After the Hamas-led terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern, a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote on an Israeli Facebook group offering therapy resources to those affected by the attacks.
She was flooded with requests from American Jews and Israeli-Americans. She, and seven colleagues, provided a year’s worth of pro bono support in Massachusetts.
In September, she will lead three talks in Toronto, on the theme of what many Jews have been experiencing since Oct. 7: a second layer of trauma — traumatic invalidation — that comes from their pain being dismissed, minimized, or invalidated.
She co-published a study on the topic: “Traumatic invalidation in the Jewish community after Oct. 7” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Typically, she says, studies like these receive some 2,000 reads; hers crossed 47,000 in the first two months.
Some examples she received included:
– Jewish therapists targeted in professional spaces; some yelled at for being Jewish, or mocked by their clients.
– A patient who is related a hostage still held by Hamas spoke about the pain of seeing her loved ones’ faces on posters being ripped and vandalized. “It’s as if my pain doesn’t matter, they are erasing my grief and denying my daily reality.”
– A psychoanalysts’ sub-group of the American Psychological Association issued a statement condemning Israel as “genocidal and imperialist,” expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle” and stating they were “not in a position to determine which path to decolonization and liberation is ‘legitimate’”
– Many patients — Jewish and Israeli — described instances of others asking them to defend the actions of the Israeli government, as if they were personally responsible.
– An Israeli-American woman described attempting to share her anguish with her colleagues and immediately being asked: “How do you think the Palestinians are feeling?”
Traumatic invalidation, Dr. Bar-Halpern says, can cause mental health issues in the short term and long term.
Until June of this year, she was director of the intensive outpatient program at Boston Child Study Center for seven years, where she was the lead clinician. She also worked as a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. Last November, she began as director of trauma services and training at Parents for Peace, an organization combating radicalization, with affiliates in Canada and the U.S.
Dr. Bar-Halpern spoke to Dave Gordon for National Post:
Q: Describe the “traumatic invalidation” you researched.
I started hearing stories that were very similar to the stories I’ve been hearing in my clinic, in my work with trauma; those with a history of sexual assault, or attacks.
That concept is traumatic invalidation. I realized that for Jewish people right now, there is a compound trauma effect, where a lot of us are still feeling the stress of the war, and worried about our loved ones at home, and carry the secondary trauma from October 7, from seeing those horrific pictures and all the horrors, but also the response that we’re getting from the environment around us.
The concept of traumatic invalidation is when someone is denying your pain, or focusing on the other side. Basically, controlling the narrative, ignoring you, not paying attention to your own thoughts, or telling you what to feel or how to act. I didn’t invent the concept of traumatic invalidation. It’s a known phenomenon in the trauma world, but no one ever applied it to the Jewish community, which is basically what I did in the research.
Q: What examples of traumatic invalidation did you find out about?
The big one, on the topic of “ignoring,” is UN Women (a United Nations foundation), who took over 50 days before releasing a statement about the gender-based atrocities and the sexual violence that happened on October 7.
There are a lot of examples of emotional neglect, when people told their friends they were suffering and afraid, and the friends didn’t check in.
And “whataboutism,” or minimizing the emotional aspect of what’s been going on. So the message that we’re getting is that your suffering doesn’t matter, or that you’re actually unlovable. When people are blaming or putting down Jews and Israelis for parts of their identity. Almost everywhere today, they’re being blamed for the actions of the government of Israel.
So the message that we’re getting is that your problems are your own fault; you are the one who’s causing trouble.
I think that if we keep seeing people as problems instead of a human being, then everybody’s going to get more dehumanized.
There is “excluding,” which is another one of the traumatic invalidation criteria, when a lot of Jews and Israelis are being excluded from social events, from labs in the academia, or a boycott on Israeli researchers.
Q: What was surprising during your research?
The fact that antisemitism is so pervasive in the mental health field, social work, and psychology has been beyond surprising, and actually devastating to me. I feel really betrayed by the mental health field.
Within the mental health field, a lot of people are supposed to be trauma experts, or expert in what we call Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is where the term traumatic invalidation came from. They were not able to hold space for the pain of Jewish people. They made it about politics.
So for example, I met people that shared stories about how they’re feeling unsafe or traumatized, either by October 7 or by what happened after October 7 in the U.S. And responses from therapists was dismissal, or victim blaming, or literally, they were told, “Well, what do you think is happening in Gaza? How can you compare yourself to them?”
You can see it also in discussion groups for therapists.
When my article was posted in the DBT listserv, the automatic reaction of some non-Jewish therapists was “why are we bringing politics into this?” And the person who posted article said, “this is not about politics. This is about the mental health.” The conversation quickly went into the dismissal of Jewish pain.
I’m hearing Jewish patients don’t feel safe. One example is what got me to write the article.
One of the pro bono cases after October 7 said she didn’t feel safe going to her LGBTQ group. The facilitator of the group started wearing a keffiyeh, and changed the art in the room to say “from the river to the sea,” with drawings of a Palestinian flag. Their Instagram page called for patients to cancel their appointments and go protest with them.
And when the participant told the facilitator that they did not feel safe, their reaction was “deal with it.” I ended up calling the head of this practice to complain, and to tell them that it’s not ethical, because when a patient tells you that you don’t feel safe, the first thing you need to do is to make sure they feel safe.
The other thing is that we had so much data, there were so many examples that by itself was surprising. We couldn’t even include all of it in the research to show how pervasive the traumatic invalidation is.
Q: Did you think what would occur if these experiences happened to another group?
Yeah, I have to wonder whether, if you exchanged Jew for Black or LGBTQ-plus, whether we would have had the same response. You would not. One of my colleagues is a Black American Jew, and he said he actually experienced more way antisemitism than racism.
And they’ll say on college campuses, they don’t want Zionists there. If they ever said “we don’t want LGBTQ here” that will never fly. But it seems like when it comes to Jews, if we just use a different term, like Zionist, which is modern antisemitism, then it’s OK. We don’t matter.
Q: What do you want mental health professionals to do with your research?
To understand the experience of Jews today; to widen the ability to validate their pain.
Validation is not always an agreement, by the way. Validation is “I see you, I understand you, I hear your pain.” You don’t have to solve the problem. You just need to be there and be curious. Ask: “What can I do to support you? What do you need right now?”
Q; What can the layperson gain from your research?
Exactly the same thing. I think that’s why it went viral. Because it speaks to everyone. Because there are so many nuances that we were trying to put into words in the last two years, and were not able to. And every person that contacted me who read the article said “I saw myself in those criteria.”
So this is for the everyday person to want to really understand their pain and figure out what to do with it.
(The events in Toronto aim to) actually help people in the community to learn how to self validate themselves, and how to counter those negative thoughts that might arise when the community is invalidating you, and how to cope with the different symptoms that come with it.
Because when traumatic invalidation happens on a systematic level, we are more vulnerable to develop post traumatic stress, and anxiety and depression, and changing the way we think about the world, the way we think about ourselves, and it’s constant insecurity. So my hope is to give people the tools of how to manage all of that.
Q: How has this impacted students?
They’re more vulnerable to a lot of it. In my clinic, I have K-to-12 patients that are refusing to go to school, or they’re hiding their Jewish identity. Some of them start self-harming. Some of them say they don’t want to be Jewish anymore because it’s not safe. The long term effect could be mental health issues, like anxiety, depression and so forth, and trust issues.
If their school is not protecting them, then we can expect them to not trust authority figures or institutions. So the hope is that the schools will be trauma informed schools, and antisemitism informed. My hope is that it can move from intervention to prevention.
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