Resilience versus Change After Trauma: Must Life After the Break Continue the Life Before It?

On trauma, pain, and the possibility of changing the relations between past, future and world

Yoel was in the war — the war that began in October 2023 — and was hurt. We want him to come back to life. What are we asking for? That he sleep, stop being afraid, be able to work and to love; that he become again who he was; that he return to the people and the world that knew him. We want him to heal. Yoel is furious when people talk to him about healing. He wants to live — but "healing" is not the name he gives to the life he wants.

He wants to sleep, to fish, to raise a child, to be close to the woman he loves. But he will not let us speak of these as signs that he has been rehabilitated. They are simply the things themselves. If every wish of his is immediately translated into a step toward healing, we go on granting the injury the authority to explain his life.

He wants people to stop addressing him as someone who is not yet who he is supposed to be.

He wants the future to be a place where he can want something that has not already been determined by what happened to him.

In Israeli society, resilience is a personal and a public ideal. We ask people to hold out and communities to rebuild. But a person, a family and a state almost always use the same words and say different things. A person's capacity to go on with their life is not the same as society's capacity to go on leaning on them in the same way.

Yoel wants to move to Thailand, to live on an island and to give up his Israeli citizenship. To build a life that is no longer experienced as a substitute for the life he lost. He wants to speak another language and to belong to a world in which return is not the test of his healing.

Can what was broken stop being missing, even without being put back in its place?

1. What are we asking to endure?

Resilience, recovery, change and growth offer different ways of understanding life after a break — and different expectations of it. Resilience emphasizes what manages to be preserved despite the injury; recovery — what was harmed and can return. Change turns the gaze toward what has become different. Growth adds the claim that the change is for the better.

The life that preceded the injury provides a point of reference: the person we knew and the future that awaited him. Even a life that has changed can be judged by what it managed to restore or to make up for.

One can change one's life and still go on judging it by what needed repairing. How does this point of reference become a demand that the life after the break continue the life before it?

2. How continuity becomes an obligation

We assume that it is the same person and the same life before the injury and after it. His body, even if harmed, goes on; his relationships are not reset; his actions leave consequences. But from here a quiet shift is sometimes made to a different demand: that he belong to his past. Not only acknowledge what happened, but go on living as someone for whom what happened to him determines who he is supposed to be.

The question is not only whether one can remember without being defined by memory. It is also whether one is allowed to forget. In Israel, where memory is at times a duty, forgetting is perceived as betrayal or as getting lost: know where you came from and where you are going.

In Israel, continuity has a social and moral role, presented also as a duty of survival that extends beyond the individual. Memory is a debt and a duty, and through it the one who remembers is defined. He is required to carry not only what happened to him, but also a family and national past that preceded him — and to pass it on.

Is betraying our past a betrayal of ourselves? Or when does loyalty to ourselves require betraying our past?

And if the one we might become does not yet exist — must we justify parting from the past in the name of loyalty to some self?

3. Life as a satellite of what was lost

Perhaps we are all broken people, living as satellites of something that was lost. Again and again we circle it, trying to repair. Absence tells our story(in Hebrew): a relationship that ended, parents, a home, a body that was, or a future that will no longer come true.

It is not a matter of how much time, how many words or deeds are devoted to remembering. One can hardly ever speak of what is absent or lost, and still everything we leave unsaid(in Hebrew) will speak of it. A decision will be measured against it. Success will prove to someone that he was wrong; failure will show how badly I was hurt; a new relationship will have to restore something the previous one did not give.

A lost future can become a black hole no less powerful than a past that took place. A person compares his children to children who were not born, his body to the body he was supposed to have, and his life to the life he would have lived if. He is not only trying to remember. He goes on negotiating with a possibility that is no longer available.

As a therapist, I enter these relationships from within the same culture. The therapist is not a cultural critic standing outside its ideas about the person and about time. For him too, life accumulates: experience becomes understanding, relationships become identity, and the past takes part in making the future. What was cut off asks for connection; what was not understood asks to be worked through; and what was forgotten asks to be remembered.

Within this conception of time, the new, too, takes its meaning from what came before. A new relationship is read as the repair of an early one, distance as a defense against closeness, and difficulty in wanting as the trace of a forbidden desire. Therapy does not only discover the gravitational pull of the past. It grants it the status of an explanation.

Causality gives this movement its logic: something that happened then explains what happens now. Responsibility adds a claim: someone acted, someone was harmed, and someone must acknowledge, repair or pay. The present becomes the place where the debts of the past are collected, and the future — the place where they are supposed to be settled.

This also creates a way to be freed: to understand where I came from, to identify what was given no place, and to work through what keeps acting. Even release from the past is supposed to happen through it. Even when the goal is to stop returning, the way passes through return.

But from the fact that the past caused harm, it does not follow that it must go on determining the shape of a life. And from the fact that someone is responsible, it does not follow that the injured person must go on carrying the injury so that the other's responsibility remains in force. Is it possible to stop living as a claim for repair, without acquitting the one who did the harm?

Can something stop being missing without having returned and without having been replaced?

4. On the broken and the whole

Within the word "broken," the whole remains present: it is the form against which we recognize what is missing. Even when we speak of trauma, we carry an image of a life that was harmed — of the person who was and of the future he was supposed to have. That image goes on determining what counts as loss and what will count as healing.

But what if trauma also severs the world in which it was clear what had broken? It is not only desires that change, but the language in which they make sense; not only the place where one lives, but what counts as home(in Hebrew) and what is felt as exile(in Hebrew); not only plans for the future, but the relations through which the past obligates and the future promises.

"Injury," "lack" and "healing" also belong to this world. If time, space, the body(in Hebrew) and relations of belonging change, so does the possibility of using these words. Can we meet a life in which the very definition "a broken person" ceases to describe what is happening — or will we go on translating it back into a language in which it must be injury, coping and repair?

So the question is not only what the trauma did to the person who was. The question is what authority the person who was still has over the life that can come into being after him.

In Oliver Sacks, this question also becomes a quality of the writing. He looks for the person who remains within the injury. In "The Lost Mariner," facing a man who cannot retain new memories, he finds moments of presence and unity in music, in gardening and in religious ritual. Continuity is not found where he first looked for it.

Reading him from within my own life, I hear this "disruption" as tragic and hopeful at once. The familiar world fails to contain what happened, and the attempt to return the person to his place also exposes the limits of the place. But within the failure, ways of sensing, relating and being open up that the earlier concepts could not recognize.

The hope in Sacks lies not only in what can be saved of the person who was. It lies also in the fact that his encounter with the living person reads as a struggle that changes his own understanding of the world.

Catherine Malabou gives this severance a philosophical formulation. In Ontology of the Accident and The New Wounded she proposes thinking about destructive plasticity: destruction that produces another form. The injury does not merely subtract capacities from a person who remains fundamentally as he was; it can change the personality itself.

The new form need not be growth. It can include indifference, and estrangement from what used to matter. Those close to the person look for the one they knew; the person in front of them does not always take part in the same search.

From here another question opens: does this search reveal what is missing in the person who is there, or what was lost to the one who searches? In ambiguous loss(in Hebrew), the person is present and yet the familiar way to him is lost. But does losing the way to him mean that he himself has become lacking?

Perhaps the break lies in the shared world that no longer exists, and the bereavement lies with those around him. When we call the person "broken," we may be turning our loss into a trait of his. Does he experience himself as incomplete, or are we the ones who miss him? And why should our answer define his life?

5. Is the island a world or a refuge?

A sculpture breaks. One can repair it with reference to what it was. One can assemble the fragments into a new composition. And one can look at a fragment, throw away the rest, and use it as the base for a new sculpture. What was is no longer the sole authority that determines what is missing and what will be.

Yoel now needs the island to become his whole world. He does not read about Israel; he does not answer messages. He wants to walk on the sand and feel that this touch is life.

The size of the island does not tell us how wide the life within it is

Moving to another place can change life itself, and not only the scenery of the same pain. Language, work, relationships and expectations are not merely means of calming a system that was harmed. They take part in creating what one feels and what one wants.

In "Against Emotional Regulation" (in Hebrew), when the problem is defined as an inner reaction, the question is how a person can better bear reality. But sometimes he seeks to change the relations within which experience takes shape. He can leave, resist, and belong differently. Even what was experienced as injury can change within the new relations.

But what a small world you live in!

As a young therapist, I was exposed to the controversy over cochlear implants for deaf children. I was supposed to represent the health system and persuade parents to consent to surgery on their children. From the point of view of the hearing world, hearing is health. Deafness is disability. But I, a hearing person, stood in awe before the richness of the language of the Deaf. Where you see a wound — they built a world.

The controversy is not only about adding a capacity. It also concerns language, belonging, and the standard by which a world counts as whole. In the same way, the size of the island does not by itself tell us how wide the life within it is.

And perhaps the island is also a refuge? So what?

Choice and escape can be bound up with each other. A person can arrive because he could not stay, and find in the new place something he wants. The reason for leaving does not determine in advance the meaning of the life that came into being after it.

6. The shadow over life

Yoel is alive. He works, loves, raises a child in another language. All of it on a small scale. It is a small island with a small horizon. Can we see his life from within his life?

In Israel, these questions are imprinted not only in personal trauma. We are all a second generation to the abyss. The Holocaust is imprinted in the language in which we recognize loss and continuation, break and overcoming. Ours is a language of survivors who created a story through a particular form of overcoming the break — and of denying it. One way of escape, or of choice. The writing of those who went through hell, and of those who wrote about it, takes us back from the great story we created about Holocaust and rebirth to the question of what a person can bear, and what he asks of his life.

Is there such a thing as life that is just life?

In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl suggests that a person is not only the one who asks what he wants from life. Life addresses him, and he is called upon to answer. Meaning is not only an explanation a person gives to what happened; it is a possibility he is called to discover and to fulfill.

But the Holocaust also broke the world in which meaning could rest on reality. The bond between love and the future, between morality and action, between a person and his worth, ceased to be something one could rely on. How can one find meaning within a reality that turned these bonds to ash?

I read Frankl's answer as the making of a new room in the house. A place not subject in the same way to what reality can give and take away. A beloved person can be present even when absent, and even when no longer alive. A conversation with them, a commitment to them, a work not yet written and a deed that can still be done — all these can act in the present without existing in it as fact.

What is not found in reality becomes the thing through which one can live within it.

Absence turns from a hole into fullness. What is not there opens a space that can be filled with will, with love and with possibility. The future is not only a continuation of what was; it can create the person through what we cast onto it. Destruction is not given sole authority to decide what is real in our lives.

This is an enormous power. But the possibility of finding meaning can become an expectation that a worthy life is a life for which meaning has been found. The new room becomes a house one is obliged to live in. I also read a theological structure here: out of the world that lost its sense, a new and demanding god was born — the meaning we must discover and fulfill. Perhaps it is from this god that Yoel and Jonah fled to the sea.

There is a difference between meaning a person finds and the demand that he find it. And there is a difference between a life that gives the injury no meaning and a life that is not required to justify itself through any meaning at all. "There is no life that is just life" can be a sentence that saves a person; it can also become a task from which he has no rest.

Who comes back?

In his testimony at the Eichmann trial, Ka-Tzetnik described Auschwitz as "another planet." He spoke of a time that is not the time here, of an existence in which the concepts of name and family do not work as they do outside the camp.

One can fall out of time and space. Grossman wrote about this in Falling Out of Time. One can seemingly leave a place and still not know how to reach the people outside it. They speak of yesterday and tomorrow, and he comes from a time that does not settle into their continuity. A person can be at home, and the home will not know how to hold the one who is in it.

In Ka-Tzetnik's later movement, described in Shivitti: A Vision, Auschwitz becomes once again the work of human hands. This is not necessarily a more comforting thought. If what happened belongs to humanity, how can one trust human beings again? What are we asking of the injured person when we want him to restore to himself the trust he once had?

Charlotte Delbo presents another possibility. In Days and Memory she describes a life lived alongside Auschwitz, and a separation between deep memory and everyday life. One can tell of what was without being inside it; the nightmare can break through the separation and return the body there.

Life goes on without everything connecting. Perhaps this is the only possible existence. The woman who was there and the woman who lives now do not simply merge. The separation takes part in the possibility of living.

Delbo sets me before our demand for continuity and for working through trauma: must a person feel that his whole life belongs to the same self? Must he hold everything he went through close enough for it to be part of him? Or perhaps something can remain known, written, told — without being, at every moment, mine in the same way?

What do I owe those who did not come back?

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi does not let the mere fact of his survival settle these questions. He examines the shame of the one who lived where others died. That he found in himself no clear act for which he ought to be guilty is not enough to make the doubt disappear.

He recalls people who died precisely because of their generosity and courage. Survival does not testify to the moral superiority of the survivor. But he may live as though he must justify it. The testimony he gives does not balance the lives that were taken.

Life is almost impossible: I am alive, but I ask constantly — why me? What will I do with my life so that it is worthy? Life as a debt there is no way to repay. Is one allowed to live, and can one ask for something for oneself without the wanting being felt as abandonment or betrayal?

Levi finds doubt wherever he wants to hold on, even in his meaning as a witness. The survivor cannot fully represent what he did not experience to the end. The one who was murdered had a life of his own; he is not only the loss out of which the story of the one who remained is made.

Against the wish to be healed

For Jean Améry, resentment cannot be reduced to a personal difficulty in letting go. He addresses a world that goes on with its life, and refuses to accept the passing of time as an answer to what was done.

One can hear in his pain a request for relief, and at the same time a claim that does not ask to disappear. If I help him stop hurting, have I heard what he wanted to say? Is our capacity to live conditional on ceasing to demand to see the wound to its end?

A therapist may think his role is to reduce the pain; the person in front of him may want someone to acknowledge the wrong as something that has not ended. The offer of relief sounds to that person like a request that he stop disturbing us with his pain.

Yoel asks that the past stop determining his life. Améry says: the break is alive, and you want the past to be granted the comfortable status of something that is over. Can both possibilities live in the same person?

And what do functioning lives prove?

Writing about the perpetrators asks what resilience is when it serves as an instrument of harm. In Hannah Arendt's reading of Eichmann, a person can act within a system without judging it. In The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell presents a fictional perpetrator, Max Aue, who after the war lives in France as a family man and the manager of a factory.

In Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, Rudolf Höss and his family tend a house and garden beside Auschwitz. Life does not wait for the horror to end in order to be pleasant. The house can be a home, the children can play, and the father can come back from work. What allows the family to live in wholeness is also what allows it to place other people's lives outside its zone of interest.

Here the question of resilience and severance takes on a new meaning: what allows a person to go on functioning while he does harm? Is the capacity to separate, to adapt and to go on always something we would want to strengthen?

And Yoel, too, has a question that does not disappear when he leaves: when he cuts off his belonging to the world that was his, what does he leave behind — a demand to go on being who he was, or responsibility for something he did? How does one tell them apart when they reach him in the same voice?

With many of the people with post-traumatic stress I met after the last war, I felt that treatment did not see the moral injury. It sought to help them bear what had happened, when the difficulty of bearing it was bound up also with what they had done, with what they had seen, and with what they are no longer willing to consent to.

One person can break because he cannot bear what was done; another can remain whole because the suffering he causes does not violate his world.

7. The technology of erasure

Research into various drugs and technologies is exploring ways to reduce the suffering bound up with traumatic memories. Suppose a drug is found that erases the experiential memory of a traumatic event and the suffering attached to it. Yoel knows he was in the war. He knows what he saw and what he did, the way a person knows facts he does not remember. But the events no longer happen in him again. He sleeps, works, loves. His life is good in his own eyes.

The drug succeeds remarkably. There is no pain hiding and waiting to erupt. Nothing is secretly missing for him. He does not need to keep Israel outside his life in order to walk on the sand. He walks on the sand.

I think: Alzheimer's in the service of happiness. And at once I look for the price. Perhaps he has lost depth. Perhaps his capacity to love has been damaged. Perhaps he does not know what he has lost. I give the erasure a new wound, so that it cannot succeed completely.

But perhaps the fear goes deeper. Perhaps we did not heal Yoel. Perhaps we replaced him.

Who says he is well?

Before the drug, there was a person who asked to stop suffering. After it, there is a person who is well. We connect them through the body, the name and the biography. But the one who asked for help is unknown to the one who now enjoys life. The former Yoel has become a stranger to him, a shell he has shed.

We want therapeutic change to go deep: for feelings, expectations, relationships and the way a person perceives himself to change. And at the same time, we assume that someone will remain there to receive the change. That it will be him — changed.

But this is a far better drug: it also changes the one who was supposed to recognize the result as his healing. The former Yoel was tormented by things that no longer trouble him. Does the absence of any sense of loss show that the erasure succeeded — or that the capacity to know what was lost was erased as well?

Who is entitled to decide: the person who asked for the change, the person who lives after it, or we, who keep looking for the first inside the second?

A person who does not carry his deeds

Has he been freed from suffering, or has the relation through which a deed becomes his own been severed in him?

Responsibility also lives in the way a person says "I did it." What if the knowledge remained, and the meaning was cut off?

Here, in our eyes, the figure of the substitute human appears. A person who functions, loves, speaks and knows the facts — but we suspect that nothing weighs on him from within, in the place where we expect to find a conscience. Perhaps we have found the "Übermensch," the perfect soldier, a successful android: able to give the answers without carrying what they say.

But what exactly do we want to weigh on him? Recognition of the other who was harmed? A wish to repair? Pain? Do we know how to tell these apart, or is anguish the proof we demand that all the rest is real?

Has a person who does not suffer from his deeds lost his humanity? And has a person who suffers from them thereby proved it?

The Zone of Interest does not allow us to assume that a pleasant routine shows recognition of the other. But Yoel's pain does not give back to the one who was harmed what was taken either. We are left facing the gap between what helps a person live and what we demand of him so that we can live with him.

Who decides that he is disabled?

The word "android" allows us to distance the new Yoel from the human. We see the movements of life, but suspect that the person is not there. He resembles us, but does not carry the past the way a person is supposed to carry it.

Perhaps the suspicion identifies a real loss. The capacity to feel, to be affected and to recognize the other can be damaged. A person need not be able to describe what he can no longer experience.

But perhaps we are also meeting a form of life that does not answer to our expectations. Yoel feels, wants and becomes attached, and the things that matter to him are not the things through which we knew him. We look for the person where he used to be, and when he is not there, we call the one who is there a "substitute."

Have we created a person severed and amputated, or a person we are not willing to allow to be whole?

We sent him to war, and we want to be the authority: to hold an image of the whole, and through it to determine what is missing in another person's life.

8. Therapy in the language of the island

Yoel has been living on the island for a year, and he chooses a local therapist, barefoot like him, who speaks a mixture of English and Thai. He could probably have had therapy online with an Israeli therapist, but he does not want to go back to Hebrew in order to be helped.

The therapist meets a fisherman, a partner, and a father who has trouble sleeping. Israel has sunk below the horizon, a possibility he no longer has any interest in.

For Yoel, therapy in Hebrew is always therapy from afar, asking its questions from within a past that expects him to come back to it. After all, what is fishing? And when does one go back to one's studies? Possible questions — but through them, life on the island becomes once again a treatment of the former life.

Choosing a local therapist is choosing to think from within a new land.

In "A Window to the Mediterranean," written by Yaakov Gilad and performed by Yehuda Poliker on Ashes and Dust (1988) — an album about the children of Holocaust survivors — a new life is imagined from afar:

And perhaps, from afar, there is a one-in-a-million chance,

And perhaps, from afar, some happiness steals in through the window.

The other language is not only emotional distance. Within a life, it becomes the language of dreams, of home, of work and of desire. New things can take shape in it. The past is translated, and it turns out there is no need to think through it. There is a new language.

In Ehud Banai's song "Your Time Has Passed," the singer dreams that he is back at his old high school, at a Purim party — the costumed carnival of the Jewish year. A friend who would later take to wandering stands shyly in a corner and tells him that they are both in India, even here, at the school party. The song does not resolve the contradiction. It leaves them in two places at once, as guests, and gives its title as the last word.

9. Those who leave, those who return, and those left behind

Yoel does not stay on the island. He becomes religiously observant — or, as Hebrew puts it, he "returns": chozer bi-teshuvah, "returns in repentance." Where is he returning to, and how does one return to a place one has never been?

Prayer, the Sabbath, God. That war takes on a different place in his life. Wounding fragments become a mosaic within a world that has direction — the pain and the doubts become meaning.

Yoel no longer seeks to be free of the need for meaning. He has found a world that gives his life meaning. Does the possibility we opened before him include this world too? Are we willing for him to choose a demanding life, full of obligations, that we do not want for him?

He lives an hour away from his mother. They do not see each other. She is waiting for him to return.

"Return" determines where home is. Yoel asks who is entitled to determine that. His mother asks what home is without Yoel.

His children are being educated in a Haredi — ultra-Orthodox — setting. The world he moved into is the world they start from. For them it is home; there is no crossing in it, and no break. The language, the customs and the expectations they grow up within are the familiar form of life.

"Return" determines where home is

If she knew about them, she would want to be in their lives. But Yoel's pain demands that the limb be cut off. Does she love him enough to give him up?

In "When Do We Sit Shiva for a Living Parent?" (in Hebrew) — shiva is the seven-day Jewish mourning ritual — I asked about parting from a form of relationship with someone who is still alive. Here the question is reversed. A parent can mourn while their child feels he has begun to live.

His change changes her life too: Yoel chooses another world, and his mother discovers that her own place in the world they once shared has also changed, without her having chosen it.

Has the person been lost, or has the place he had in our world been lost? Can we acknowledge our loss without demanding that he return and fill it?

And if Yoel joins a cult?

There, too, he may say he has found a home. He has a role, people who understand him, and a story that makes sense of what happened. He feels less broken. We may see exploitation, closure and dependence.

And if he becomes addicted to drugs? Perhaps he finds in them a quiet he did not find in therapy, while at the same time his life increasingly organizes itself around using.

Here, recognizing Yoel's authority becomes hard. Relief does not decide what is good for him, and our opposition does not prove that he does not know. When are we listening to a choice we do not accept, and when are we meeting a person who is gradually losing the capacity to choose? What allows us to tell the difference — beyond the fact that he does not choose as we hoped?

Did we open for him the possibility of being other, or only the possibility of being the other we are able to accept?

Sometimes telling a child "You don't have to go to school" is what makes it possible for him to go. When leaving becomes possible, staying can take on another meaning. From the outside, the child has gone back to the same classroom; from the inside, the relation through which he enters it has changed.

But if I told him he doesn't have to go only so that he would go, the permission was a means of getting him back on track. I knew in advance which choice would count as success. I pretended to open a door, and waited for him to use it to come back in.

Am I able to mean that he really doesn't have to go?

As a child who went back to school, I long for a child who will take this possibility seriously and go with it. Who will not have to keep fighting school in order to justify having left it. School could stop being the question his life answers.

But this longing of mine can also become an expectation he is required to fulfill. I may be waiting for him to carry on, for me, the leaving I never did. Even when I invite him to cut off, I can be asking him for continuation.

I help people work, study, have relationships and belong. Sometimes I am glad when they return. I want to be able to recognize, too, lives that do not bring them back to the place they left.

But could I, as Yoel's mother, bear it? I hope I never have to face the test.

Resilience and severance are not two options that enjoy the same standing. Family, education and therapy grant continuity the status of a default: to hold out, to keep in touch, to finish what we started. In Israel, this claim is also bound up with a language of loyalty and survival. That is why opening the possibility of not continuing changes a person's world even before he has chosen it.

There is no need to prove that severance is good in every situation in order to give it a place. Continuity is not required to prove this each time either. We assume it, and sometimes demand that the one who leaves justify his life before what he left.

Nor does Yoel need to know in advance what his whole life will look like in order to leave. He may come back. He may discover that the new place does not suit him. He may live years that will afterward come to an end. Their ending does not prove that it was not a life he wanted, just as returning does not prove that he was never entitled to leave.

Here we return to the words we began with: trauma, resilience, therapy, healing. What stands behind them?

Yoel is 24; I am 65, a little older than his mother. At my age, we demand that life accumulate: that the love we gave remain present, that the years not be lost, that what was bear fruit within what will be. That the person who was formed also through us go on carrying us within him. What happens when his life does not give us this continuation?