Mideast War and Therapy

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Like many Jews around the world, Rosie found herself spiraling post-Oct. 7, watching news 12 hours per day, debating folks online, and feeling her friendship circle dwindling. After she posted about the massacres online, she lost clients of her Kingston, New York, tarot-reading business.

“The day of Oct. 7, I completely shut down and went into survival mode,” said Rosie. “I was not OK.”

During her third session with a new therapist, Rosie (we’re using therapy clients’ first names to protect their privacy) broached the subject of the massacres, and her emotional distress. The non-Jewish therapist told her flatly, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Rosie is far from alone. Post-Oct. 7, many Jewish clients across the political spectrum have attempted to process Israel-related issues in therapy, yet had their feelings dismissed—often, though not always, by non-Jewish therapists.

At the same time, Jewish therapists have felt clients—again, often but not always non-Jewish— projecting onto them the views they imagine their therapists have on Israel and Gaza, distancing themselves without discussing where anyone actually stands on the issues. And Jewish therapists have even had trouble finding safe spaces to connect with other therapists. Therapeutic relationships are being torn apart from all sides, bringing into question what role a therapist’s opinion has in a therapy session and how important is it for a therapist and client to share similar views and backgrounds.

Finding a Jewish therapist was essential for a client named Rachel after working with her previous therapist through middle school, high school, and college. “The therapist knew everything about me,” she said, including that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. After Oct. 7, when Rachel broke down in tears about the antisemitism she was witnessing, her therapist told her that the videos she’d watched from the massacres were “spliced together” and “fake.”

“What about the 16,000 dead Palestinians?” her therapist asked.

“My brain kind of just shut off,” Rachel told me. “She was just talking, and I was in a bubble, like, ‘What is happening here? People are tearing the kidnapped posters off. How could you just be so cold-hearted?’”

“I need to leave this conversation,” she remembered saying to her therapist. “I don’t feel safe.” Her Zoom session ended with the click of a button.

Soon Rachel found a new therapist who shared her Jewish background. “After Oct. 7, I need to make sure that [my therapist is] Jewish,” she said, “because [non-Jewish therapists] don’t understand, they won’t understand it.”

There are plenty of cases where clients have advocated for themselves and the therapists have put in the work to mend the relationship. For a client named Erica, a schism occurred when she was venting over Zoom about misinformation being spread about Jews being colonizers, and her therapist told her, “Well, I don’t believe in treating humans like animals.”

Erica’s therapist was Jewish. They both descended from Holocaust survivors. Her therapist knew that she looked at situations with nuance and was empathetic toward Palestinian civilians. And because they had grown so “connected” over their decade-plus relationship, his comment stung more.

“Oh my God,” Erica thought. “I feel a very strong implication that you’re saying I do believe [in treating humans like animals]. I don’t see a reason to continue our conversation if that’s how you feel,” she recalled telling her therapist. “I think we’re done.”

Their session ended abruptly. Then her therapist reached out a few weeks later and acknowledged that he wasn’t in “a therapeutic mindset at the time,” Erica recalled. He had suffered a loss in his family, and he admitted that he “was not receiving everyone’s pain or frustration in the most professional manner.”

Her therapist didn’t take back anything he said about Israel, but acknowledged what he said was inappropriate, and Erica felt that her therapist genuinely yearned to continue working together. There are topics she doesn’t broach with her therapist because they both know they don’t see eye-to-eye on them, but that understanding puts them on the same page.

Working through these difficult discussions can strengthen therapeutic relationships. “We’re both happy to have patched things up,” Erica said. Their conversation brought them closer, she said, because it was an acknowledgement that they were both struggling with current events. They weren’t alone.

It’s not just clients who’ve been affected by these political divisions. Clients and therapists alike—no matter where they stand on issues of Israel and Gaza—are filtering the news through their lived experiences. “If you’ve been a victim of sexual assault, if you’ve been trafficked, if you’ve experienced antisemitism or discrimination against immigrants, when people see imagery as horrific as what we’re seeing, it’s human nature to relate to it,” therapist Halina Brooke told me. “Of course, people are going to have really strong feelings and really steadfast ideas.”

Therapists are human, said Brooke: “If something’s affecting our own community, we are a lot more likely to dig our heels in. Our blind spots become a lot more opaque.”

To help recognize blind spots, the best practice is for therapists to bounce ideas and cases off peers. But many therapists feel unsafe processing their work with peers in such a polarized climate, and it’s affecting the quality of therapy.

Since the attacks, therapy organizations that claim to be progressive, such as the social justice-oriented Inclusive Therapists, have flooded social media with watermelon emojis, referring to the war in Gaza as genocide. Other groups have been criticized in long Reddit threads for being too supportive of Israel (“So frustrated with ‘liberal’ therapists,” one thread is titled). Suddenly, stating you are anti-Zionist is a prerequisite to being added to therapist listservs, and there was even a Zionist therapist blacklist being passed around, made up mainly of Jews. Safe places where therapists go for support have veered to one extreme or the other, leaving clinicians feeling alone. “A lot of Jewish therapists have found that it’s very hard to continue feeling safe and comfortable in consultation groups that aren’t Jewish affinity spaces,” Brooke said.

This is exacerbated because clients themselves will jump to conclusions about therapists’ views on the conflict based on their Jewish background, with non-Jewish clients deciding that a therapist with a Jewish-sounding last name must be “too pro-Israel,” and distancing themselves or ghosting them completely.

It’s a lot easier to work with someone with different political opinions than it is to work with someone who makes assumptions about you because you’re Jewish,” Brooke said. “For most Jewish therapists, this is the first time, perhaps in our whole career, where we’ve had people really push on and try to dissect our identities and demand an explanation for our political affiliations [and] our really complicated views on things domestic and abroad.”

It is causing therapists to have to look at how they feel about the issues and decide how much they want to disclose. They have to get to know themselves better as clinicians and recognize their limitations so they can work on them. “It gives us an opportunity to become more sturdy within our own identities,” Brooke said.

A half-decade ago, Brooke launched the Jewish Therapist Collective to support and advocate for Jewish therapists. This September, they are starting a weekly consultant group for non-Jewish therapists to meet with Jewish therapists so they can become more culturally competent. This December, the organization is planning a trip to Israel to connect with Israeli therapists, study trauma and PTSD, and visit the Nova festival site and kibbutzim affected by the Oct. 7 attacks. Their site includes a directory of Jewish clinicians. “People don’t realize that they want a Jewish therapist until they stumble on some cultural incompetence with a gentile therapist,” she said.

Therapists are “ethically mandated to not discriminate against anyone and to treat people regardless of how they come,” Brooke said. “On the flip side, we have an obligation not to cause harm to clients if we have a situation where our bias might compromise our ability to care for someone.”

Even though it may seem easier if a client and therapist share similar views, a strong therapist is able to empathize with a client’s perspective, even if it’s not their own, said Nava Silton, psychologist, professor, and author of Scientific Concepts Behind Happiness, Kindness, and Empathy in Contemporary Society. Having different perspectives allows the clinician the opportunity to learn.

There are cases where a therapist needs to recognize that they are not a good fit for a client, Brooke said, such as if a clinician’s child has an eating disorder, and working with clients in similar situations would trigger them.

“It’s important to remember that clients aren’t coming in to be treated for their political views,” Brooke said. “They’re usually coming in because they have a crippling anxiety or difficult depression or grief issues.” Therapists should focus on client goals, not what’s going on in the Middle East. If a therapist can’t get past the politics, it’s on them to find a clinician who can, and they shouldn’t put any blame on the client, she said.

Similarly, it’s an issue if a therapist’s views are so in line with a client’s that they spend sessions venting about the news. “It can feel really good to sit with someone who might share your vantage point, and you can feel seen by each other,” Brooke said. But instead of spending sessions discussing current events, therapists need to tap into their support systems to discuss politics on their own time.

If a therapist is overstepping into inappropriate territory, it’s not on the client to coddle them, Brooke said. She recommends the clients say to them, “I’ve noticed this and it’s important that we talk about it if we’re going to move forward together.” Then set boundaries. “If the therapist tries to tell you that your perceptions or experiences, especially of bigotry like antisemitism, are wrong, or they get defensive, that’s a sign to walk away,” Brooke said.

It’s also not OK for therapists to use clients to educate themselves about Judaism or Israel, especially if that isn’t what the client wants to discuss, said Silton. If this happens, she recommends the client states what they do want to spend the session discussing and directing the therapist back to their goals.

If a therapeutic relationship ends, clients shouldn’t dismiss the growth that they made, Brooke said. “You can walk away from the relationship and be like, ‘OK, that was an important chapter, and I got a lot out of that, but that therapist just hit a wall and couldn’t grow with me in this other way.’”

Because so many people don’t understand the ways antisemitism presents itself today, many get defensive if antisemitism comes up.

“Don’t take it personally. If your therapist falls short, just know that it’s not you,” Brooke said. There are good therapists out there, even if it might take some time and work to find them.

Don’t take it personally. If your therapist falls short, just know that it’s not you,” Brooke said. There are good therapists out there, even if it might take some time and work to find them. “Know that you’re worth it. You are worth continuing to look [for the right therapist]. You are worth being bold and setting your boundaries and keeping them.”

It's ****** up what Israel is doing sure but the therapist is there to help the individual they're seeing not to make the world a just place

I wouldn't be comfortable with a therapist who held views that I considered contradictory to human rights. As a client, I would end that therapeutic relationship. It's more complicated if a therapist feels she/he has a fundamental problem with the views of a client, since the therapist is supposed to be able to get past that, not just in relation to their political views but also to objectionable actions on the part of the client, who could even be a rapist and still need access to therapeutic treatment. Part of the problem with the article is that is presumes assumptions and misunderstandings where none might exist. If someone is fundamentally opposed to Israel's genocidal actions and the therapist is not, that isn't a misunderstanding, it's a disagreement and one that may be fundamental enough to end the therapeutic relationship.