“There is nothing more difficult than the pain of loss, and when you experience these pains again and again, things become more and more difficult, but what can we say, this is our choice…our destiny and we must accept it no matter what it is…and we ask God to provide us with the means of patience and strength so that we can “Continuation… for Hamza and for all the martyrs… we are committed to the covenant and we are continuing.” What journalist Wael Al Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the Gaza Strip, said, bidding farewell to his eldest son Hamza, who was martyred two days ago after the Israeli bombing that targeted his car, was so poignant that it shook the conscience of the honorable people of the world. It is a tragedy that one person is exposed to all these losses and remains steadfast, but rather continues what he started with steadfastness.
“Accumulated grief,” the psychological expression given by psychologists to successive losses and the pain of loss associated with the death of loved ones in successive cases, in an ideal world, described by the German psychological researcher Catherine Scheer, is a world in which the individual can catch his breath between one sadness and another, and in which he can obtain peace. An opportunity to heal from the shock of loss. This does not mean that sadness disappears completely, but it moves from an acute stage, which is the first burning period, to an integrated stage in which it is possible to return to practicing normal human activity, but without returning to what it was.
When sadness becomes a luxury
In another world that does not have the luxury of time between one disaster and the next, “accumulated grief” becomes the expression given to going through successive shocks of loss, without the person being able to go through a sufficient period to catch a breath between them. There is no room to recover from the initial loss, until the second and third loss surprise you. Thus, it becomes difficult to deal with the grief caused by each loss.
In a study on the effect of multiple losses on feelings of grief, conducted by Dorothy L. Mercer, professor of psychology at Eastern Kentucky University, the study pointed out that multiple losses affect individuals’ mental, psychological, and physical health and affect their relationship patterns, jobs, personalities, and attachment to material things in life, and in In the book “What is Your Grief: Lists to Help You Through Any Loss,” Litsa Williams says that confronting new losses is much more difficult than confronting the first loss, so it seems as if you are fighting with half your energy, half your ability, and half your feelings.
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Accumulated sadness and mountains waiting to collapse
What is happening in Gaza is that an entire people has become prey to accumulated grief, faced with successive shocks until they have lost the ability to survive them, and with the absence of psychological support, which has become a luxury amidst everything that is happening.
Dr. Ali Abdel Radi, teacher of psychological first aid at Al-Azhar University, spoke to Al-Jazeera Net about the impact of repeated loss on the lives of the entire Palestinian people as an original research model for the experiences of accumulated grief and anguish after repeated traumas. He said that there are two ways to confront traumas that clearly appeared with repeated loss in… Recent events:
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The first method: denial
Denial, and the subsequent course of life in the usual way, without any apparent difference, so the individual appears to have overcome the crisis without actually being able to confront it due to his psychological fragility.
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The second method: psychological toughness
Psychological fortitude in the face of successive losses, which we have witnessed happening every day since the seventh of October, in which a person has the ability to confront what he is going through consciously, and can release his sadness and separate his professional life from his sorrows, no matter how great they are.
Meaning therapy
Abdel Radi confirms to Al Jazeera Net that the ability to face sadness and psychological toughness when facing adversity is achieved when a person believes in the “meaning of life.”
The professor of psychological first aid pointed out that it is strange that the school founded by one of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, Viktor Frankl, the young man who lost his entire family in the Holocaust during World War II, has become the Palestinian people the most inspired people in confronting the current Holocaust, adding that the psychiatrist Frankl When he developed the concept of logotherapy from the heart of suffering, establishing a new school of psychotherapy that is no less important than Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, he made it clear to the world that finding meaning and purpose in life is the basis of the individual’s motivational power, which makes him able to survive even in the most miserable and suffering circumstances.
Abdel Radi told Al Jazeera Net that the meaning of life is strongly evident in every tragic situation that the Palestinian people go through. They are between two goals, both of which are positive: either liberating the land and obtaining their right to a liberated homeland or martyrdom for the sake of God, and both matters have a very great meaning that makes all the tragedies of life It is easy for them, so the greatest Israeli fear is the psychological toughness that the Palestinians possess, and not just the military equipment. Therefore, they target everything that breaks the people’s resolve and resilience in the hope of their collapse and their clinging to life to cease, but to no avail.
“The psychological strength that appears to everyone currently may differ when things calm down and return to normal,” says the mental health teacher at Al-Azhar University. “At this stage, psychological treatment for all those affected should not be neglected, and that is an arduous task that requires international solidarity to bring an entire people out of the crucible of accumulated grief.” The state of distraction that prevails among everyone now in the videos coming from there requires that psychological first aid teams be provided to accompany other medical teams in order to be a lifeline for thousands of children who have been exposed to the shocks of loss, whether the loss of their families or limbs, or even the loss of their previous peaceful, peaceful lives.
