Healing Trauma in Ongoing Danger: A Psychologist's Lessons

Alexandra Chen is a trauma psychologist and psychotherapist who has spent about 18 years working with children and families affected by war, displacement and torture, across roughly 14 or 15 conflict zones, most recently in Gaza. In a long conversation with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, published on his channel in November 2026, she makes a case that cuts against a common instinct: the most important thing you can offer someone in pain is often not a solution but the knowledge that they do not have to face it alone. The conversation moves through how to build emotional safety when physical safety is impossible, why promising that everything will be okay quietly damages trust, why conventional trauma approaches strain when danger never stops, how expressive and movement therapies reach what children cannot yet put into words, and how to stay humane without being crushed by suffering. It also traces how one conversation became Healing for Gaza, which began with three people and now has a team of 180. The episode includes first-hand accounts of death, injury and violence, and listeners are advised to use discretion.

Can you compare one person's suffering with another's?

The episode opens with a question Chatterjee admits he had been turning over before the interview: is it even fair to set a stressed professional in a comfortable country beside a family that has lost its home? Chen's answer is that the comparison is the wrong frame. "At the end of the day, no one wins in the suffering Olympics," she said in the episode. "We're not here to compare trauma, but we are here to be as human as possible in response to all of it."

She draws on a definition from Judith Herman, the trauma scholar, that gives the idea its structure. Trauma, Chen explained, is "the incident that overwhelms your system's ability to respond." That definition does not rank events. A car crash in a country with good emergency medicine and a genocide can both overwhelm a nervous system, and in both cases the person wants the same thing from the people around them: someone who can offer safety, healing and reassurance, and who will not abandon them. Chatterjee's own clinical experience supports this. Being listened to without judgment matters to people who have never been near a war. Chen's work suggests it matters just as much to people who have seen their house destroyed and their parents killed.

What does emotional safety look like when there is no physical safety?

Chatterjee put the obvious objection directly: in a war zone, you cannot provide physical safety. So what is the safety being offered? Chen said it begins with a refusal to over-promise. She described a rule on her own team: however much pressure there is to say that everything will be fine, or that people are safe, lying to someone in the moment for a flicker of comfort is dangerous. It stops people from understanding what is actually available to them, and it erodes the trust that the relationship depends on.

The alternative she offers is a two-part statement that is honest and still steadying. The first half names the reality: in this moment you are in danger. The second half names the relationship: but I am here with you right now, and in this moment, she said, the person in front of them is "a safe person who is not going to hurt you and is going to listen to you if you'd like to share."

From there the work is largely accompaniment. Sometimes a person wants to talk. Sometimes they want to sit with someone while they cry, rage or scream. Sometimes the most urgent need is practical: Chen gave the example of a parent asking how to make the food they have last two days for four children, and the worker helping to work that out in the same conversation. What she is offering, she said, is "the promise of steadfast and continual accompaniment." The word promise appears here on purpose. It is a commitment about presence, not about outcomes that nobody controls.

Why do children hide their suffering?

Chen returned several times to what happens to a community when violence arrives. The fragmentation of a community, she said, starts with the fragmentation of individual identity, and then with the relationships between people as they flee, try to cross borders, or try to get across the sea "and not drown." She described the invisible wounds that sit beside the visible ones: terror, grief, anger, extreme fear, and despair. Many of the children she works with are hiding their suffering from their parents, and the effort it takes to be brave, for a child, is itself a burden.

To make this concrete, Chen told the story of Lara, a seven-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza who lost both legs when a bomb levelled the building her family lived in. Lara and her father were home when it fell. Her mother and two brothers were out visiting her grandmother. Her last memory of the moment was the ceiling collapsing, and her father throwing himself around her to protect her. Chen's account of Lara is one of the episode's most difficult passages, and it is worth listening to in full rather than through a summary. What it shows is the way a child's world is rebuilt slowly, through relationships, rather than through any single intervention.

Why isn't a solution always what someone needs?

One of the most useful distinctions in the conversation is between being useful and being a fixer. Chatterjee framed the episode's central tension around the moment when clinicians, and people generally, want to fix what they see. Chen's position is that in ongoing danger, a fix is often beyond reach, and reaching for one can leave both people feeling worse. The question she says she asks herself is a simple one, borrowed from the perspective of the person suffering: "If I were in this instance where I have lost absolutely everything... and utterly terrified, what would I want in this moment?" Very often, she said, the answer is "a friendly face, a comforting voice, a reassurance that there's someone to walk with me."

The same logic guards against burnout. Chen said that the scale of suffering can never be met by an individual, and that it takes an entire community to address it. She insisted on a principle from the work: "not letting the great be the enemy of the good." The aim is to take it one moment at a time. If you measure your contribution against the whole catastrophe, you will spiral into despair. If you measure it against the person in front of you, you can actually do something.

How do children process what they have no words for?

The episode's description says Chen discusses how movement and expressive therapies can help children process experiences they do not yet have language for, and why people must be trusted to guide their own healing. These are the parts of the conversation that most directly challenge the idea that trauma recovery is primarily a matter of talking. For a child who has seen a building collapse, or who cannot describe what happened to them, talk-based methods can be closed doors. Movement and expression offer other routes in, and they leave the child in charge of the pace. The idea that the person being helped knows something about their own healing, and that the helper's job is to make room for that knowledge, runs through the whole conversation.

What does resilience really mean, and what does it cost?

Resilience is a word that gets thrown around in humanitarian and wellness contexts, and Chatterjee and Chen return to it with some care. The episode's summary frames the question as what it "really means" to be resilient. Chatterjee also notes that resilience, in the conversation, comes at a cost. Chen addresses guilt in this part of the discussion, including the guilt that can follow from being safe when others are not. The full exchange is more nuanced than any paraphrase can carry, and it is one of the places where listeners who work with people in distress will find the most to take away.

How did three people become a team of 180?

The episode also tells the story of how Chen came to found Healing for Gaza, an organisation connecting children and families with therapists around the world. The project began with three people. Chen says in the conversation that it is growing quickly, and the description puts the team at 180. The origin story is a conversation that inspired her to act, and the growth is a reminder that the impulse Chen describes throughout, to respond to suffering rather than only feel it, can be organised into something larger than one person's effort.

Where to go from here

The most useful way into this material is the full episode, which is long, specific and at times very hard to hear. Pay particular attention to the sections on emotional safety, the Lara account, the discussion of guilt, and the account of Healing for Gaza. If you work with people in distress, the practical takeaways are concrete: do not over-promise; name the danger honestly and then name your presence; ask what the person in front of you would want in this moment; and measure what you can do against the person in front of you rather than against the whole catastrophe. If you are simply trying to be a better friend to someone who is struggling, the same lessons apply. Chen's central point is that people in crisis need a companion more than a rescuer, and that a companion who tells the truth is worth more than one who says everything will be fine.

Content note: the episode contains descriptions of death, violence and injury, and listener discretion is advised.