Report of the Inner Healing intervention at Olievenhoutbosch: A Growing Movement of Personal Transformation.

Over the course of 2025, Initiatives of Change – Creators of Peace Circles programme, in partnership with Ukulunga Foundation and Kids Paradise Academy, delivered four powerful Inner Healing workshops in Olievenhoutbosch, east of Pretoria. These workshops or Circles reached 78 young people, aged 19–32, including one from Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, guiding them through a courageous journey of self-discovery, self care/love, family healing, and trust-building.

Across four workshops, the participants — many of them students, job seekers, or part of learnership programmes — came with open hearts and heavy burdens: trauma, rejection, fatherlessness, broken trust, guilt, and emotional pain. However, what began as uncertainty, transformed into collective healing, courage, and newfound hope. Below are themes of transformational impact from participants and the programme.

1. Transformation Through Shared Stories

Participants arrived carrying painful histories — abuse, neglect, abandonment, and self-blame — much of it rooted in the family. Many had never spoken about these experiences before. Through storytelling, reflective exercises, honest sharing, and deep listening, they found a safe space to share their truth.

“I couldn’t forgive myself for the things I’ve done and what happened to me. I hated myself. But now, I realise I can’t change the past. I choose to forgive myself — and that’s where my peace begins.”
— Workshop participant

Each session revealed how family wounds cut deep, but also how healing is possible when those wounds are acknowledged. One participant discovered her peace began with self-forgiveness, not waiting for the people who hurt her to apologise.

2. Breaking the Silence: Healing Family Trauma as primary self rejection

Participants faced long-held silence around rape, rejection by parents, absent fathers, and the emotional weight of being unprotected — particularly by mothers/ mother wound.  Some shared how these betrayals left them emotionally numb, angry, and withdrawn. “I thought I loved my mother… but I now realise she’s the one who’s hurt me most. And yet I made her my best friend — just to protect myself from facing the truth.”
— Participant reflection

This honesty became a turning point. It allowed the group to speak not only about pain, but also about how to move forward — through forgiveness, empathy, and choice.

3.  Forgiveness as a Family Healing Tool

In each workshop, the Power of Forgiveness session brought life-changing revelations. Participants explored the idea that forgiveness is not about forgetting or excusing harm — it is about freeing oneself from the burden of holding on. “I always thought not forgiving them made them feel the pain they caused me. But now I realise it only kept me in pain. Forgiveness is a way of regaining my peace.”
— Workshop participant

The family tree activity helped participants trace intergenerational patterns of trauma, resilience, and identity. Many began asking deeper questions about their family history, initiating conversations with parents and relatives for the first time.

4. Emotional Resilience and New Beginnings

Participants gained practical tools:  How to manage anger, communicate better, build self-worth, basic conflict resolution and make empowered decisions. Simple exercises like ice breakers and role-play helped even the most reserved participants find their voice. One young woman, struggling with emotional numbness and on medication for bipolar disorder, said: “This workshop helped me feel again. I stopped my meds for two days just to feel what’s happening in me. I’m finally able to feel — not through medicine, but by listening to myself.”
(Facilitators encouraged continued medical care alongside inner work.)

5. Creating Circles of Trust and Friendship

Many participants expressed that they had never experienced real peace — not in their homes or communities. One shared: “We couldn’t act out peace in the role-play activity because we’ve never seen it. In our lives, peace only comes after everything is broken.” Yet by the end of each workshop, trust began to grow, friendships blossomed, and participants created their own inner healing support groups. Some even referred to the workshop group as a new kind of family — one formed through courage, vulnerability, and shared growth.

6. Looking Ahead: A New Legacy of Healing

By October 2025, 79 young adults will have completed this year’s Inner Healing journey. They will be celebrated at the upcoming Graduation Ceremony on 18th October at the Olieven community venue, a symbolic milestone for those who have taken brave steps to rebuild not only themselves — but their relationships, families, and communities.

7. With Deep Gratitude

We extend our heartfelt thanks to:

• Donors and sponsors who made the workshops possible
• Mentors Lungelo Mangue and Manuel Rannenyane, for their peer support and guidance
• Partner organisations Ukulunga Foundation and Kids Paradise Academy
• And the young people of Olievenhoutbosch and Soshanguve, for choosing healing over silence
• Initiatives of Change

8. Facilitators lessons from this project

1. Healing takes time and trust must be earned with the vulnerable communities. This demands that it be built through presence, empathy, and consistency.
2. Forgiveness is a process, not a moment learned – a process to guide participants toward understanding forgiveness as freedom — a step in reclaiming their own peace, similarly at the beginning mark the understanding that peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice
3. Reflection Activities like the family tree, 3 I’s conflict resolution model, and decision-making framework were highly effective for surfacing family patterns and personal blind spots. These activities sparked deeper questions and intergenerational conversations beyond the workshop.
4. Language and Literacy Barriers Require Creative Inclusion. Healing spaces must be linguistically and culturally inclusive. Visuals, storytelling, body language, peer support, and translation are essential tools for accessibility, allowing that the grass-roots communities we work with here, namely those who didn’t get the opportunity to get basic education, heal and are equally part of the transformation.
5. Facilitators Are Also on a Healing Journey. Both facilitators shared that these workshops triggered personal reflections and healing around neglect, pain, and family issues they hadn’t fully addressed. Healing is mutual. Facilitators are not just givers — they are also learners and on their own healing journey. This shared vulnerability builds trust and credibility with participants. “I got to work on another layer of my own pain. I’m healing too." – Cleo
6. Exploring our family tree and inherited trauma offers a gentle yet powerful doorway into individual healing — helping us understand where we come from, what shaped us, and how we can consciously choose a new path forward.
7. Facilitation is not about fixing people. It’s about walking with them through the unknown, creating a space where healing, honesty, and self-discovery are possible — even if only for a moment.  Healing doesn’t end in three days — it begins there. The real work continues in relationships, homes and hearts.

9. We can’t do it alone, how can you help?

• Donate to support our next healing workshop, see end of newsletter
• Sponsor a participant or family for the full programme
• Partner with us to host a healing circle and Trustbuilding dialogue in your community
• Share this initiative with those who believe in hope, healing and transformation

10. Recommendations

• Strengthen pre-workshop preparation to explain what Inner Healing is, set expectations, and reduce anxiety before workshops.
• Develop deepened the healing process post the workshop by Add modules on applying healing tools in daily life for example partner with an Arts centre : Introduce music, poetry, drama, and drawing as alternative forms of expression and also help create appreciation, graduation ceremony activities
• Train Local Champions: Identify 2025 graduates who show leadership potential and train them as assistant facilitators, peer to peer mentors and foot mobilisers for next projects.

Your support is not just changing individual lives — it is rebuilding families, transforming communities, and igniting a movement of peace rooted in personal responsibility and shared healing.

• Report by Cleo Mohlaodi and Gladys Mabe