An Intervention on a Living Room Carpet

On October 12, 5 days into the war, a colleague sent me an application for a sensitive intervention with a 15-year-old Arab girl, who suffered from “severe anxiety attack.” That morning was my first day back home from a trip in the Far East that was cut short when the war broke out. The urgency to get home as fast as possible, energized a great effort which was still ongoing in me. Receiving this request was, by analogy, a threshold of apprehension of the size and depth of the events taking place and the great impact they might seal in our future. I felt as if the quality of urgency colored every moment of being, and I experienced the eagerness to act as driven by this. I thought that, in relation to future applications, it is important to pay attention to the nuance between urgency and vigilance. Under the general situation of emergency, it was important to approach each request in an adequate manner. This request for a sensitive intervention echoed these thoughts.

In this paper, I will present 3 vignettes that mark transitions from anxious states of mind to soothed ones, fluctuating through the intervention with Nur and her mother. The first vignette is the beginning of the connection made with Nur’s mother, Magda. The phone conversation that took place summoned a kind of a brief intake of the situation Nur and her family experienced. Distress and urgency in this beginning were held in both minds, by Magda and me. An immediate and direct action motivated a transition of these. The second vignette is an intervention with Nur, which took place on the carpet in the living room, in the family’s house. Sitting at Nur’s feet and in front of her, listening to her efforts to settle troubling questions, a sudden transition occurred. An approval of Nur’s compassionate approach to the unbearable reality beyond identities calmed her down and changed her anxious state of mind. The third vignette is a joint action Nur initiated three days later, relating to an original creation