The Unimaginable Trauma—And Resilience—of the People of Gaza
For many mornings of the past two years, 70 of my Gazan colleagues at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine have left their tents—overrun by bugs and rats, repeatedly threatened by bombs and missiles that have landed nearby—to teach basic trauma healing self-care to others in Gaza who have endured unimaginable loss.
On our weekly Zoom calls, they have described walking as quickly as they can, often for as long as two hours, to the tents and rubble-heaped spaces where they gather 20 or 25 children and adults. There, in a two-hour workshop, they teach them slow deep breathing to balance autonomic nervous systems locked in a never-ending cycle of agitated fight or flight. Then, playing rhythmic driving music on their cell phones, they ask everyone to stand, shake bodies rigid with fear, and then to dance to traditional Islamic tunes—to find a small space of freedom. At the end of the session, they hand out paper and crayons (that they have somehow miraculously found) and encourage people to draw feelings too deep for words.
As founder and CEO of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, I’ve been to Gaza 20 times since 2002, when I began to develop our program of population-wide trauma healing, parallel to the one on the other side of the Erez Crossing that I was creating with my Israeli colleagues. We have created similar programs in Kosovo, Ukraine, and here in the U.S. after mass shootings and climate-related disasters. The programs in Gaza and Israel started small. Invitations came from mental-health professionals overwhelmed by the extent and depth of trauma, and they grew in partnership with local organizations that welcomed trainings in the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s comprehensive, evidence-based program of self-care and mutual support. Over time, we developed local faculties and mentored them as they trained successive cadres of clinicians and educators, clerics, and leaders of women’s groups.
For the last 32 months, unable to enter Gaza, I’ve been haunted by images of mutilated children—initially the kids of the Israeli kibbutzim, and then the children of Gaza. Every morning I’ve anxiously awakened, groping for my WhatsApp, where on too many occasions I read of the deaths of Israeli hostages and my Gazan colleagues and their families. Psychologists, counselors, and a nurse who provided trauma care through our program—brilliant professionals with whom our team shared spirited discussions and many meals of kabobs, hummus, and flaky sweets—were murdered in their homes, along with their family members, sometimes dozens of them. Unimaginable.
Over the last 32 months, I’ve heard and read the testimonies of our team members and a small sample of the 300,000 children and adults with whom they’ve shared our program of self-care and mutual help, and I’ve looked at the data on the most traumatized who participated in our five-session groups—data meticulously and miraculously collected by our Country Director, psychologist Jamil Abdel Atti, and his team. Eighty percent of the 200 adults who began the five-session groups had “severe” or “extremely severe” depressive symptoms, and 84% of them concluded with “normal” levels. All of the 200 children and adolescents initially qualified for the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder; after the group’s fifth session, with war still killing and maiming their friends, only 30% qualified. The kids drew themselves in the first group as dark, cramped figures, their mouths turned down, their faces flooded with tears. At the end of the fifth group, one girl’s face blossomed into a radiant flower, and another drew herself with luxuriant pigtails, standing beneath a bright red beating heart.
Now, there is a ceasefire in which, according to the United Nations as well as my team, some Gazans are still being killed. Our team reports that as people emerge from the life-or-death struggle for survival, which eclipsed all thought and numbed sensations, their trauma is transforming into a stunned grief. In the mornings, our counselors still walk, slowly now, through the stench of bodies decomposing under the ruins of schools, mosques, and homes. Their eyes scan the ground for unexploded weapons; they share coins with emaciated, begging children. Overhead, drones still dart and helicopters hover, their noises now easily identifiable.
Still—and this, too, is unimaginable—our team preserves a hope that is renewed every day as they comfort those who have lost children and limbs. “We do soft belly breathing five or six times each day,” they tell me, “and we teach it constantly to the children and the mothers and fathers. We get them up, shaking and dancing, and it’s like they are awakened from the dead.”
“How do they manage? How do you manage?” I asked Atti, the beloved leader of our team, who has lost two sisters and more than a dozen members of his extended family.
“Well, Jim,” he tells me, “I have to be strong and take care of my children and my five grandchildren—to put them first. And my work, our work, saves us. It is satisfying to help the children, especially those who lost parents and legs. They make all of us hopeful. They are our future. But above all, it is Allah. I know that no matter what happens, no matter how much we suffer, or how many people I love die—it is Allah’s will.”
Several weeks ago, after our international faculty led a series of online workshops to deepen our Gaza team’s skills with children, all 70 came together to celebrate what they’d learned. They put up pictures on a board to share how they were feeling: scraps of magazines, photos preserved from wreckage. One of our counselors proudly pointed to a partially inflated red balloon and said it reminded her of childhood and hope. A program administrator drew two leaves—one green, one orange—representing the olive and citrus trees for which Gaza is famous, in hopes that these destroyed trees will once again flourish.
No drawings or objects suggested revenge. They depicted renewal and regrowth. And this, too, was as unimaginable as it was hopeful.
The women and men and children of Gaza continually astound and inspire me and our international team. If they can transform this unimaginable trauma and loss to tender care and inextinguishable hope, perhaps it is possible for all of us.
