Journal-1

BringThemHome-the hostages in Gaza-NOW

Journals tend to begin with a journey, like a vacation, or maybe a change in life circumstance. A move, becoming a citizen of Israel would be one of those. 

Subtext: Now I have the right to wonder if voting matters in two countries, not just one! 

An old time blogging colleague writes Life in Israel, and that is totally worth checking out. But everyone's life is different. Here's one therapist's point of view. 

Journal 1, October 7

Actually, today is October 8, 2024 

Today marks a year plus one day since the most obscene, most unimaginable chapter in the history of the State of Israel. I can't even begin to put the details of the October 7, 2023 to the page, suffice it to say that what you have read, if the details are exceedingly grotesque and inhumane, well, it all of that is true.  

Why should we be surprised. Jewish history is punctuated with massacres. Crusaders out to slaughter. Murderous Cossacks roving into towns hunting Jews. My own grandmother, her soul should rest in Heaven, once told me that Polish marauders, Cossacks, barged into her village, her home, and seeing her in a rocker nursing my father, spared her life. She didn't say much other than that. The czar let the Jews of the village leave that day, assuming they had money for passage, the day a fast day. We celebrate that fast at the end of this week, Yom Kippur.

As a rule, the sparing of Jewish suffering has never been a thing. Witness events in France, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, South Africa, you name it. The streets in North America aren't safe, there's mayhem on college campuses. Having suffered pogroms and a holocaust, a surge of antisemitism is foreboding. And then, October 7, 2023. And it happened on holy land.   

G-d's Country

Another version of God's country

That attack defiled a holy land. 

Israel is the real G-d's country, Jews and Christians believe, as opposed to Wisconsin, where Heileman's Old Style is brewed. Holiness is in Eretz Yisrael, Israel, if it is anywhere. 

G-d's presence is what makes the land holy, Her/His holiness, not ours. We may aspire but most of us don't come close.  

And Hamas had the chutzpah to defile it, suspending wartime norms: rampant rape, decapitation and the severing of other body parts, mutilation, wholesale slaughter of 1200 innocents at a music festival. And then joy, the celebration of perpetrators. Nasty, very not holy stuff.

Yes, I'm still working it out.  

Difficult to digest, this hatred towards Jewish people disguised as a hatred Zionism. News flash, they are one and the same. Difficult to note the many videos and programs that remind us of what happened. 

But that is what we all did yesterday from sun up to sun down. An entire nation grieved their dead their stolen — kidnapped hostages still in harm's way. We grieved between sirens, jarring warnings that missiles approach. Get to a safe place. You have a minute and a half.

For some, sirens are triggering, as they are meant to be, unresolved PTSD of October 7 and the weeks, now month, a year that followed. Not a good year. Traumatizing for some but for others a way of life, how one lives, lived prior to this war. Missiles from Lebanon in the north, missiles from Gaza in the south, going on thirty years. 

For Israelis at the borders sirens are not something new.  

But to the average new immigrant (me) and to perhaps millions of Israelis, the sounds of missiles are new, as is the fear. When our defenses are down, the sound of sirens screaming, the booms bursting, despite the psychological defense of denial, despite living life as if there is no war, we feel fear.

It is how the enemy lives, too.

Blessings and Peace, 

 

therapydoc

 

Same DNA, new place, different day

I'm old so I get a charge out of remembering, looking back. And one of the things therapists do is look back, look left, look right, stay in the moment, or look forward with people. We're all about time.

A person will come into therapy to work on a problem and we'll do that, work on the problem, something current, maybe something as simple as expressing true feelings, being congruent with people, honest about oneself. When a person is hurting, it can be hard to share that feeling, pain, even with close friends.

You think, "Well, people like me the way I am, the way I seem to them, which is happy. Why change that?"

And yet it's hard keeping up a face, always being the cheerleader, always making people laugh, smiling lest you cry. Cup always half full. Sometimes you just want to break the thing.

So we'll work on it, trusting others with those raw emotions. The fear dissolves, the problem resolves, the behavior changes, the personality gets softer. It's easy, once you get into it, to share sadness with others.

Case closed? Hardly. A therapist might say, "This is the place, dear. This is the time, the opportunity. We can go back to any of it, any of your history, or all of it, and rethink, rework it. Everyone has more than one thread that bothers them about the past. USE your therapy. You're here. Take advantage."

And no question, in those moments, in that 45-minute hour, we go back to something painful, something real and unresolved, and we turn it on its head.

For another example, maybe a better example of reminiscing, you only have to talk to someone who has given up an addiction. Watch as those eyes get wide and shift upward and to the right as thoughts loop back on the days of dependency and abuse.

Your friend will say, "What was I thinking? Can you believe it? That was ME. So different now."

See my post on that at The Second Road for a recovery story. I guest post over there sometimes when I remember what I'm really supposed to be doing here on the Internet.

therapydoc