العيش في ظل الحرب: الصدمة والبقاء والأثر عبر الأجيال مع مايك نيكونتشوك

After working in Jordan for a few years volunteering in one of the refugee camps, I paused and I went back to school and did my graduate work in social cognition and neuroscience to try to understand how the brain engages in decisions when it's been tremendously psychically wounded through trauma. I went for a six-month internship that happened to be at the exact same time as the conflict in Syria was escalating. Those six months turned into the next decade and a half of my life. Judith Herman, step one, safety. Well, what do you do? And that's a material impossibility. So it raised a whole set of different questions, not about the long-term stewardship of our wounds and how it metastasizes in social and political phenomena, but also realistically, therapeutically, what is possible when folks will remain materially unsafe for the foreseeable future?

I said, in those moments when you truly were confronted with the imminence of your own death during the war, what changed? How did you become different after? And he said, Surtadhagata. I began to laugh more. My science is my love letter. Everything that I research, everything that we develop with communities for communities, is my way of expressing love.

Welcome to the Living a Life and Balance podcast. My name is Abdullah Boulad. I'm the founder and CEO of the Balance Rehab Clinic. My guest today is Mike Nikonchuk. He is a trauma educator and researcher who has been working for 16 years in refugee camps and war-affected communities. I hope you will enjoy. Mike, what motivated you to do what you do today?

That's entirely selfish. I was it's family. When I was young, we would always go, not always, but sometimes we would go back to visit mom's family in Guatemala. My mom's from Guatemala. And there was a period of time when we went a lot, then periods of time when we wouldn't go, and then go frequently again. So I knew I think I always had a sense that there was factors that were influencing whether or not it felt okay to go. And I was a child, but there was still an active conflict going on. The peace accords weren't signed in Guatemala until 1996.

Yeah.

And fast forward many years later, through high school and university, you know, there was a strong interest in knowing more about this whole half of my lineage. And there were some things that were very much talked about, and then other parts of the experience of the country that I knew nothing about that I was reading about, and that my mom had never talked about, mainly the fact that there was 36 years of war.

Yeah.

And, you know, I would ask her some questions and I would hear things from her and others that, yeah, stuff happened. It was a difficult time, but it was very subtle. You know, there was never a sit-down conversation where I learned the fab the full family story. And it wasn't until I was in university working and volunteering in a rural community in Guatemala called Santa Anita La Unión, that I sort of was slapped in the face with the full family story. This village that I was working in, Santa Anita La Unión, was comprised of 32 families who had been sort of resettled on that land by the Guatemalan government as part of the peace accords process.

They, during the demobilization and disarmament process in the country, many groups of combatants were given abandoned tracts of land as part of this process of put down your guns, we'll give you land, you can have a productive livelihood on these lands. And we were doing some volunteer projects there in university. And through a series of events and conversations, it came to light that many of the folks that were living in this land were from the same unit of the guerrilla combatants that had extorted and kidnapped and tortured my grandfather. And my mom then told me the full story of when she was when she was young, I think around 11 years old, she found a note in her father's office that said, If you don't come up with $50,000, we'll rape and kill your eldest child.

And obviously she was completely and totally freaked out by that. So she brought it to her dad and he said, You know, no te preocupes, mija, we got this sorted, we got the money. And then when they when he was set to deliver the money, he was disappeared for three days, and she didn't know if he would come back dead or alive, if these folks who sent that threatening note would come and get her. So it it it it traumatized her as a child. And she never talked about it. I didn't know that until I stepped on this sort of landmine by working in this community. And then so many pieces of my mom, the family history, the politics started to make a little bit more sense.

And it really ignited a whole set of questions in me around how folks deal with their pain and not just the individual, but the political consequences of untreated or unaddressed wound.

Yes.

And that was sort of the start for me of what inspired the set of questions that I didn't know whether I answered them through psychology or through political science or whatever. There's a lot of ways to look at those questions.

Yes.

And my path later in life, after you know, working in Jordan for a few years, volunteering in one of the refugee camps in Zatari refugee camp, I paused and I went back to school and did my graduate work in social cognition and neuroscience to try to understand how the brain engages in decisions when it's been tremendously psychically wounded through trauma.

Yes, it's uh it's always difficult to put ourselves in in those people who went through the trauma. Uh, how how old was your mother at that time when she experienced it? She's about 13 years old, I think. 13. And so just am I understanding this correctly? So you were helping those people who tortured your grandfather at that time. How was the reaction of your mother when she found out?

You know, interestingly, at the time, my both my grandparents were still alive, and they had a pretty mild reaction. My my grandma, my grandpa, who he means he he survived this, he was, and he never really talked about it. He knew that I was working in this village. I told him they were like former Orpah. And he was like, I hope it all goes well, you know, because I I my grandfather was a quiet guy, you know, very gentle. Any sort of condemnation or disapproval was very nonverbal, and at least with me. My mom, on the other hand, had a big reaction. I remember very much when she said, you know, you were you had the luxury of being raised abroad.

You'll never be able to understand. And you can't possibly understand what they did to us, what they did to me.

Yes.

And at the time I was 20 years old, so I had probably a bit less trauma responsive than I would be now. But I said, one, I didn't choose to be raised abroad. You prevented me from knowing any of this. This was on you. And two, therefore what? Like you're in you're entitled to have whatever reaction you want in perpetuity and make decisions on behalf of your children of who I can and can't talk to. Who is them? Who is us? So she was angry. Yeah, of course she was angry. She was I I I was putting my whole hand in a wound, in an unhealed wound.

And I'm her child. You know, you're your your children are not supposed to activate your wounds. You're the parent.

Yes.

And so I think there was a there was a there was a rupture in our relationship that I her and I are very open about, and we've talked about and we've gone through a process of what we went through together as you know, an adult son of my mother. And I invited her to come to the village at one point, and she came a few years into my work with this community. And I don't know if I I still don't know if that was the right decision, right? I remember driving from Guatemala City out to this place, it's about four and a half, five hours, and near a city called Guatepeque by the Mexican border. And my mom was really silent the whole drive.

And there were moments when she was visibly nervous and shaking. And I'm thinking, you know, now I look back and like, who the hell am I to subject her to this massive trigger? Who am I to accidentally put my mom through exposure therapy? Yes. And there was a moment when we were working, because this is a coffee, a working coffee farm, and my mom was just, we were working helping clear some of the underbrush. We would do all sorts of projects with the community. And this woman who was a comandante in the guerrilla, she fell and injured her foot. And my mom's a medical doctor, she's trained as a doctor.

So my mom instinctively went to kneel down and start to check out the woman's foot. But you could tell that that instinct of helping then somehow met the realization of I'm helping the person who ruined my life. And you could see her just there was this like oceans colliding, impulses colliding, the doctor's instinct to help, and then her personal, probably that really unhealed part of herself as a child, wanting to never help these people.

Yes.

Yeah, this is on on the one hand side. Now your mother experienced it directly, but there is probably also generational trauma we're talking about. If like conflicts in certain zones have been over decades. So, how to overcome this, you know, from your experience so far? How what what have you seen from people to cut this generational trauma and accept or be befriend with um the other's side? Let's call it.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand exactly how that transmission occurs across generations. And there's the very complicated epigenetic research, of course, when we're talking about sort of DNA methylation and the actual embodied legacies in terms of maybe predispositions to um certain illnesses or certain response patterns or ways of being in the world that are genetically encoded and expressed in the you know, phenotypic diversity we see in the phenotypic inheritances and the genetic inheritances.

You know, so there's the genetic and the epigenetic discussion, of course, that is frankly less interesting to me because yes, it matters. It also is largely adaptable. We're talking about all of the studies we see, even on multiple generations of survivors of war. The types of responses and genetic imprints that we see are so different. You look at genetic research out of Rwanda versus Syria and Palestine versus the US, all we know is that obviously these things are transmitted in the body. But that's not my main area of work. It's something that I'm interested in. I'm more interested in the environments that are created for subsequent generations and the narratives that are given to subsequent generations.

Even in my mother's initial response, there was a very clear us them narrative. Yes. So in her mind, at least, it's logical and natural that I, as her child, will understand the world through the same us them narrative. Yes. Them who did that to us. I don't know who us is. I don't know who them is. You never told me really explicitly.

Probably because she she tried to protect you from it and uh she was never exposing you to what happened. So you this by doing this, she broke it automatically.

But then I'm I have to face all the assumptions and question all the assumptions that are built into that. You know, is am I expected to hate these people? I think she probably, on the one hand, questioned of all the communities my son could have worked with. Yeah why these people? As as if her having a response of pain would make me make a different decision. So there is an expectation often that because of the narrative of how I understand the world, who is victim, who is perpetrator, who hurt me, who hurt us, that subsequent generations are to navigate for the sake of their own safety to navigate the world in the same way.

Yeah. Yeah. At the core, we we get back to forgiveness and uh how can we forgive someone?

Um I don't know if it's forgiveness. I really don't. Because what what is for you tell me what when you forgive someone, what do you think is happening?

Probably accept your past and um and don't let it influence you too much uh going forward in your life.

Accept your past and don't let it influence you going forward. That's going against all the principles of Hebian learning from childhood.

Yeah.

When I when I was a kid and I touch a hot stove, no, I can't for we can't forget. Forgetting the past is unwise.

Not forget, but for accept and be more compassionate to the situation, because uh I always try in in any type of um relationship to be compassionate and try to understand why is someone reacting as they they are, and and uh the more we try to put ourselves in other person shoes, the more we can try to understand what happened also to us and why it happened to us. And was it was it by purpose or was it again an intergenerational thing on the other side?

And this is something we see so much in our work is the relationship between curiosity and justification. We are in the work that we do, we constantly talk about curiosity. You know, what does it mean to approach your own woundedness with curiosity? And acceptance, of course. I mean, uh thinking of working in refugee camps uh in Biradisham in sort of the Greater Syria region. There's uh multiple impulses in the trauma field. Some folks say it's structural, the violence, you know, people frankly they don't need therapy as much as they need justice.

Well, part of me says, well, no shit. Of course. However, I'm making a choice to be in relationship, to be in community with folks who are suffering. I cannot do anything right now about structural violence in Syria during the middle of the war.

Yeah.

So what are the choice points? What are the realistic things that we can do? Say, yes, this sucks, this is miserable, this is not your fault, you are objectively unsafe, and the world largely does not care. Hello. You know, let's start with that. And I've often seen the conversation shifting of, okay, let's then be curious about the ways that you are adapting to those circumstances and the gap between the man you want to be and the man you feel that your body is compelling you to be with these sensitive reactions or with these ways of being in a relationship that don't feel aligned to how you want to be in the world.

And of course, you we do that work of curiosity while being arm in arm, looking at the structural and me doing my part to address that. But one doesn't cancel the other. But back to the question around sort of curiosity, yeah, it is a process of curiosity and understanding, or from my mom, thinking there's absolute benefit in her sitting and thinking meaningfully with my pain is here. We don't have to touch my pain, we can explore someone else's. But that process in and of itself is really hard.

Because for her, she doesn't feel that justice has been served. She doesn't feel that anyone cared enough about it, probably, and that it hasn't been treated with care. And so if my pain hasn't been recognized, validated, and seen, you want me to be curious about the pain of my perpetrator? Yes. That's a big ask.

It is. It is. I mean, I don't know what your mother went through, but uh was it just put aside, never talked about, never received treatment about it, never recognized what happened to her, or how how was it for her?

She can do the podcast next time and talk about all of that. You know, I don't I don't, of course, know the part of my mom's life before I came along and was a conscious person that could ask these questions. So I don't know what her experience, her full journey of dealing with the pain of her past was. I know that her and other family members had really different understandings of the same incidents. And this is what happens in families, right? Depending on developmental period, temperament, individual factors, relational factors. Siblings can experience the same event in totally different ways.

Yeah.

And so her reaction was her reaction. Whether or not she, you know, went through any specific therapy, uh, it's not my that's not my story and my journey, my part of the journey to disclose or talk about. But I know that for whatever reason, it still that woundedness was there. And asking her to think about the journey of her perpetrators is not an easy ask. It still isn't an easy ask. And I don't think that there's a lot of clarity amongst both parties of what is the utility of this.

And I think it's especially true in communities where there is still a contemporary power difference between victim and perpetrator communities. So if you look at a society like Guatemala, where the dynamics of the civil conflict were such that poorer communities and many communities that um are indigenous, and so of sort of indigenous Maya communities, were generally, not across the board, generally, more seen as allied with the cause of the guerrilla, of the rebel groups that received support from the Soviet Union, from Cuba.

This was part of the 1970s and 80s, Cold War era, of course. And in the historical record, 94% of atrocities and acts of mass violence were committed by the government against these communities. My mom isn't indigenous, she's of mixed ancestry and grew up in the capital in a relatively well-off family. So, in the historical record, what happened to my family sits in that 6%.

Yeah.

So the broader historical narrative is oppressor oppressed. How does my mom see herself in the milieu of that? I don't think she sees herself as the oppressor. I think she sees herself as a middle-class girl whose father was taken from her and she was threatened with being raped.

Yeah.

So there's what the historical record says and what she thinks about herself. I think of modern Syria, communities who are Alawi, right? Alawite communities who only recently, after the fall of the Al-Assad regime, endured massacres in Danyas. You know, does acknowledging that somehow erase or how does that interact with the pain of people who experienced massacres in Rhutta or elsewhere during the conflict? And the world didn't care. The world did nothing. So when the it's also not just how you react internally, but how the world and the broader narratives that were in react to you and your pain.

Does it feel like it was minimized?

So we're talking here, and I can feel it from your voice, also a lot of anger or representative to this type of uh um people who go through trauma. And the biggest question is how to process that uh eventually. But before we get into this, so you had your time in in Guatemala and doing your work, but what what happened after? So you shifted and recently in the last decade was in the Middle East.

When I was 17 in high school, I woke up one morning with a tremendous, unquenchable desire to learn the Arabic alphabet. And I'm it's not it's not just a story I tell myself. You can ask my family. No one really knows why. We didn't have any Arabic-speaking friends. No connection, zero connection. Yeah, but but I woke up one morning with this like absolutely serious desire to learn the Arabic alphabet. So at the time, what was available was those Rosetta Stone CDs, the language learning programs. So I went and bought that um and I started learning the letters and then you know, basic pronunciation, and you would have that, you know, the little headset and they would tell you if your pronunciation's okay with the and the bad, you know, all of the more difficult letters.

And by the time I then got to university, I wanted to study Arabic more deliberately. So um, you know, I started taking Arabic diligently in university, studying classical Arabic was ha every day for four years without any clear intention about why. I was in university from 2007 to 2011. So it was a post more immediate post 911 landscape in US foreign policy. So my other degree was in international relations, so I thought maybe this was good to have. Spanish and Arabic, two languages that I can work with in whatever future career I'm going to be involved in.

And it was after that, after university, that I took a small job in Switzerland, where I met this Jordanian nonprofit organization that was working in trying to bring more trauma-responsive, trauma-informed approaches into their curricula working with school dropouts. And I went for a six-month internship that happened to be at the exact same time as the conflict in Syria was escalating. And those six months turned into the next decade and a half of my life that I'm still, you know, deeply focused on, you know, the full spectrum of accompanying communities that have lived through political violence and trauma.

In Guatemala, I started that 30 years or, you know, 20 years after the conflict ended. And then working in Jordan, having enough Arabic and native English speaker, you know, they immediately put me in assisting in the coordination for the opening of Zatri refugee camp on the border of Syria. All of the local staff of the Jordanian staff mostly only spoke Arabic. So I was sort of shuttling back and forth with the UN system and seeing the setup of this refugee camp and then working in programs as folks were coming, you know, fresh from Syria into Jordan. At first it was a few thousand people, then the camp ballooned into 140,000 people in just a few months.

And so you watched the emergence of an informal, unlargely unplanned city. And I was working with men of my age who were in their early 20s coming out of a conflict, negotiating identity and anger and shock and trauma and loss. And I kept seeing and thinking to myself, Oh, I wonder what was going on in my mom's head 20 years ago, you know, right after the conflict. So you were seeing not 20 years later, but folks truly freshly exiting a conflict. And at the when Zatari camp was first established, we would be having meetings and the ground would shake and there would be a thud because there was bombs dropped just in Busar Tasham right across the border, a few kilometers away.

And it's so different than some of the more hermetically sealed trauma work that we see in therapeutic contexts in safer environments. Where what are you doing when someone is still hearing and feeling the bombs in the land that they fled from? So it raised all these questions for me about what is even possible.

You cannot escape from what happened to you. It's still ongoing.

Judith Herman, step one, safety. Yeah. As the key to stabilization. Well, what do you do? And that's a material impossibility for the client in front of you. So it raised a whole set of different questions, not about the long-term stewardship of our wounds and how it metastasizes in social and political phenomena, but also realistically, therapeutically, what is possible when folks will remain materially unsafe for the foreseeable future? Yeah.

These refugees, um, what what type of feelings, emotions, um they came there released, uh, relieved, or what what type of emotions uh they come with?

There's a desire amongst folks that are far away to interpret the experience of war as somehow unified. That quote unquote, the refugees experienced the war in the same way. And one thing that was really interesting to me is that there's some folks depending a few kilometers distance, you know, some folks they knew that there was more and more clashes and conflict coming. So before they experienced any direct violence, they fled the country.

Yeah.

Whereas others were much more directly exposed to aerial bombardment, having loved ones killed, having loved ones imprisoned or disappeared because of uh participation in protests or whatever it might have been. Uh, so you had a whole spectrum of different experiences of the war.

Yeah.

Uh, and so therefore you had a whole different landscape of reaction. Some folk folks moved, fled to Jordan with their entire family intact, 25 people from the extended family, you know, brothers, sisters, tete, chalto, everyone came together.

Yeah.

And then others who were the only members of their family that came across. Maybe they had a loved one who was in the armed services, or, you know, there were reasons why folks fled differently. Some folks fled to Jordan taking family members' IDs because they were military and they were defecting, but there was a special mil a camp at the time for non-civilians. Okay. But they didn't want to be separated from their wife and kids. So you had all sorts of stories in this one camp. So many diverse experiences, not only of the war, but also of what whether or not displacement felt safer or simply a different and new kind of stress to negotiate.

Because you're talking about folks who are living agentic lives, who have their home, who were, you know, Dadaha, Southern Syria has a high percentage of home ownership. Syria generally has a very high percentage of home ownership compared to other countries. And some folks, the loss was greater. If some folks lived in a three-story multi-generational home and had a small car, you come across the border, you're put in a bus. If you were, you know, found by the um, you know, military or police near the border, you were brought on a bus to a refugee camp. You're registered, have your thumbprints taken, a retinal scan, and you're given a tent and some polls and say, Alama'ak, good luck.

Here's the spot where you're supposed to do that. You know, and of course, if auntie, uncle, sibling came a week later, well, their tent is over here. So you started to see folks or you rearrange things. And this is how this the Zatari as sort of an informal city emerged, where there was the rules, and then there were the ways that people negotiated survival and buffering against the stress of that through self-organization, collective organization. But it was a shock to people's assumption of agency where I'm being told where I can live, I'm being told where the bathrooms are. There were communal kitchens when it first started, there was food distribution, things that are incredibly potentially humiliating or that are at least stressful.

So for many people, the war was far more stressful than displacement, and for others, displacement was more stressful experience than the war. So you see a spectrum of of what folks were dealing with to answer your question originally of what were folks dealing with. Some were dealing with loss. Many folks were dealing with a sense of worthlessness. Well, my cousin was staying back to fight with the Free Syria army. I'm not. Is it okay? What does it mean about me as a person, as a man, as a Syrian citizen, if I'm making the choice to be with my wife and kids?

What are other people gonna think about that? Whether or not it was the right choice for me in you know, Arab society, there's no choices that are just about you. It's about you and your family and what people will think. There was folks that were dealing with anger, folks that were dealing with a tremendous sense of humiliation, as I mentioned, um and just complete and total shock of oh, I thought this would feel safer. Loss of role? I was an engineer, I was a doctor, I was this, I was that.

But you're giving me a tent? You know, a f a flattening of status when you become a refugee. You don't have official paperwork. Depending on the country that you are an asylum seeker in, maybe you're going to be given formal papers, maybe you're not. Depends on the legal system of the country that's hosting you. But but there's a flattening of identity where you are you've you notice that the world and the system reduces you to legit refugee.

Yes, and probably the biggest the biggest uh challenge is uncertainty. What's next? So where is this heading to? I mean, they are in this situation, you can accept it or not, fight it, try to figure out the systems, but what's next? Well, and how long?

And that's a journey, right? Because when folks, when the camp first opened, that wasn't it was prominent, but it wasn't the most salient feature of their distress. Sort of the emotional and psychic distress that folks were in was not around the how long is this going to last, because it was still so fresh and so young, and the conflict was still so hot and active and spreading around the country. It wasn't until I think a few years into the camp existing and to the war going on that folks started to have that question. And that was around 2014-15. So about two or three years after the start of the conflict, which is when we also saw a very different set of decisions, primarily by young men, of oh, this looks like it's going to last a while.

I can't stay here. I want my kids to be in a place where they have documents. I want them to go to a more well-established school. I want them to know what trees look like. And we saw this large wave of migration into the European Union and elsewhere. Folks going to Libya, then via boat, folks going to Turkey. So that's when you started to see those choices shifting. But ironically, as folks make those choices, a lot more families are becoming separated. So some of the same coping mechanisms that made that temporary displacement easier started to break down because decisions towards permanence led to the disruption of coping mechanisms.

Yeah, it it it's definitely a tough situation and it needs different, it goes through different phases and changes. But you mentioned safety, and when people with traumatic experience uh they they have to feel safe to to get treatment. This is what we usually in a therapeutic setting would would would say in in the Western world. How did you experience that? How could children and the parents and the whole family systems find this safety? And what what gave them hope?

Yeah, you're mentioning something that I think is really critical. And that first thing is that when entire family units or an entire village or a society is experiencing a potentially traumatic event, you're going to have a constellation of different responses. So when you work with an individual who comes back from combat or from a war zone, they're coming into a family system that in the most cases did not experience those same things. But in a refugee camp, you're talking about entire family units and structures of friend groups, for example, all of whom experienced potentially traumatic things.

And therefore, you're not just negotiating your own adaptations in the context of unchanged others. You're negotiating your adaptations in a context of other people's adaptations. And some of those adaptations are the opposite. You know, some folks might have a strong need to connect and to be held and to be in contact with people, and others might self-isolate. So that same person who you knew before, who you thought would play a certain role, is also changed. So you see families having, I think what we saw was a lot of communication gaps.

And where folks would traditionally find ways of coping, they couldn't find those same ways or couldn't access those same means because the people changed too.

Yes.

So even in, you know, with husbands and wives or with extended brothers who you would think would be tightly bounded, war does a really funny thing where even in collectivist societies that are often romanticized, war is still experienced individually. Whether it's me, my brother, my cousin, yes, we experience the same thing and we're always eating meals together, but those meals are becoming increasingly tafe, you know, or sort of talking about surface level things because all of us have changed differently. And as you well know, no one wants to burden anyone else in the family.

You know, what's the most common expression? I don't want to give you a headache. So therefore I'm going to sit in silence with all of this pain because I know you are carrying pain too.

Did you not uh experience these communities or families talk to each other, talk what's happening, to process also within the community what has been uh affecting them?

In some cases, yes. I think there's certain experiences that are easily shareable and that are shared. Yeah. Uh there's also certain experiences and adaptations that might how do you know if what I'm experiencing is a result of the war or something that's different or someone else has changed? Some things are very much able to be talked about, but other things aren't talked about. Um, I can think of some really concrete things that were beautiful coping mechanisms that we saw emerge. The meals that folks share together. I mean, that is something that is sacred, that is held in high regard, that you know, Yom Juma on Fridays, you're having that meal together.

Come together.

At least you're with other bodies, you're with other people. You have folks that you can share certain tasks with, certain burdens with. A huge one is also prayer and communal religious practice. Yeah. I mean, no matter where you are, you can do ablution and you can pray in the same direction. And there is a beautiful consistency to religious rituals that can be used and can be done in any context. And I think this is, you know, as as a Christian, it's one of the things that I admire the most about Islam is the possibility, the immediate possibility of communal ritualized prayer with the absence of a mosque.

If you have enough people together, you know where the Gibla is. You have, as long as it's more than three, you have one who is leading. You can preserve that. And I saw folks who didn't have access to a rug finding a piece of cardboard and putting it over the dusty ground. There are some things that are beautifully consistent that can stay intact and be communal coping mechanisms. Sport, watching football matches, no matter how shitty it got, whenever there was Real Madrid game on, the world was okay.

Oh, please talk about uh uh FT Barcelona. My my son prefers the absolutely.

I I it I think the first question I had when I met many of the folks in Zateri was uh in Barcelona Madrid, and I was like, and I truly didn't, I don't care, I don't really follow football. But instinctively, the first day I think I said Madrid because my cousins and you know in Guatemala are all big Real Madrid fan. So then I was labeled, you know, with Real from then on out. And then I had to learn who was on the team, and you know, but these were small moments when everything was okay. Um and yeah, so there of course were ways that people coped and talked, but there's also things that are experienced silently. Uh isolation, doubts of faith, sexual dysfunction, some of the more sinister and private things that occur as a result of trauma and chronic stress.

So this is more like a biological also response to the to the ongoing trauma.

Of course. I mean, I think we often lump trauma and chronic stress in the same bucket. Um, but they are often quite distinct, complementary, but distinct physiological cascades that occur. So much of the work in trauma it involves, you know, we're st we're talking about prolonged childhood neglect. We're talking about car accidents. You know, in in the trauma field, we're talking about a typology of events that's actually quite diverse. And then in the context of war and displacement, there is trauma exposure in the sense of life-threatening events. And there's also chronically stressful environments where you even have limited access to things like healthy foods or exercise.

So a lot of the common advice for dealing with stress eat well, sleep well, exercise well. Well, how do you want me to do that?

Yeah.

How would you like me to do that? For example, in certain refugee camps, food is regulated by the agencies that run the camps. And you know that in most cases, they are not bringing in fresh fruit and vegetables every day. It is whatever canned stuff you can get that's cheapest. You know, simply poverty makes it harder to cope with stress. And so a lot of the things that are sort of general advice that you would see on Instagram or on whoever doctor's page you're following are completely inaccessible for most people in a refugee camp. It's hot, it's dusty, the health services are limited, medication is often in sort of short supply and can be expensive.

There's no place for recreation or exercise. You know, you see kids in Zatari who for a long time they couldn't draw trees because they never seen one. A friend of mine, he he he brought his kids, you know, he brought them outside of the refugee camp to spend some time outside visiting family and amman. And he texted me frantically because he felt like such a terrible father. Because when his five-year-old daughter got to the bottom of a flight of stairs, she sat down on the ground and cried because she didn't know how to use stairs.

She'd never seen them. And he felt like a terrible father. How could I have done this to my child? What are the decisions that I made that led me here where my daughter at five years old doesn't know how to use a flight of stairs and is scared? And the amount of shame that he just had to internalize of thinking that this is my decisions that led her here. What have I done to her? You know, but then you go back and forth between shitty options. What was the other option? Stay there. Maybe she wouldn't do maybe I wouldn't exist.

Yeah.

So there's no good choices.

Yeah, it it's always probably an inner inner discussion between uh is it a good decision or is it a wrong decision?

And those are the discussions that often don't happen in groups of people and in families. Themselves normalizing?

Yeah, it's also for children because I what comes to my mind is my own past. You know, I was born in Lebanon, in Beirut, and uh I I remember as a child like planes flying over the city and bombarding the city. For me, this was like a normal normalization of my life, you know, talking, hearing the the the news uh outlets, uh my grandmother grabbing me, going to the shelter, and all these things. It was normal or just simple, like when going to school and singing songs about war and and and tanks.

I mean, the if I think about it today, this was definitely normalization of my circumstances back then, but it's absolutely not.

There's a part of me that wants to say we have to we have to go back and and mention that humans are incredibly resilient, but I really hate that word. Um, because no one wants to be resilient when they grow up. So I don't want to normalize resilience as virtue, right? Because that's a really easy way to simply clap at people that suffer for not having died. You know, oh you didn't die. Look how resilient you are. And as one of my friends say, So, what's the other option? What is the other option other than being resilient? Are the people that died in the war not resilient? Yeah, so I don't want to frame it as resilience, but I do think it's important to note that humans unfortunately can habituate to really bad circumstances, meaning that folks can function.

I think as much as I talk a big game about safety, I have to be really careful and clear in suggesting that the goal, we're not saying that the goal is constant ease. Humans, the human body, the human mind is meant, is built to deal with adversity and challenge and temporary threats. So of course, we can and should expect that our lives will have some adversity. That's not to romanticize that, but simply to say, I don't want to suggest that the goal for everyone should be a constant feeling of safety and ease. At the same time, safety should be largely the default experience where your salience network can sort of scan the environment, understand the availability of safety resources, of potential threats, do that predictive processing that helps us safely navigate the world.

And when children are raised in environments where increased threats are the norm, unfortunately, you see kids still often being kids. But what you see also at the same time is, as my friend would describe it, um, sort of children having to grow up way too fast. Where the things that the decisions that they're seeing adults make, the decisions that they have to make, the things that they say casually, the amount of times a child will say Allah Yarhamu, because someone in the family has died or been killed, no, that's not a normal childhood and not one that should be romanticized.

And it's really difficult to see the normalcy in many ways of kids being kids and playing in the street, but because there's a skewed sense of when is safe and when isn't. If my niece and my nephew, who live in suburban America, if they were to step outside in Beirut today and hear of Occasional blast, they would they would probably think it's not safe enough to play outside here, full stop. Whereas a kid who's grown up in that environment who has been a toddler in the past three or five years in Lebanon, okay, Baba said there's no khasaf here right now, there's no threat of the airstrikes here.

We can go play outside. So you have a completely skewed sense of what is normal. There's a completely skewed baseline. And I don't want to say that every child that endures that is going to grow up with some sort of psychopathology. No, humans are incredibly adaptable and adaptive to their environment. But that's not a justification.

Yeah.

And you will often and also see certain predispositions, certain behavioral tendencies, certain things that you inherit from family, whether or not there is a biological stress response, there is at least going to be one that exists in family and how we negotiate things, how we understand the world. Do I all do I have some sort of base ontological security that the world is safe and cares about me? My niece and my nephew, they're growing up in a world where they think that they matter.

Yeah.

I can tell you a lot of kids that I know that are growing up in a world where it has to be made very clear to them for their own sake that no one cares. So care for yourself accordingly. And that's a really different experience of growing up.

Yeah, and how but how can someone in such an environment grow up with a healthy sense of identity also?

And families, I mean, you see such rich love and beauty and joy in families that are living through tremendous pain. You know, when I say that kids are growing up with the sense of people don't care, I more mean the external, the broader world around you. You know, of course, within families, just as much as there is the intergenerational transmission of trauma, there is the intergenerational transmission of strength, of joy, of love, of care during crisis, and all these beautiful positive traits that exist in family units and in social structures as well. Um what do you do with that? I think, you know, there's a period of folks go through this critical consciousness of understanding not only themselves, but who they are in the world, how maybe they've adapted and adjusted and their family might be different than other families.

And I think this often doesn't become clear for folks until they're adults and start to see, oh, all these things and traits in my family, they're different than people around me. And some folks start to notice it and experience it in diaspora. When I see friends of mine who, as young adults and adults, came of age in a refugee camp and now live in Canada and Germany and elsewhere, where their kids are never going to have those experiences. Huh. There's a beauty in that and a loneliness in that. Because of course they made all these sacrifices for their kids. Yeah. But will they ever know? Do you want them to know?

If they knew how much you suffered to get to where you are, how much you sacrificed, what do you gain from that? What do they gain from that? You know, because there's this also this fear of mania, of of making someone feel indebted. And so this as a parent, I see my friends negotiating this on a daily basis of wanting to shield their children, but also wanting to be fundamentally known by their children later in life.

Yeah, it's a difficult question, also. Are they losing their roots in some way, or are is it is it needed for them to cut off and look forward? It's I don't know what's best.

When I think of my mom, I think of her negotiating and choosing the way she wanted her children to see their roots. And there is choices that people make. And I think that it is a complicated process at a personal level of trying to work with your, especially adult children, of talking about what is their inheritance, not just the good, not just the food, not just the holidays and the culture and the celebrations, but the legacies of pain across generations, because that also shapes them.

And I grew up in a way where it was just the positive for a really long time. The roots were the positive ones, not so much the painful ones, the dark ones. But to me, the picture was really incomplete. The picture of my own self, someone who struggles with anxiety. Of course I do. It makes more sense, and that's not to justify it or say, therefore, I don't have to do anything about it. No, it's oh well that makes a lot of sense. Here's a thing that I have to work on, and it also becomes a way of honoring my ancestors. The act of being a good future ancestor to someone is an act of also understanding your own ancestry, it requires that.

Yeah, I think it it is a positive thing to stay connected with uh with with your history uh and not just to ignore it completely. It it it helps you understand the world and maybe also some sacrifice from the past or from your parents better without owing them something. I'm not saying that. It's an important distinction here.

And Lebanon is a country that knows this very well. Yeah. I mean, just yesterday I was rereading Al Hawyat al-Khatlal um in the name of identity by Amin Maluf. And he writes so much about how, especially for diaspora communities, the world constantly tries to understand you by reducing your identities to knowable and definable things. Oh, because you're darker skinned in community, in a community that is lighter skinned generally, you are Lebanese, you are Mexican, you are Guatemalan. So this tendency to categorize is both naturally human, but creates a much more complicated picture for how folks negotiate the relationship between their past, their ancestors, the legacies of pain and trauma, and the identities that they're currently supposed to be inhabiting wherever they live now.

I I can also see that I I grew up, I was seven when I moved to Switzerland. Or I was moved too. Didn't go by myself.

Seven-year-olds don't move, they're moved.

So I uh yeah, I was moved to Switzerland and had to grow up in a country I didn't know anyone, my parents didn't know anyone, there was no connection. Was a lot of pain as a child to adapt very quickly, much quicker than my parents. But I I could feel it, I could see what what what pain they they have gone through. And many years later, today, when when I when I um was studying and uh in business, I felt like I was Swiss. There was a little bit of a disconnection at some point from from Lebanon, culturally living, my wife is Swiss and so on.

But um as of today, I still would be seen as a foreigner in Switzerland or in Europe in general. So people ask me, where are you from? I'm Swiss, you know, but my name is not Swiss and my look is not Swiss. Uh but I felt Swiss. I felt, but when I'd been traveling to Lebanon, for example, they would ask me, they they wouldn't recognize me also as a Lebanese anymore because my language is not perfect. Uh I have broken Arabic, uh, I would usually speak. So it's it's also finding your identity when you in-generational, you know, my my parents left torn for country, but then also generational later, how do you find your identity?

And in my case, I needed to be balanced within myself. But I can imagine that many people, if they cut what their history is about, that they lose also who who they are and who how they move within that world.

But when you think about how humans negotiate surviving and navigating the world, it's by putting things into categories. Right? This is the earliest thing we do from the time that we're born.

That's a survivor moment.

We start to we start to categorize things. That's how we make sense. When you're a baby, I see my little baby niece who's just a few weeks old. You know, she does this with her hands and she's so what are these things that seem to be attached to me? Do I have control over them? You start to categorize everything around you. Um and we, of course, as time goes on, in living in tremendously diverse and big societies, we're not living in like chimps and societies of 30 to 40 or whatever. We have to categorize people around us. And there's people whose mind we have to consider because they're more relevant to us, and then there's whole groups of people whose minds and inner lives we don't consider because they are not salient.

This is some of the basic premises of social cognition we pay attention to things that we should pay attention to for that are relevant for us to stay alive. And I understand the impulse to categorize things and people. There's a legitimate curiosity and there's the raw need to categorize things to be able to negotiate them. And I felt that too. And it was so interesting because in you know, living in Jordan, there's always always this question of besint the minwin, you know, this of where are you from?

Yeah.

And I would say, you know, America, um, Amerike. And they would say, Lalala, but it's asrak minwin.

Right.

So it's it's not just something that happens in in in in sort of Europe or North America. And in Jordan, I was constantly asked, where are you from? I'd say Americans, they'd say, no, no, no, but really, because they're seeing darker skin, they're seeing a beard. It could be Arabic, yeah. Yeah, or so there's genuine curiosity, but also when I would say, okay, like I'm Guatimola, my mom's from Guatemala, and then my dad is American, and then they say, and I would say, Ukraini. You know, my grandfather, you know, my dad's side is Ukrainian. And they say, ah, Ukraini. It was so you're Ukrainian, which is the of my lineage and ancestry, that is the thing with which I least identify.

Yes.

But there's this tendency to reduce because I was also operating in a context that even your name is patrilineal. You know, men and women, their middle name is their father's name, their second middle name is their grandfather's name on their ID card. You are known by your paternal lineage. So, in that sense, in their minds, I'm Ukrainian. So it's it's it's it's a natural tendency that humans have to categorize in that way, even though for me, I'm sitting there kind of laughing. I'm like, oh my gosh, of all of the parts of me, that is the I've been to you, I went to Ukraine once in 2011. And, you know, everyone there, I when I got to Kiev Airport, the guy looks at my passport, he says, Oh, Nikunchuk.

He's with a smile on his face, says, This name is Ukrainian. I said, No, I know. And then, you know, completely he just says, Why is your face brown? I was like, Okay, again, genuine curiosity. Mom's from Guatemala, you know, Papa married outside the tribe. You know, we go through the whole thing. And so I appreciate the genuine curiosity about it because humans have a need to categorize, but it makes it complicated when you feel a certain way and yet you're being categorized in a different way.

Yeah, or being accepted because you or being not accepted.

Yeah, and then you know, having a you know, when I say I'm from Guatemala, that's also for many people, it's not known where that is. And so it'd say Guantanamo, no, not Guantanamo, not Guantanamo, that's not a country. Uh, and then I would say Mexico, and there's a little part of me inside that's like they're not, they're not the same. Yeah, um, but okay, Mexico, you know, and then you mean even folks joking, yeah, Mexico, Abel Mexique, you know, I would have little nicknames around being Mexican, which is I'm not Mexican, no part of me is Mexican, but here we are. So you have to I take it with uh light-heartedness.

Yeah, and this is what what the Lebanese uh do actually. They always ask you within the country where are you from? Because you are not a Lebanese when you're in Lebanon.

You are if you're from Shuf, you're from Shuf from Terables, where in Terablus?

When you're outside Lebanon, yeah. And uh, but that's that's back to be human again. And we want to belong to a certain tribe, and and and this belonging uh community again is uh so important.

Uh but also your own negotiation of that shifts based on context. If two folks from you know Jordan meet each other outside of Jordan, their connection is different than if they were to meet each other in Jordan.

Yes.

Right? Because the context around you, there is now a subordinate category that unites the two of you that is still a minority. But when that is no longer a minority, when you're in Jordan, where everyone around you theoretically, you know, is possibly Jordanian, it is no longer a salient signal to the other person. So it becomes then the subordinate category below that. It's a normal thing that humans do.

Oh I can see this a lot in Switzerland in Europe when I travel around. If you see someone familiar also as a Swiss, you know, when I I live now in Spain and uh when I'm in Major and I meet someone uh Swiss, sure, I can connect with that person much, much, uh much better.

But what's interesting to think is how this relates also to the discussion of trauma. I was having a chat with someone yesterday who was asking about how often folks that have experienced shared traumatic events seem to be able to, you know, have some sort of code or recognize each other, right? Um, there's we see this a lot with veterans, with folks with combat experience. Oh, you know, did you serve? Did you this? What branch? There's a certain co-identification or a camaraderie that exists with co-experiencing the same context of trauma. But even that also shifts when you're in the country versus out.

Yes.

So you you see it in folks that have experienced, quote unquote, the war in Syria. Maybe that is something that feels a bit more unified on the outside. But then as you get closer to the epicenter of where that trauma or traumas occurred, the identities start to shift. Did we experience this one trauma as the same trauma? Where there's different victim perpetrator dynamics, different meaning making, different sense making about what that trauma was. And some of those identity signals that would, in theory, unite folks as brethren in trauma or kin in trauma, start to break down as you move to the epicenter. And I'm sure you see that in Lebanon too.

Yes, I do. I mean, I don't travel much there.

Uh, but in the Lebanese community, yeah.

Within the Lebanese community. Uh that that happens a lot. What comes to my mind right now, but also Gaza, for example, I uh I saw recently like a musician who found purpose of just trying to give something back within uh a war zone, like creating like concerts uh or we're having having singing songs. Um and I I I I love that because it it gives like purpose to different people and it helps normalizing like or giving something um normal back.

How what type of activities have you experienced uh people stepping up to and providing serving the others?

I have a close friend who lost his fiancee in an airstrike in the early days of the war in Syria. And he found her body under the rubble when he was going to pick her up and his future father-in-law as well. And this was sort of the beginning of his journey with grief and loss, and then he lost other family members. He was he had to leave the country because he had been involved in some protests, and he was the only one of his family that fled across into Jordan. And one night, you know, we were having it was during Ramadan, we were having a big watermelon at Sahur time, as one does, water-rich foods before the sunrise.

And I asked him, I said, I have a I said, I have a bit of a sensitive question. I said, go ahead. I said, What in those moments when you truly were confronted with the imminence of your own death during the war, what changed? How did you become different after? And it's okay if I didn't. You don't have to you don't have to be transformed by a near-death experience or by being confronted with your own mortality. And he said, Sur adhakakar. I began to laugh more.

Yeah.

Right. And so you know, I don't want to be the guy coming from the outside and and saying, uh huh, let's laugh it off. You you it's serious. The experience of war of suffering is immensely serious. At the same time, many of my Syrian friends who live through unimaginable horrors are among the funniest people that I know. Whether that's an escape hatch or a coping mechanism, that's not mine to judge or to decide, whether it's an act of avoidance, that's mine to observe and maybe think about. And does it always show up? Is it does it make them incapable of processing or integrating what they've been through?

In most cases, no. It but it does shift your relationship with the imminent possibility of sharing in a very incongruous and potentially inappropriate response to the situation when you when you face death, when you're living through constant stress, when everything is awful, in many cases, all you can do is laugh. It is the most imminently accessible endorphins that you have. And some folks might say, Oh, what is that? Dark humor. But when you watch Lebanese comedy or Egyptian comedy, communities that have gone through a lot are often among the funniest.

And so whether it's the production of music, the production of of laughter, of comedy, or whatever it might be, yes. Does it does it help you connect to an equally as true part of yourself in that moment of of darkness? Good. Do it, lean into it.

And and was he doing this like actively or or just to bring a bit some ease to himself and to the He became a little bit of an instigator with his friends, always being the funny guy. Okay.

You know, and so whether or not it was a conscious therapeutic process, I don't think so. But it was something he had noticed about himself. He said that he said that I began to laugh more. And there's something, there's something worth noticing there.

That's something he could control. But I can also imagine you mentioned that uh a bit earlier. Well to to lose agency, or how can they find agency about being recognized, being valuable, being um uh bringing sense to to what they are doing in their life?

But in our work, we often ask folks a really simple question of after 15 years of war, but how would you like to feel? Or even a more complicated question is what is a feeling that you long for that you that you miss. Yes. You know, because what it's both the simplest and the most beautiful thing we can do to honor people's pain is to simply try to get them to a feeling state that they long, for which they long, right? And when we've asked this question so many different times, the overwhelming response of what how do you want to feel after 15 years of war, the number one response is always safe.

And that's why we're called the Inner Safety Project, because it's just a call and response. How do you want to feel? You want to feel safe? Ya Allah, let's do it. Let's try to get you there. Even if it seems impossible in the circumstances. But another really common response, and this is uh interestingly, particularly true among men, istimam cared for. I want to feel cared for. Right. What a what a brutal answer to be confronted with. Yeah. Because for for a grown man to say, I want to feel cared for means that there is a well of experience of feeling neglected.

Yeah.

It's obvious we want to care for children, but how And this same guy, one and I I I pursued this line of question in an interview with this guy who's like six foot four, big guy. He has two kids. And I said, Imam, tell me more about this. He said, I'm jealous of my two-year-old son, and I feel I feel awful for feeling jealous of a baby. I said, Okay, tell me why. He said, Because when my son asks for a hug or asks to be cared for, people respond. Yeah. He said, I can't do that. What would my wife think? What would my mom think? What would my family think?

As the provider, as a grown man, asking to be held? I can't even, I could never articulate that. Right? And after that, and you know, this would probably break every possible rule of research, of practice. I said, God, come here. And I gave him the biggest hug, and he just starts weeping. Because it was a simple probably one of the only moments in the past five years of his life when he asked the world for something and it was given to him.

Yeah. But this shows again, you know, doesn't matter how how how old we are, how we grow up, uh we always need like belonging and being recognized and and even more in in such an environment.

Yeah.

Being cared for, feeling that you matter, feeling, you know, one of the biggest themes that we have to work with in our in our group work and community is a constant feeling of humiliation.

What what does it give to you? I mean you you you you got emotional now at that point.

So I'm surprised it took this long for me to get emotional.

Yeah what does it do with your with yourself doing this work and helping others?

The way that I maybe it's a justification, maybe it's a neat little narrative I tell myself, but my science is my love letter. Everything that I research, everything that we develop in with communities for communities is my way of expressing love to my friends who have lost so much. And there's probably something incorrect or biased about doing work in that way but it is 100% driven by what my friends are asking about about themselves.

But why does it feel so hard? What can I feel when you know you spend five years in a refugee camp then you get on a boat and then you get on a plane to Libya then you get on a boat and ten people around you drown and you make it and you get to a place that gives you documents but then says you can't bring your wife and kids and now you're separated from your kids what are you supposed to feel? How do you hold that you know because I see so many of my friends trying to negotiate not just feeling humiliated or uncared for but feeling numb.

And so one of the few things that we can do also is where do we find gratitude in that can we walk folks through a process of at least understanding the logic of of course your brain and your body are engaging in this process of turning everything down because you are one person who could not handle it. So we have an image in our curriculum that was designed with some folks uh some Syrian folks that we know talking about numbness, emotional numbness as a concept, as a coping strategy that our bodies engage us in without our consent. And it's a picture of a doctor administering anesthesia to a human heart.

Right? Because everyone can understand why do we get anesthesia before surgery? Oh well the doctors give us this because otherwise the pain would be too intense. Hello great now let's talk about emotional numbness about how our bodies have this logic of of course you wouldn't be able to handle this much pain. So turn it all down but that's not something that people consent to so then you see a lot of folks that I know in my life that are struggling with wondering if they love their kids enough wondering why they can't feel happy when they go to a sibling's wedding why wondering why the lows are so accessible to feel so low, but the highs feel so limited.

Right? So but there's a logic to it. So you see there is a possibility of some shift of some work to be done when you can at least approach that with a sense of gratitude for the logic of oof I totally get why you're doing that to me dear head dear heart I see you I see what you're doing. You're trying to protect me at least not being so mystified or isolated and think thinking that you are somehow some non-emotional numb freak at least understanding the logic of it can open up the space for a little bit more self-compassion.

Yeah beautiful work you do and and uh the the impact you you leave behind you cannot save everyone that's that's I had over the years several people ask me can you help me get out of here and you know what I could do it I could help some people but I've seen also others who left and then felt felt alone or were were always connected or in mind and heart always there.

So they lost I in my opinion lost more of their quality of life than being with family and people around them um which is supportive. So you gain on the one hand side and let's say physical safety but you you lose you lose a lot of emotional how how how to how to call it more emotional connection and and and probably at the end love.

I've had this discussion with many people who you know I worked in in in different projects in Europe and I observed many people that I know and I met many friends along the way who had left whether they were in Syria or Turkey or Lebanon or Iraq wherever they were Jordan wherever they were first displaced and then they were in Europe. Many folks that didn't do that journey that were still in Jordan or Lebanon or elsewhere and it was the biggest dream of their life or the biggest regret of their life oh I wish I went in 2015 when it was still easier to get to the EU whatever and I had seen so many folks who what happened when they got to Germany or elsewhere was it was beautiful for three months.

Yeah. And then you're hit with a tsunami of grief or of confusion for several reasons. For some folks it was because oh maybe I'm in a materially safe place where I can work but all my friends are there.

Yeah.

All the ways that I coped and understood the world and filled my time and filled my heart are not here with me. Or you know the laws of physics you are finally been displaced all of this tsunami and wealth of pain and trauma has been displaced by something of equal or greater mass, which is calm and stability in a country that is bureaucratized and routinized. So what do I what do I do with that when when you're confronted with the fact that so much of your inner life was inertia when you've gotten the thing that you said you wanted now you're opening up the floodgates of feeling all of those things that you supposedly were leading you towards the next step.

So yeah it's not all rosy for those folks who made those decisions. But when I talked to friends in 2020 2021 2022 who were then trying to still make that journey of course I said hey buddy I've seen folks go through this in Germany I've seen I'm I can't take their choices away from them. As someone who has all of the privileges and mobility in the world it is not my place to tell someone to stay in a context of material suffering. But we had those conversations around there's something if if you're gonna do this and this is your choice Habib, if you're going to do this, don't be surprised if and I will hold you when you're there.

Yeah so I I like that so to to create awareness about it and not to glorify oh you made it and you make this amount of money or you get this support.

To normalize not having to be only experiencing joy when you get the thing you said you wanted.

Yes.

Because for so many people having that dream is how they make sense of the pain of that there is something that I'm working towards otherwise it's just often an abyss. And we're now seeing this and I mean there's many folks who have gone back joyfully to Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime and there's beauty and there's love and there's many things but there also for many folks is it's not all joy. There's many folks who are going back thinking you know finally I will see people that I haven't seen for 12 years and then you go back and those people are not the people you left because they've endured 12 years of war too.

Yeah.

So there's also what was expected to be all joy is commingled with a tremendous amount of unexpected new loss. And that can be very difficult for people as well.

Yes and what it tells me is also over time things change and Syria has changed uh now it was beautiful to see also Hala Gorani who traveled back to Aleppo and was documenting a little bit about her experience after decades leaving so and what was beautiful to see is also that the people are caring about stone by stone and uh buildings historical buildings which were bombarded and then they were splitting the stones and categorizing it by old pictures and trying to puzzle it back into a former shape and making something new out of it.

So um but it's simply to say that it's not the expectation that it is somehow linear and one-dimensional is something that folks need to be very conscious of. When we it's and it's such a normal thing if if I'm undergoing if I've lived my whole life chronically poor there's a net it's natural to think if I was if someone dropped 10 mil in my bank account I would feel great. And we have countless stories of winners of the lottery who it's not so great. For a while. And it's not to say that there's no benefit and it shouldn't be pursued of course rectifying structural harms receiving justice going back to a longed for homeland these are of course good and beautiful things that for so many, this is the arc that bends towards justice.

But at the same time there has to be an awareness and a cognizance that you can't put all of the psychological eggs in that one basket.

Yeah.

Right? Because it isn't going to be one dimensional or linear.

What would you do with 10 million right now?

Oh I would give it all away I have all of the kinds of uh survivors guilt and feelings that I you know I I have I have so many blessings and and and joys and privileges in my life that I would my first instinct would be to give all of it away. Which part of the world after I pay taxes yes of course um which part of the world do you think would need it the most right now I would say if you walk in any neighborhood in any city in the world you look around and you'll find enough people that have enough need that that 10 mil would go go away quickly.

Beautiful I think not many would think that way right if you could now pursue in the next few years what what would you like to give in more war regions or anything else what what is it you want to focus on in the next years?

There's a few long-term goals that I have with this work. One is to make trauma related research much more responsive to and useful for people who are living through war and violence and disasters. So much of the research is understandably conducted in more industrialized, wealthy centers of learning and that makes sense. But it's one ethically and two methodologically very difficult to do robust research in communities that are experiencing protracted instability but I do think there's a richness that can really benefit our under our collective understanding of trauma and of healing by expanding how we do research, who's involved in the research process, what are the questions that are being asked, who are the first askers of those questions and how are we relating to them in the process of coming up with the questions, coming up with hypotheses, conducting research, and most importantly making that research imminently useful for folks that are navigating their own pain and trauma.

The second is that so much of the work in trauma and neuroscience and fields that are close to my heart is predominantly in English. And there's small little things that we struggle with in doing a lot of this work in Arabic. One is when I'm talking a big game about safety, am I talking about aman or salame? These are different words. So and these are small choices that we think are inconsequential but even when we do surveys the vast majority of psychological measurement tools and assessments were originated in English and then get translated into other languages and validated through back translation into English which still places the affective landscape of humans defaulting to English as the way of understanding the self.

And that's it's not that those are all bad terms. No, no there's a richness to that but I think there is a lot of work that we can still do in how we're honoring where concepts originate from and the diversity of experiences and conceptions of selfhood and emotion that exist when we look beyond the English language. And then lastly my third objective and goal is to in a in a way that feels culturally spiritually and personally relevant to create a situation where as many people as possible around the world have access to good information that helps them demystify some of their own experiences and responses as a result of experiencing trauma.

So whether that's through education or through different you know psychoeducation materials or initiatives making that information readily available in ways that feel relevant and accessible for folks that isn't in complicated technical jargon or has a bunch of hyphens in it.

How do you process what you experience what you see and the pain you you yeah you you you have to get along with how do you process it for your with for yourself when you say process what do you mean I mean how do you deal with it um do you do you have a therapist or do you do you talk about it? What's your way of uh dealing with it?

I absolutely go to therapy um sometimes you know double feature sometimes I have a therapist for one thing and then others that I and I I work in a field full of therapists yeah so it's not like it's I got a lot of people I can call although fewer people that I can call that will be able to imminently and personally understand some of the really dark types of experiences that we confront in working with survivors of torture and things like that. But I have people that I can call outside of my you know normal therapy um and this might sound a little distant for some folks that work in this field but I am a religious person.

Right? I grew up in the church and there's two things that I think that I personally have that can hold whatever I bring to them. One is the earth there is no amount of weight that the ground cannot hold there's no amount of weight when the earth beneath us cracks under the heaviness of it. So for me nature is super important and the other entity is God there is nothing he can't handle. There's nothing I bring up to him I elevate I bring up in my own prayers and my meditations and reflections or in interacting with spiritual texts of different kinds that he can't handle.

I don't want to say it's his job to handle it, but he's seen it before you know unfortunately the horrible things we do to each other as humans are not new. For some people religion is a placebo great placebos work.

Oh yeah for me it's it I don't see it that way but I also welcome you know working in neuroscience there's a there's a lot there's a lot of folks that are either agnostic or atheist and at the same time so whenever we have this discussion it's like awesome if the placebo works let's give it to people I have one last question if you think about someone right now you're speaking to in in a in a conflict situation what would you tell him? What would you tell that person? What would you recommend?

I would invite someone to think of the most uncomfortable way that they have adapted and adjusted and changed as a result of what they've been through when I would just simply say I guarantee you it's not just you. Right? Because you've come across folks who adapt and think I wasn't like this and I have this really weird thing that I've been thinking or feeling or doing or wanting to do you know people adapt and adjust and have all sorts of symptoms. It's not just you I promise it's not just you're not crazy.

Beautiful Mike thank you very much this podcast but also the work you do I think uh it's very admirable and uh and um it needs also courage to be in these regions and to engage with um with in in conflict zones in general um I I appreciate it often I feel like when I when I see the media and see what's happening in certain areas I also feel like the urge like how can I help? How can I but um sometimes we we are in our bubbles and we have the rubber responsibilities and not ready but yourself dedicating your work with research and active field work um thank you for that.

Yeah and I also want folks that feel that too that who who think I'm not doing enough I'm not this I'm not that there's I don't want to romanticize being a trauma pirate either. You know I'm I'm I'm not going in there I'm not I'm not finding conflict zones and going into them. I am working in the community where I have developed long-term relationships and I go where they go I I I follow their interior shifts and their landscapes I'm not going to a new conflict just because I think that conflict is interesting. Like I said this is my letter to my community and so many of those folks when I've I've had that conversation around what and I've asked my friends what would you say to people who aren't doing enough who think they're not doing enough and they would say I'm jealous I would be doing nothing if I were them and that's not to say don't do anything be complacent don't you know but there's also a weight of that sense of not doing enough that also everyone should be gentle with themselves when they can be and also try to create the change they want when they can as well.

Yeah. Thank you for taking the time today. Thank you