Part One: She arrived late
The drive was ordinary — Beirut traffic, then the mountain road, then the gate.
She put her bag in her room. She came down for water. She sat at the kitchen table for a while in the dark before going to bed.
I found her there when I came down at midnight.
We did not speak much. There was nothing particular to say.
Her body was in the room and some other part of her was somewhere else entirely — tracking the news, tracking the family members who had not messaged in three hours, doing the calculations that never fully stop.
I have seen this particular quality of presence before.
The body is here. The system is still elsewhere, scanning for what comes next.
Part Two: Why I am writing this
I have been travelling to Lebanon for years.
My ex-husband is Lebanese and Palestinian. My children carry both our worlds in their bodies. My daughter is living in Beirut now, as these words are being written.
I have held retreats there. Worked with women there. Sat with the particular quality of a body that has grown up inside continuous threat.
I am not Lebanese.
I married a Lebanese-Palestinian man. I raised four children who carry Muslim names and look like me. My son Faisal has green eyes and his father's name. A black cab driver in London heard me say that name and told us to get out.
That is a small thing. A cab. A name. An inconvenience.
It taught me something I have carried into every room I have worked in since.
The body that holds two identities — the one people see and the one people react to when they hear the name — lives in a particular kind of alertness. It is not the same as the alertness of the women at my retreats who grew up in Shatila. But it is adjacent to it. My children live inside it every day.
I do not speak for Lebanese women. I have sat with them. I have watched what their bodies do when the container is steady enough for the vigilance to soften.
That is what I can report.
Part Three: Not what people mean by trauma
What I have witnessed is not what most people mean when they talk about trauma.
Most people mean a discrete event. Something that happened. Something that, once processed, becomes past tense.
The clinical language — PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder — describes a response to something that is over. The prefix post says so. After. The danger has passed. The system is stuck in the past, replaying what is no longer present.
In Lebanon, the danger is not past.
The threat is not behind the body. It is in front of it, and it has been in front of it, in some form, for decades.
The clinical term for this is Continuous Traumatic Stress — a construct developed by South African clinicians in 1987 to describe the psychological effects of ongoing, unresolved threat.
Not what happened. What is still happening.
The nervous system under continuous traumatic stress does not behave like one recovering from a single event. It cannot. Recovery requires safety. Safety requires the threat to have stopped.
In Lebanon, it has not stopped.
Part Four: A history that does not end
Since 1978, Lebanon has witnessed sequential military campaigns.
A ceasefire was agreed in November 2024. It did not hold.
Despite the agreement, Israeli strikes continued almost every day through 2025, killing 331 people — at least 127 of them civilians — before a ground invasion resumed in March 2026. A second ceasefire was announced in April 2026. The Israeli prime minister stated it did not apply to Lebanon. Hours after the announcement, Israel launched its largest airstrikes of the war, killing more than 350 people in a single day.
A body cannot rest during a ceasefire that does not hold.
The nervous system cannot update its alarm when the evidence keeps proving the alarm correct. The word ceasefire, for these bodies, became another word for the silence between strikes.
As of May 2026, Israeli airstrikes and ground operations since March have killed at least 3,185 people, including 276 women and 217 children, and injured more than 9,600. More than one million people have been displaced — approximately one in five of the entire population.
I am not listing these things to make a political argument.
I am listing them because they are the context in which Lebanese bodies are living, and context is not separable from physiology.
Part Five: The witnesses and the healers
There is something specific about this war that I need to name, because it is relevant to what I do.
Since March 2026, at least 131 paramedics have been killed. Some in double- and triple-tap strikes — where rescuers who came for the first victims were then targeted in a second strike. The ambulance becomes the target. The person running toward the injured is the next to fall.
Journalists have been killed in their cars, in buildings they sheltered in. Ali Choeib and Fatima Ftouni — two Lebanese television journalists — were killed in a single airstrike on 28 March. Another journalist, Amal Khalil, took shelter in a building. The building was then struck.
At least 173 incidents have been recorded against healthcare workers since March. 123 deaths. 273 injuries. Seventeen hospitals damaged, three fully closed.
I am describing this not to enumerate atrocities but because it has a precise somatic meaning.
The people whose job is to bear witness, and the people whose job is to care for the body — those are the ones being targeted.
A nervous system learns from evidence. When the healer can be killed, when the witness can be silenced, when the ceasefire is announced and the strike arrives hours later — the body learns that there is no category of person who is safe. No role that confers protection. No agreement that holds.
That is not a thought. That is a body learning a lesson it will carry for a generation.
Part Six: What Shatila holds
The camp at Shatila still stands.
It was built in 1949 for Palestinian refugees — families who had arrived with what they could carry and the understanding that this was temporary. Seventy-seven years later it is still there.
In September 1982, Israeli forces surrounded the Sabra neighbourhood and the adjacent Shatila camp. They sealed the exits. For forty-three hours, a militia moved through the camp. Between 1,300 and 3,500 people were killed — most of them Palestinian civilians, many of them women, children, elderly. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring it an act of genocide.
No one was punished.
The body that grows up inside Shatila does not carry a memory of massacre.
It carries a knowledge that massacre is possible. That it has happened here. That the world watched. That no one came.
That knowledge does not sit in the mind. It sits in the shoulders. In the jaw. In the particular way a woman holds her children close in a crowd — not protectively, but reflexively.
The body learned. The body has not been given a reason to unlearn.
A body that has spent decades under intermittent and now continuous threat does not have the same nervous system as a body that has not.
This is not a metaphor. It is measurable.
Part Seven: What the numbers say
A nationally representative study of 1,000 Lebanese people conducted in 2022 — before the current escalation — found:
47.8% screened positive for probable depression.
45.3% for probable anxiety.
43.5% met criteria for probable PTSD.
These are not small numbers. These are not clinical populations. These are ordinary people, sampled across governorates, across genders, across educational levels.
That was 2022. Before the ground invasion. Before the 3,185 dead. Before the paramedics were targeted in the second strike.
There are women in my retreats who were born into this. Whose mothers were born into this. Whose grandmothers were born into something adjacent to this — and who carry in their bodies a readiness that pre-dates their own birth.
This is not pathology. This is adaptation.
The body learning, across generations, that the appropriate response to the world is vigilance.
The distinction matters because pathology implies something has gone wrong with the body. What I have observed is a body that has done precisely what it was built to do — and has been doing it, without pause, without resolution, for so long that it no longer knows it is doing it.
Part Eight: The grandmother's stone
One of the women at my retreat carried something I have only seen a few times in my practice.
A specific quality of vigilance that did not belong entirely to her own lifetime.
We were working with the body. Tracking sensation. Following what was there before the story about what was there.
She found a heaviness across her shoulders.
Not tension — something older than tension. Something settled, like stone.
When did you first learn to carry this?
She could not locate the beginning.
She knew it had always been there. Her mother had it. Her grandmother had it.
Her grandmother had been a young woman in Palestine in 1948. The year approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. The Nakba — the catastrophe. Her grandmother's family left their village carrying what they could. They did not go back. They went to Lebanon.
They arrived in a country that did not want them, in a camp system that would confine Palestinian refugees to a legal and social limbo for generations.
She was carrying the weight of her grandmother's unfinished flight.
And underneath that, the weight of a region that has been in a state of emergency, one way or another, since before she was born.
When I said: this heaviness may not be entirely yours to carry — it may belong to someone who came before you — she went very still.
Then something moved.
Not released. Not resolved. Moved. As though the system registered, for a moment, that it was not alone in holding this.
Part Nine: What I did not expect
I expected grief.
I did not expect the particular quality of alertness that has become, for many Lebanese women, the baseline.
Not anxiety. Not hypervigilance in the clinical sense. Something more functional than that.
The ability to monitor seven things simultaneously without appearing to be doing so. To know the position of every person in a room. To calibrate how much noise it is safe to make, how visible it is safe to be, whether the quality of the silence has shifted.
This is not a symptom. It is a skill.
It was learned under conditions that made it necessary. And it costs something.
It costs the capacity to be in one place at a time. To be in this room, in this body, in this moment, without also being at the checkpoint, at the border, at the screen tracking the family member who has not messaged in three hours.
What I see in sessions is this: when I invite these women to notice what their body is doing right now — not what it has been through, but what it is doing in this moment — there is often a pause of surprise.
As though they had forgotten that the body is allowed to be in the present tense.
Part Ten: The table that meets you at the door
The same country that produces this nervous system also produces the table.
I have never experienced hospitality like in Lebanon.
The food arrives before you have finished sitting down. There is always more. The door is always open. A stranger becomes a guest within seconds. A guest becomes family within minutes.
The same nervous system that learned to track threat also learned to make space for another person with extraordinary warmth and precision.
Both come from the same source: decades of learning to read what the room needs, and to provide it.
I do not romanticise this. The generosity is real, and it costs something too. To be endlessly available, endlessly providing, endlessly absorbing — that is its own form of vigilance. The body that never stops attending to others does not get to attend to itself.
What I have found, in the work, is that when Lebanese women are given explicit permission to be received — to be the one attended to, to have the work be about them — something particular happens.
The vigilance does not disappear. But it finds somewhere to put itself down for a moment.
That moment is not resolution. It is not healing in the clean sense. It is the body discovering that it is allowed to be in a room where nothing is being asked of it.
For some of these women, that is a new experience.
For some, it is the first time.
Part Eleven: What the work can be
The clinical literature on continuous traumatic stress makes a precise distinction that I have found essential in my practice.
PTSD: a response to something that is over. The nervous system replaying a past threat as present.
Continuous Traumatic Stress: the appropriate response of a nervous system to a threat that is genuinely ongoing. The vigilance is not a malfunction. It is accurate. The body is correctly reading the situation.
This distinction changes what the work can be.
In standard trauma work, the goal is often to help the nervous system understand that the threat has passed — to update the alarm. This is possible when the threat is over.
When the threat is not over — when a woman returns from her retreat to a country where a ceasefire was announced yesterday and the airstrikes arrived hours later — the work cannot be about convincing her body that it is safe. It is not.
The work becomes something different.
Helping the body find moments of regulated presence inside conditions that are genuinely unsafe.
Not false safety. Not managed distance from reality. Actual presence — with everything that is happening — without being consumed by it.
This is harder. It requires different tools. It requires the practitioner to be willing to sit with what cannot be resolved.
I have been doing this work across several modalities: Somatic Experiencing to help the body complete what it can, even inside ongoing conditions. Spinal attunement to work with the deep structural holding that decades of vigilance produces. EMDR to reach the specific moments that carry the most charge — not to eliminate the history, but to prevent any single event from commanding the whole system.
I have done this work through screens.
With women in Beirut whose cities were being bombed.
The work travels. The body can be regulated across distance, if the container is steady enough.
It is possible to help a body put some of the vigilance down, even when the conditions that produced it have not changed.
Not all of it. Not permanently. But enough.
Enough to sleep. Enough to be in the room with someone they love. Enough to feel, for a moment, that the body is theirs rather than a system dedicated entirely to surviving the next thing.
That is not a small thing.
For a body that has been holding for this long, it is enormous.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette