An Irish SEP in Palestine (part 1)

By Karen Garvin (Counsellor, Psychotherapist and SEP)

Prior to 2023, my definition of being harm avoidant was to avoid exposing myself to things that disturbed me: news, films, stories of war. That orientation also shaped my work as a therapist. It was an individualistic approach to protecting my peace by shutting out what disturbed me. My world was carefully curated.

That changed in November 2023 when I joined a Cork HCW Palestine rally. The reality unfolding in Gaza seeped through my social media filters, and it horrified me. I knew such violence existed, but it felt distant and almost unbelievable. It felt utterly contradictory to say I worked with trauma while witnessing one unfold in real time, and not talking about it. I had started my SE training earlier that year, in February 2023, and had become curious about the difference between a genuine lack of capacity and my own ideas about protecting my peace. Through the training, I became increasingly aware of my changing capacity to stay with difficult experiences, and my perspective on same.

In 2024, wanting to create space for therapists to speak about what was happening, I set up Irish Psychotherapists for Palestine on Instagram. Through this, therapists spoke up publicly, ran small fundraisers, and attended weekly protests. Over time, however, this began to feel insufficient. When the opportunity arose to travel to Palestine as a volunteer in August 2024, I felt I had the capacity to go.

I didn’t know what to expect, but what I encountered was devastating. In refugee camps such as Tulkarem, I walked through buildings that had been bombed by F-16 jets and infrastructure destroyed to the point that it resembled images of Gaza. Even so, people welcomed us into their homes. Tea with sage was made and fresh bread was served on immaculate plastic tablecloths amongst the rubble. I met many local workers supporting people in the camps and heard experiences that hit me hard. Hearing about young people who had been killed made me think of my own children, who were the same age. I was often overwhelmed in these moments, but I also noticed that I had the capacity to stay and listen. I learned here that regulation is not about being calm all the time. From an SE perspective, I began to understand regulation less as the absence of distress and more as the ability to remain connected to myself while staying present with another person’s experience.

The stories shared with me were harrowing. My perspective changed in that I came to believe trauma-informed therapists must hear these stories if we are to take part in dismantling the structures that enable such suffering. Part of those structures is the way refugees are often viewed through a lens of being underdeveloped, helping to manufacture consent for the Islamophobia and politically enabled violence occurring now.

Experiences in the camps frequently brought me back to conversations I had been having during my training in the North of Ireland, and to questions about occupation, division, and collective memory. Training in Somatic Experiencing in the North of Ireland has influenced me deeply. I had grown up in what would have been considered a republican household, carrying the romanticised southern version of evicting our coloniser. My experience was limited to childhood Christmas shopping bus trips north, encounters with soldiers, and my father’s books on Bobby Sands and republicanism. Experiencing occupation directly in Palestine, the soldiers, checkpoints, incursions, and the visible devastation of refugee camps meant that the North of Ireland became a frequent topic of conversation amongst the 6 Irish on the trip. We automatically spoke Irish with one another at checkpoints and in the company of outsiders.

Through conversations with Northern SE colleagues, I came to appreciate that the lived experience of those who remained under occupation in the North, and the sense of abandonment by the South, was an entirely different reality. I reflected on this often in Palestine while getting to know people living inside and outside the camps, hearing about internal discrimination & separation, and listening to the differing realities of those living in Areas A, B, or C. Those outside the camps often got on with the freedoms available to them, while those inside lived with daily disruption, destruction, and military incursions. Palestine gave me a greater appreciation for the divisions that occurred in Ireland and the enduring impact of partition. The purpose of the trip, and the commitment I made to myself, was to bear witness and bring back the stories I was asked to carry.

When I travelled to Palestine the first time, I was in Intermediate Level 1 training. When I returned in October 2025, I had completed the full three years. Looking back, I can see a profound difference in my capacity. On my first trip, I often found myself overwhelmed, moving between tears and exhaustion. By the second trip, I noticed an increased ability to attend to my internal experience. Through awareness of sensation, breath, movement, and orientation, I could move through activation without becoming entirely consumed by it. I think this was a combination of increased capacity and ability to resource myself, the habituation of violence and that by my second trip in October 2025, I had a clearer understanding that our role as witnesses is not to merge with and drown in another person’s trauma. Just as in my therapy practice.  The role of the witness is to remain present enough to call for help, to speak about what we have seen, and to support in whatever ways are available to us.

Judith Herman speaks of this:

“In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.”

— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

In 2024 I spent a month in Aida Camp, originally intended for 1,200 people displaced during the Nakba in 1948. Today it houses four times that number, and residents are subjected to ongoing incursions by the Israeli military. In 2018, UC Berkeley described Aida as “the most tear-gassed place on earth.”

Trapped and unable to leave. Stateless and without rights. What does this do to a population? The North of our own country offers some indication. I met many people carrying complex diagnoses. Psychiatric assessment is becoming more common, alongside medication as treatment, yet removing the threat, or providing sustained therapeutic support is rarely normalised. Through an SE lens, I found myself wondering: how do people orient towards healing while the threat remains present? How do you find a counter-vortex when the source of activation is ongoing for years?

In Aida, people were curious, welcoming, and warm. Irish language and murals lined the walls in quiet solidarity. Houses were built upwards because residents were forbidden from expanding outwards. The apartheid wall stood metres away, watched over by seven towers. The occupation was always visble. Drones followed us home at night and hovered feet above us as we ate on the roof at night. Automated weapons tracked our movement along the wall. I eventually moved my bed so I was no longer sleeping in the direct line of fire from a mounted weapon outside my room in the camp.

This first trip in 2024 offered a front-row view of life for people displaced within their own country. I visited five camps, prisoners’ rights organisations, human rights groups, and Palestinian organisations in Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, and Ramallah.

The restrictions on movement were impossible to ignore. Travel was often unpredictable, and at times simply impossible. The apartheid system was pervasive. What struck me most was how quickly I adapted to things that should never feel normal: checkpoints staffed by armed teenagers, settlers spitting at us in the street as we were identified as Christians, and daily humiliations and restrictions. This witnessing fundamentally changed my practice. I became increasingly aware of how systemic oppression becomes normalised while trauma is individualised and separated from its context. One man I met after decades in prison described his release as moving from one prison into a larger one. There was still no safety. I was struck by the condition of people’s bodies following imprisonment. Emaciated & wide eyed. The impact of mass internment on families and communities was everywhere. I met photographers, social workers, and community organisers who had all experienced internment.

One conversation about SE emerged after I closed a door behind us in a room with a man who had been interned, and I noticed a significant increase in activation that I could feel in the resonance between us. By slowing down, creating distance, and asking, a conversation began to unfold about the door & I understood what the closed door represented. Re-opening the door brought immediate relief. It was a simple but powerful reminder that behaviour often makes sense when understood through the lens of survival. I became increasingly aware of how trauma lived in everyday experiences: chest pain, anxiety, anger at a running tap because water had been restricted. Bodily responses carried histories that made complete sense once their context was understood. As my understanding of SE deepened, I became increasingly interested in how these ideas showed up not only in my clinical work but in my own nervous system while in Palestine.

When I encountered moments of terror, I noticed that I would locate the strongest sensation and then orient towards parts of my body that felt easier. I can still hear my course founder in the North saying, “SE is not a technique,” yet in moments of extreme stress, in the absence of external safety or support, I found myself facilitating myself using body practices.

For example, on one occasion, when I was alone, I encountered a situation in which I thought I was going to be shot. I became aware of intense activation in the front of my body where the threat was. I felt myself brace for impact from my face down to my ankles. It felt too much, so I turned away. That felt less frightening, but now I could no longer see what was happening with my eyes. As soon as I turned, I felt intense pressure at the base of my skull and a sensation throughout my back of wanting to collapse. The space was wide open with no hiding places, and I knew I had to move away under my own steam. So I tunnel focused on the ground and on my feet as I slowly walked. My arms were stretched out and beginning to hurt, but I didn’t want to lower them. The bracing through my back and head was intense. I can still recall the graveyard beside me, the heat, the dust, my sore arms, and watching my feet move. Every so often I noticed that I could breathe. The sensation of my feet contacting the earth felt like an anchor amidst the pressure in my skull and the impulse to collapse.

When I finally reached a corner out of range, I jumped around a bit as if the ground were hot, and shouted (and cursed) at myself telling myself that I was fine-but not to ever go there again. Making noise and hearing my own voice helped me reconnect to myself and come out of the tunnel vision part. Looking back through an SE lens, I can see how attention naturally moved between overwhelming activation and sensations that felt more manageable, allowing me to keep functioning in the absence of safety. What I find interesting is that I can vividly recall my feet, the graveyard, the dust, the heat, my sore arms, and the pressure in my skull, but not the terror itself. In fact I laugh sometimes thinking I must have looked like John Wayne walking away from the guns.

Orienting through & focusing on different sensory channels has helped me reconnect to myself on many occasions there. Noticing quieter sounds in my environment further away, smelling a hand cream I had brought with me, stretching or tensing and releasing parts of my body, noticing my breath, or orienting towards something that felt less threatening all provided some relief in the moment. Moving around and talking out loud was particularly helpful when I felt myself slipping into a sleepy dorsal state and becoming less aware of danger.

During the final two weeks in Aida in 2024, I experienced intense activation one night from the sound of overhead rocket strikes and the sense that there was nowhere externally available to move towards safety. The only place left to go was inward, curling up, noticing everything inside and that I could still breathe. In conversations with others in Palestine about trauma, I noticed how often people oriented towards minute sensory details: the thing they saw, heard, smelled, or touched that helped them survive. After the first trip, I also noticed that I carried alarm in my own body for months after returning home, particularly when hearing planes overhead.

While in Aida, I met Samira, Director of Education Services at the Aida Youth Centre. She was born and raised in Aida Camp and has now raised her own adult children there. Established in 1968, the Aida Youth Centre is remarkable. Initially focused on sport, it now provides education, psychosocial support, arts, music, humanitarian aid, and medical assistance. Our shared interest in trauma renegotiation turned into a three-hour conversation, and that conversation has continued through weekly Zoom calls in the 2 years since.

Central to these conversations has been a sharing of learning and psychoeducation. Samira was interested in the impact of trauma and the experiences of children attending the centre. We spoke about the nervous system rather than cognition alone, and about how emotional responses can be understood through the body’s attempts to adapt and survive. Those conversations led to the development of the Aida Project.

Over time, some of the language of SE has become part of our shared language: the healing-vortex, setting the conditions, slowing down, titration, pendulation, activation, and capacity. We discussed viewing children’s behaviours as a result of their Trauma, behaviours as incomplete self-protective responses and using bottom-up approaches to support self-soothing and build capacity, rather than relying solely on top-down direction or instruction.

My experience was that there was value in offering a regulated nervous system within these conversations, and this was reflected back to me many times. We spoke about creating the conditions for things to slow down, and I tried to model that whenever activation appeared. For me, this too became part of active witnessing within the therapeutic community. Samira’s vision was to offer direct trauma-focused psychological support and to include parents in that work. Funding was a barrier. Through Irish Psychotherapists for Palestine, €12,000 was raised to build and furnish a therapy space, which was completed in October 2025 and which I later returned to witness and support.

For me, that project represents something important about witnessing and capacity. The Aida Project is one small expression of what can emerge when witnessing is accompanied by action.