impossible to see at first glance. The grief of leaving everything behind. The shock of violence witnessed. The ache of family still in danger. The loneliness of beginning again in a place that does not yet feel like home.

A refugee is not defined by the moment she left - but by everything she carries after.

The Unseen Realities of ‘Safety’

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In the UK, refugees and asylum seekers face two kinds of hardship: the visible, headline-making challenges of war, loss and displacement and the quieter ones, the ones that live inside the body. Isolation, sleeplessness, anxiety and a sense of unbelonging so deep it feels physical. Safety does not always bring peace. Often, it simply brings the space for trauma to finally speak. And in London, in the noise and the rush of the city, that silence can feel deafening.

Living in Limbo

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Many refugee women spend months or even years waiting for an asylum decision. They are unable to work, unable to plan their futures, unable to ground themselves in the new world around them.

This uncertainty holds the nervous system in a constant state of alertness. It is an invisible exhaustion, the kind that makes it hard to think, to connect, to trust, or even to breathe deeply.

Research shows that around one in three refugees in the UK experiences PTSD or depression. Given what so many have lived through, imprisonment, violence (domestic and otherwise), loss, it is heartbreakingly unsurprising.

Yet trauma doesn’t only live in the mind. It settles into shoulders, jawlines, breath, and sleep. It becomes part of the body’s story.

Why Community Matters in Healing

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A moment from our mini-retreat - where women could arrive, exhale, and be held by community.

For many refugee women, the hardest part is not the past; it’s the present. The everyday tasks that seem simple until you are doing them alone in a foreign place: Navigating services, Introducing yourself in a new language, Finding a friend, Asking for help, Walking into a room where you know no one.

Healing requires community, spaces where women can be held, seen, and understood without needing to explain their wounds.

This is what many refugee women in East London say they long for most: belonging, gentleness, a room where someone remembers their name, a moment where their body feels safe again.

A Gentle Place to Begin Again

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At Abuelita’s Wellbeing in Hackney, we meet many of these women. Women who have carried tension in their bodies for years. Women who have not felt safe enough to rest. Our role is small in the grand story of their lives, but small things can matter deeply.

Through massage, yoga, tension and stress release exercises, and quiet moments of care, we offer women a chance to soften. To feel human again. To feel at home in their bodies, even if home has been lost.

Women have told us: “I never felt so relaxed in my life’’ and “I feel like I’ve found myself again.”

We also work with partners like MamaSuze CIC, whose creative workshops help refugee women laugh, connect, paint, sew, and rediscover joy together. Friendship becomes part of their healing. Community becomes medicine. Art becomes a doorway back into themselves.

And all of this is possible because every massage, craniosacral session, or yoga class booked at Abuelita’s quietly funds free therapy for a woman who needs it. A simple act of care creates another. A circle of support that grows with each person who steps through the door.

A Place Where Hope Lives

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We know that healing from displacement is not quick. It is not linear. It cannot be rushed.

But we also know this: healing happens when a woman feels safe. When someone welcomes her. When her story is honoured. When her body is allowed to exhale after years of holding itself together.

One woman recently told us, “I feel like I have a family here.”

In East London, among neighbours, friends, artists, therapists, community organizers, and kind strangers, that sense of home is slowly being rebuilt, one gentle moment at a time.

If You Want to Be Part of This Healing

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The softest acts can make the biggest difference. Booking a treatment. Attending a class. Sharing our work. Supporting a woman you may never meet, but who is walking the same streets as you. Every act of care,  for yourself or others, helps keep hope alive in East London.