The Art of Mastering Survival Mode: Healing from Childhood trauma in the Palestinian Context

This thesis explores the layered experiences of childhood trauma and healing in Palestine, empirically located in the West Bank. In a context marked by a century of colonialism and decades of ongoing military occupation, psychological wounds are lived not only as personal experiences but as collective and political realities. Drawing on an anti-colonial and feminist stance that resists the framework of PTSD, the study seeks to capture how trauma and healing are understood and navigated in Palestinian society. Methodologically, the thesis is inspired by constructivist grounded theory and takes a reflexive approach that recognises my insider positionality as both researcher and participant in this context. Three studies make up the thesis. The first, based on twenty-seven interviews with experts (clinicians, scholars, and activists), examines professional understandings of trauma’s nature, its manifestations, the shackles on the healing path, and the helpful resources within the community. Building on these insights, the second study turns to lived experience. Twenty-five interviews with laypeople across the West Bank explore personal narratives of trauma, healing, and survival, highlighting how processes of healing unfold under occupation. The third study, an autoethnography, emerged in response to critical historical shifts, drawing on my own diaries to reflect on the interplay between collective events and personal histories. Across the three studies, the thesis conceptualises trauma as an ongoing, multifaceted experience rather than a single event, and reframes healing as a collectively co-regulated and politically situated process. It argues for recognising both “zooming in” (emotional processing and meaning making) and “zooming out” (resistance, social roles, productivity) as complementary to each other, and integral to the process of healing. The findings call for unlearning colonial frameworks and designing interventions that embed healing structurally through agency, participation, and community engagement rather than limiting it to individual therapy or symptom reduction. It calls for respect for people’s voices and needs rather than imposing what is assumed to be needed. Keywords: trauma, childhood, collective, healing process, Palestine, experts, lived experience, autoethnography.