Glitter.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about children experiencing trauma.

The first time it really hit me was when I spent time in Tzfat painting bomb shelters. From the outside they were beautiful, I painted butterflies and flowers. They were covered in color, art, and intention. But inside they felt stark and heavy. I remember standing there realizing I couldn’t truly imagine what it would feel like to spend days inside one of those spaces, waiting, listening, living with uncertainty. Especially as a child.

Then December 14 happened in Sydney, Australia. Thankfully my family there was safe, but my young nephew witnessed someone being shot right in front of him. I still don’t know what that does to a person. I don’t know how a child makes sense of something like that, or where those images go once they are seen.

At the time, I was in Israel and offered to run an art therapy group for teenagers from my old school who were there. I thought we might talk about what they were seeing or feeling, about the news, the fear, the uncertainty. But they didn’t want to talk. They wanted to color. They wanted to play with clay. They wanted to laugh and have fun.

And it made perfect sense.

The images were too big. Too overwhelming. What they needed wasn’t discussion; they needed relief. A moment where their nervous systems could step away from fear.

Art therapy became that space. Through creating, they were able to externalize what was happening inside without needing to explain it. Their artwork spoke quietly: figures in pain, symbols of protection, deep connections to the land of Israel. The meaning was there, even without words.

Over the last few months, I’ve continued training in trauma work, particularly ISP, which is an acute trauma response approach that focuses on supporting a dysregulated nervous system in real time using bilateral methods. I’ve also noticed a shift in how I listen to people. When I hear trauma stories now, I find myself listening less to the narrative and more to the body. How are they breathing? Where do they hold tension? How do they contain emotion, or struggle to?

Yesterday, a friend said something that stayed with me. She described trauma like glitter. You can clean it up, but pieces of it remain. It becomes part of you.

I think about children running to bomb shelters. Children learning that a friend’s father was killed simply for being Jewish. I wonder what lives inside their small bodies after experiences like these.

I don’t have answers.

What I do know is that the human heart has an incredible capacity to hold many things at once: grief, fear, joy, play, connection, hope. Even little hearts can hold enormous experiences.

Maybe healing isn’t about erasing what happened. Maybe there is no complete undoing. But there is an ability to carry even the most tragic realities and continue living, connecting, and creating meaning.

And perhaps that capacity, to hold pain and still remain human, is where healing begins.