Neuropsychologist, trauma specialist, former associate professor at Mount St. Mary's University, child of a Holocaust survivor, CEO, Israel Healing Initiative.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2015
- Tweets1.9K
- Following1.1K
- Followers5.5K
- Likes5.3K
I’m reposting this to balance out all the death threats I get. Thank you @Scribemoon for making it even!
Follow @orlipeter . She is a trauma therapist here in LA who has been working with Nova Survivors. Her tweets the last few days on the deliberate cruelty of this, to deny Jews even their pain and sorrow, she has brilliant insights.
I'm so curious about what happens in the brains of traumatized people when you put a camera in their hands. How can filmmaking become part of the healing process?
Movie producer @RosenmanHoward and I had a wonderful, intimate dinner with @NetaAriel, the director of Ma’aleh, one of Jerusalem’s leading film schools, and was named Woman of the Year in 2015.
And Ma’aleh has an impressive record, its graduates created the hit Israeli television series Srugim, its films have won international recognition, and Girl No. 60427 earned a prestigious BAFTA Student Film Award in 2022.
But the work they do that really got me curious was Ma’aleh’s Video Therapy program, which puts cameras in the hands of October 7th and other trauma survivors and helps them turn painful experiences into films they create and control.
Especially in today's hostile environment, where so much of their suffering has been ignored, distorted, or erased from academia, international media coverage, and even psychological treatment training, I’m fascinated by the therapeutic possibilities of giving these survivors control over how their stories are told,
And the neuropsychologist in me is eager to see something else: pre- and post-treatment qEEGs to examine whether, and how, this process changes brain functioning.
Stay tuned.
Interviewed by @MizellPreston of @FNCDigitalDesk
Trauma psychologist Dr. Orli Peter, who founded the Israel Healing Initiative, a nonprofit that has been providing high-tech trauma treatment for people impacted by the Oct. 7 attack, told Fox News Digital that the demonstrations across the country "manipulate the public," weaponize the anniversary, and detract from the mourning of Jewish people.
"Demonstrating while Jews are mourning on Oct. 7 weaponizes the anniversary," Peter explained. "It serves two purposes for the activists: One is to manipulate the public by interrupting the mourning before empathy settles on Jewish suffering and responsibility points to Hamas."
"The other is to show power over the mourners, telling them, 'Even in your grief, in your memory, in your most vulnerable day, we can invade," she added.
foxnews.com/video/6406438007…
Why would anti-Israel activists choose October 7, of all days, to demonstrate across America, knowing that Jews are mourning the worst massacre of their people since the Holocaust?
Fox NewsDigital interviewed me today for an article examining the vast network organizing these demonstrations and the money behind it. They asked me to explain the psychology of choosing this particular day.
I believe the timing serves two purposes.
First, to hijack public attention before empathy can settle on Jewish suffering and responsibility for the massacre can settle on Hamas. The demonstrations interrupt the mourning and shift attention away from the victims.
Second, to show Jews that even their grief is not beyond the reach of those who wish to intimidate them. Choosing this day sends a message to the mourners:
“Even in your grief, in your memory, on your most vulnerable day, we can invade.”
Link in comments.
Link here.
foxnews.com/politics/anti-is…
Let me say this plainly: if you are planning to join one of the demonstrations on October 7, you are allowing yourself to participate in an act of cruelty and desecration.
This anniversary will reactivate trauma-related memory networks for many survivors, families and witnesses. Feelings, images, bodily responses and grief tied to October 7 can return with extraordinary force. Mourning is one way the mind begins to organize fragments of that pain: remembering, making sense of what happened, allowing grief to be felt.
To choose this day to descend on mourners with chants, accusations and political theater takes a body opened by grief and pushes the dagger deeper. This is true even if you sincerely believe genocide occurred. People can be manipulated and still become agents of cruelty. Victims of propaganda can still do cruel things.
There are two psychological effects to choosing today. The first has to do with a propaganda win. You interrupt public mourning before empathy has time to settle on Jewish suffering. Not even for a moment can public attention be allowed to rest on Jewish pain, even on the anniversary of the slaughter. Empathy may lead people to ask who did this.
The second has to do with inflicting power. Jews do not get to stand together publicly and grieve without you entering the space. Jews do not get to hold the memory of the people they lost without being shouted over. Jews do not get to be vulnerable without discovering that even their most sacred vulnerability will be invaded.
There are 364 other days to demonstrate, accuse Israel, condemn the war, demand Palestinian rights, or make whatever political argument you wish.
Choosing October 7 means finding the deepest wound, ripping away the bandage, and turning the reopened flesh into a political stage. Demonstrating today should leave a stain on your moral self image.
This is the same tactic as the street protests going on right now. Acknowledge Jewish grief just long enough to move past it, then turn October 7 back into an attack on Israel. They cannot let people sit with Jewish suffering long enough for empathy to land there, because that risks Hamas losing even one moment in the propaganda battle, even on the anniversary of the massacre.
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
Three years ago, I watched the first interviews with October 7 survivors, and despite more than 30 years of treating trauma, I had never seen anything like it.
I had worked with people traumatized by 9/11, Iranian refugees fleeing the Islamic regime, Israelis and Palestinians, rape survivors, soldiers, victims of violence. I thought I understood the outer limits of what human beings could do to one another.
October 7 changed that.
Children deliberately burned alive, women raped so brutally that witnesses I later treated were left in profound shock.
A month later, Daniel and his brother Neria were referred by Maman nonprofit to my Beverly Hills clinic with severe PTSD.
On October 7, they had been among the thousands of young people trying to escape the Nova Music Festival while Hamas gunmen fired at them. They recovered a weapon from a fallen soldier. While one brother fired back, the other dragged wounded survivors to cover beneath an armored vehicle. Their best friend was captured by Hamas and held in a tunnel.
They were so traumatized they could not sit on the waiting-room couch long enough to fill out an intake form. I gave them simple neurostimulation immediately just so they could sit long enough to begin.
Within a week, they were stable enough to return home.
Before they left, they told me: “We need treatment like this in Israel. If you come, we’ll have 50 people lined up outside.”
That was the beginning of the Israel Healing Initiative.
Three years later, we have treated more than 150 survivors, including people who were suicidal, and trained clinicians in these methods.
The first photo is a still from a video Daniel took on October 7 while he and Neria were pulling wounded survivors to cover. The second is Daniel today.
Three years later, the need has not ended.
Please help us continue this work.
Help us keep bringing them back to life. (Link in comments.)
If you would like to help or learn more about our work, check here. israelhealinginitiative.org
Heroism is contagious.
@Mr_Andrew_Fox
This is a survivor of an attempted mass murder aboard his plane, home again and being interviewed on Israeli TV.
What a workout for our nervous systems this is to view the video.
The puppies evoke warmth, amusement, tenderness. Then we are interrupted with bloody scenes from the plane and we shift into alarm. Then back to the puppies, and back to warmth.
Our physiology is forced to keep reconfiguring itself as the images change. It’s a remarkable little demonstration of how quickly our nervous systems respond to what we see.
3/5 Breaking news is especially vulnerable because reporters have to publish when they know the least. Missing facts leave more room for bias.
The NYT initially reported an “altercation” between the pilot and co-pilot. The Guardian described a “feud” and “fight.” More alarming information was already beginning to circulate, but it isn’t clear what the Times had independently confirmed or what evidence it had considered when it first used “altercation.”
Within hours, passengers were describing a stabbing, a catastrophic descent and what they said was an attempt by the co-pilot to crash the plane. Both outlets updated their coverage as more evidence came in. But it took hours, crucial time for an inaccurate explanation to take hold.
4/5 Influencers are in a privileged position to move fast and get a freeway into our brain’s search for an explanation. They don’t need to wait for evidence. They simply reached for an answer that already fits the propaganda edifice they had built.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center found the first “false flag” accusation 67 minutes after the plane’s distress signal. Within five hours there were 1,000 posts. Within 12 hours, 2,963 blamed Israel, Mossad, Netanyahu, Zionists or Jews.
Truth has a disadvantage here. It has to wait for evidence. By then, other explanations can take hold. When the evidence finally arrives, the truth then has two jobs: establish what happened and dislodge what people already think happened.
5/5 What can we do?
Preparation is easier than repair.
First to protect ourselves, build a bulwark into your own thinking now: breaking news means thin evidence. Treat the first explanation as provisional.
Second, to slow the spread, when a news organization gets the early story wrong, go to the source. Put the evidence in front of its reporters and editors quickly and push for an update. Their evidentiary standards give you leverage.
Third, with influencers, trying to change them is usually a waste of time. The audience is your target. Get into the comments quickly.
Speed is essential. Get there before the first explanation settles.
2/5 That explanatory vacuum didn’t stay empty for long.
Before anyone knew why the Flydubai plane had plummeted, news organizations and influencers were already implying or supplying causes.
Once an explanation begins to settle, later evidence has to overcome what is already there before a different account can take hold. It’s like a construction crew having to tear down an existing structure before it can build a better one. Our brains conserve resources too.
1/5 The Flydubai story exposes a vulnerability in the way our brains work. We look for explanations much faster than reliable evidence becomes available.
When a plane suddenly plummets, our brains are hardwired to ask why. That search for a cause gives an enormous advantage to whatever explanation gets there first. It can begin taking hold before the evidence needed to test it even exists.
Research in social psychology and the neuroscience of learning and memory points in this direction. For shorthand, I call this period the “attributional window.” 1/5
Orli Peter retweeted
Can’t wait for next summer, when Hollywood drops both the lesbian bar movie and the Flydubai movie.
They sit at opposite ends of the human condition. One is a clown show about people who achieve nothing. The other is about competence, courage, and the refusal to die on someone else’s terms.
If this clip of @jkirchick on @billmaher makes you wonder what is going on psychologically, I wrote about it a couple of days ago for the @JewishJournal , connecting the wild queer-bar fiasco to what happened to Scott Wiener and antizionism.
