Trauma and healing
Trauma is not the event. It is what the experience does to the fabric of a person: to the threads that tie body to feeling, feeling to thought, a person to other people, and experience to meaning. Under unbearable pressure the psyche protects itself by cutting threads. Numbness, splitting, forgetting, leaving the body. That is how one survives the moment. It is also what remains, afterwards, to be mended.
Healing as mending
The Hebrew word I keep returning to is mending, ihui (איחוי): the mending of torn fabric, the suturing of a wound. Healing from trauma is not erasure and it is not return; there is no going back to the person one was, or to the world as it was or should have been. It is the slow reweaving of the severed pieces, body, feeling, memory, relationships, into one story which can be lived with. That work cannot be done alone, because the injury itself was to connection. It happens inside relationships that hold: a therapist, a family, a community, a culture.
In the shadow of trauma, and in its light
I have spent my life, personally and professionally, in trauma's shadow and in its light, and both are real. Alongside the pain there can be depth, a sharpened sense of what matters, and an unusual capacity to stand with others in theirs. I do not romanticize this. Growth does not cancel the price, and no one should be told their suffering was worth it. But a life after trauma can be full, and the wound can become a place of knowledge. Hence, post-traumatic growth may coexist alongside post-traumatic symptoms.
Moral injury and moral resilience
Some wounds are moral. They form when what a person did, failed to do, or was forced to witness collides with their deepest sense of right, and they answer poorly to techniques aimed at fear alone. Values then may regretfully be ignored or temporarily suppressed, which may lead to shame, guilt and loneliness. Much of my research and writing concerns moral resilience: the capacity to hold on to one's values inside impossible situations, and to rebuild them afterwards. Repairing a moral injury involves acknowledgment, responsibility and repair, which is where healing meets restorative justice.
Captivity and betrayal trauma
Captivity taught me that the deepest deprivation is the loss of choice. When harm is deliberate, and when the frameworks that were supposed to protect a person fail them, the injury reaches the foundations: the basic trust that the world is livable. I call this betrayal trauma, and I have studied, written and lectured on it for years. Recovery begins with restoring what was taken: safety, freedom, and relationships that can be trusted again. It leans on family anchors and on community at least as much as on any clinic, and it moves at the pace of the survivor, never to be fully concluded.
Who this work is for
Survivors of trauma in all its forms, including former prisoners of war, hostages and their families. People carrying the second generation's quieter inheritance. And the professionals who accompany them, who carry weight of their own; that side of the work is described under Supervision & Teaching.
Restorative justice and dialogic processes
When harm is done, people wish for justice to be restored, and where applicable courts ask which rule was broken and what punishment fits. Restorative justice asks a different question: what does repair require? Who was hurt, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to meet that need? It brings the person harmed, the person responsible, and the community around them into one process, aimed at acknowledgment, accountability and mending, not punishment alone.
Where I met it
I first encountered this way of thinking during my years in Canada, and returned to study it in two research journeys through the country's west, learning how First Nations communities respond to violence and conflict. In those traditions a conflict is not a matter for the parties' lawyers; it belongs to the community as a whole, and to its stakeholders in particular, who take responsibility for hearing it and healing it. What I saw there has stayed with me for decades.
Why a psychologist cares
It stayed with me because it describes, at the level of a community, the same movement I see in the clinic. Psychological healing and restorative processes share a grammar: truth is told, harm is acknowledged, responsibility is taken, and something torn is rewoven. Hebrew makes the kinship audible; the field is called tzedek me'aheh, mending justice, from the same root I use for the mending that is healing. Trauma cuts a person out of the human fabric. Punishment alone does not sew anyone back in. Repair can.
Where it runs through my work
This conviction runs through my teaching at the meeting point of psychology and criminology at Bar-Ilan University, through my research on restorative processes and moral resilience, and through my volunteer work documenting torture under the Istanbul Protocol with the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Careful, formal acknowledgment of harm is itself the first act of repair, for the person who was hurt and, sometimes, better yet, for the one who caused it as well.
Lectures and consultation
I lecture on restorative justice and restorative processes, and consult for academic, clinical, legal and community settings seeking to bring these practices into their work. I have studied and written about this and its possible applications in conflictual contexts, whether Jewish-German or Israeli-Palestinian (see references). If you feel you are a stakeholder for conflict resolution within your communities of reference, and you seek to join or consult, contact me.