Boston-area trauma therapists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman don’t use the term “gaslighting” in their paper on Jewish trauma after Oct. 7, but they might as well have.
Writing in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, they give a different name to the pain many Jews have felt over the last harrowing 20 months: “traumatic invalidation.”
It’s a common term in their field, describing when, for example, rape victims are told they have misinterpreted events or even brought them on themselves.
They apply the term to what Jews have reported in the months after the Hamas attacks. “Rather than being met with compassion and care,” they write, “many were instead met with a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding, and even outright denying the atrocities of Oct. 7, along with any emotional pain stemming from them.”
For the Jews in their study, traumatic invalidation took the form of colleagues who ignored or shunned them after Oct. 7, or suggested that Israel had it coming, or told them that they were overreacting to antisemitic comments.
They write of clients and colleagues excluded from clubs and professional associations, pelted with pro-Hamas messages from people they considered friends, and told that their grief over the deaths, kidnapping and sexual assault of Jews after Oct. 7 does not matter compared to the human toll in Gaza.
Individuals whose experiences are invalidated or downplayed can be at risk for a range of symptoms, including mood swings, anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress. Making it worse, they write, are therapists and counselors who either don’t appreciate their Jewish clients’ pain or who minimize their distress.
Posted last month by a journal for specialists – part of a forthcoming issue on antisemitism and social work – the paper by Bar-Halpern and Wolfman has been shared widely on social media.
“We’ve been getting a lot of messages and emails saying, ‘Thank you for giving me the language,’” said Bar-Halpern in a joint interview with Wolfman. “We had one person saying that she was crying while reading it, because she finally felt validated after the last year and a half and things finally made sense to her.”
Bar-Halpern, 41, is a clinical psychologist, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and director of trauma training and services at Parents for Peace, a national helpline for U.S. families with children drawn to extremism of all kinds. She grew up in Israel and moved to the United States 17 years ago.
Wolfman, 45, is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist who grew up in Connecticut. She is founder and director of Village Psychology in Belmont.
In an interview, they spoke of the hurt inflicted when others deny your pain, how therapists fail their Jewish patients, and the kinds of skills that build resilience.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start by telling me how you came to this topic.
Miri Bar-Halpern: On Oct. 7, 2023 I wrote a message on a Massachusetts Israeli group [chat] saying, “This is my cell phone number. If anybody needs support, give me a call,” and I’m flooded with phone calls. So I quickly mobilized a team of Hebrew-speaking clinicians, and for about a year, we provided free support for Israelis in Massachusetts. And then it got wider. I started hearing those stories from the people that I’ve been seeing even for one session, because they have their own therapist, and the narratives were very similar to what I’m seeing in my clinic.
In other words, clients coming to you because they felt their own therapists either dismissed their concerns or couldn’t understand what they were going through as Jews?
Bar-Halpern: One hundred percent. If you look at listservs right now, people actually say, “I’m looking for a Zionist therapist. I’m looking for a Jewish therapist.” They’re looking for someone that they can relate to, which, in the past, wouldn’t be an issue.
Wolfman: Along those lines, I saw someone who had stopped attending synagogue in person for fear of violence and had never brought it up with their previous therapist. And so we find things like that too: Certain things aren’t being asked about because [therapists] don’t know to ask, or maybe somebody doesn’t feel safe to share it, because they don’t know how it’s going to be received, if it’s going to be dismissed, if it’s going to be minimized.
The antidote to that is education, training and experience, and that’s part of what we want to be able to offer to people.
The last few weeks have seen the killings of two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum and the firebombing attack on the Boulder, Colorado march for Israelis taken hostage. Are your clients and colleagues talking about these attacks in ways that fit into your invalidation framework?
Bar-Halpern For me, it goes back to the dehumanization piece, into normalizing hate and normalizing invalidation. The Jewish community has been saying, “We’re afraid this might happen, and nobody is saying our pain is real, and nobody’s taking us seriously.”
I’m assuming you write a paper like this because you want to alert your colleagues. What are you hoping to accomplish by getting it out in the world?
Bar-Halpern: I wanted to give people the language to describe how they’ve been feeling and give them that stamp of approval in an academic peer-reviewed journal.
The other part of it was a call for action. The mental health community has failed the Jewish world these days. They’re not providing the same type of care that I would like to see generalized to every group that is suffering right now. I mean, if you look at Facebook groups or social media groups or even listservs of therapists, it’s pretty brutal to see how they’re questioning the trauma. We’re not asking for a special treatment. We’re just asking for the same type of care you would give any type of client that is telling you. “I’m hurt, I’m in pain, I’m scared.”
Wolfman: What’s really important is that, as a mental health provider, you’re trying to understand the world from your client’s perspective, and to put that understanding into words. Validation does not mean agreement. You don’t have to agree to be able to validate and understand where that person’s experience is coming from.
What’s important is really being open and curious to what your client is trying to communicate to you and sitting with it and then reflecting it back to them in a way that helps them then understand themselves better, regulate their own emotions, and then being able to better articulate their own experience to themselves and to others. Θ
