From Silence to Strength: How Art Helps Heal Trauma in Israel

Six years ago, my family and I made a decision that would change our lives forever: to make Aliyah.

Moving to Israel was far from easy. It demanded personal and professional sacrifices, pushing me to rebuild my life from the ground up. As a therapist, I encountered challenges I had never faced before—learning to navigate the unique and profound trauma experienced by combat veterans and victims of terror.

I transitioned from working with at-risk youth in a San Diego homeless shelter to sitting across from grieving families and survivors of unimaginable loss. The language and cultural barriers I faced as a new immigrant became the foundation for a deeper understanding of trauma and resilience, shaping the direction of my therapeutic work.

To understand the kind of trauma I work with, I invite you to imagine this moment:

You’re at a celebration—a party. The music is pounding, your body moving to the rhythm, surrounded by friends. There’s joy, freedom, a sense of peace. Everything feels perfect.

Then, in an instant, piercing sounds fill the air. You look up, expecting fireworks, but instead, you see men in black and green uniforms. They are armed with machine guns and shouting in Arabic. It’s chaos.

You run for cover. You find a bush and crouch low, praying they don’t see you. The smell of burning and the sounds of gunfire mingle with the desperate screams of the wounded. Hours pass before you find the strength to move. You run, not knowing where you’re going, until you see friends who guide you to safety. You drive through red lights, past bodies, not stopping until you finally reach home.

And then, you sit in silence. Frozen. Trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

This is the story of Michal, a Nova Festival survivor. She escaped the massacre, only to learn later that eight of her closest friends were murdered that day. For months, she couldn’t drive or speak about what she had witnessed. The terror gripped her, paralyzing her. Her guilt over surviving while her friends didn’t became a heavy weight she carried.

This was one of the first trauma cases I encountered at the beginning of the war.

For me, the silence of trauma is deeply personal.

I grew up visiting my grandmother at Kibbutz Ruhama, where she rarely spoke of her childhood. It wasn’t until my twenties that I discovered she had kept a diary during the Holocaust, chronicling her escape after losing her entire family. Her diary became her silent witness, holding the stories she couldn’t speak aloud.

Today, neuroscience explains what my grandmother and Michal both experienced. Trauma silences the part of the brain responsible for speech, known as Broca’s area. Memories don’t disappear, though—they remain locked in the senses as flashes, sounds, smells, or triggers that disturb the nervous system. This “speechless terror” can lead to depression, anxiety, and even thoughts of suicide.

But silence doesn’t have to be permanent.

Expressive Arts Therapy provides a way to process trauma without words. By engaging the senses through visual art, music, movement, and writing, survivors can bypass the brain’s language barriers and access the part of the brain where trauma is stored.

This approach inspired my PhD research and the creation of the Resilience Journal—a therapeutic tool that helps survivors process trauma through images and imagination. Like my grandmother’s diary, it provides a safe space to transform pain into a narrative of strength and healing.

In the days after October 7th, donors from San Diego reached out to me.

“What do you see? How can we help? What do people need?” they asked. I knew instinctively that using the arts as a therapeutic tool could help survivors build resilience, but I also understood how difficult it would be to engage them. The trauma was ongoing. Trust was fragile.

With the support of Adopt the Family Foundation and Choose Kindness Foundation, I began working with Nova survivors in Eilat, offering group and individual therapy, as well as training therapists in using the Resilience Journal.

The results were profound.

Through the journal, Michal began to process her trauma. She drew her car—the “heroic car” that helped her escape. She wrote letters to her friends, pouring out her guilt and sorrow. Slowly, she reframed her story from one of helplessness to one of survival. She began to drive again. To talk again. To dance again.

The journal became her witness, holding the memories that words couldn’t express.

In the past two years, over 140 therapists have been trained in the Resilience Journal method. Since the war began, it has reached more than 200 survivors, providing them with a pathway to healing.

For Michal, and so many others, the journey of recovery is long. But through art, we’ve found a way to begin—one page, one image, one story at a time.

In Israel today, as we face the ongoing trauma of war, we continue to lean on each other, finding strength in community and in the resilience of our shared humanity.

In the face of trauma, silence often feels like the only option.

But what if we could begin to speak without words? What if there was a way to unlock the stories that remain trapped inside us?

I invite you to consider this: the next time you feel overwhelmed by something you can’t articulate, try reaching for a blank page. Scribble. Doodle. Draw the shapes, the colors, the feelings that come to mind. You don’t need to be an artist; this isn’t about skill. It’s about giving form to the things we can’t yet say.

In Israel, we’ve learned that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s in the act of creating—whether it’s a painting, a song, or a letter—that we start to rebuild.

For Michal, the act of drawing her “heroic car” helped her rewrite her narrative, reclaiming her sense of agency. For my grandmother, writing in her diary gave her a silent witness to her grief.

Perhaps for you, or someone you know, the first step toward resilience can start with a simple act of creation.