MARA GOVERMAN: This episode contains discussion of antisemitic violence and intergenerational trauma.

JOSH FEDER: Welcome to The Carlat Psychiatry Podcast. I'm Dr. Josh Feder, the editor-in-chief of The Carlat Child Psychiatry Report.

MARA GOVERMAN: And I'm Mara Goverman, a licensed clinical social worker in Southern California with a private practice. Today’s episode is one that we’ve been sitting with for a long time. We’re talking about how to survive psychologically in a world where hatred is persistent, not abstract, not metaphorical, but recurring and sometimes lethal. Josh, I want to start by asking you what made this feel necessary to speak about this now.

JOSH FEDER: This past week, I mean, we’ve had three major events, planetary, right? We had the Brown University school shooting. We had the Bondi Beach massacre during a Hanukkah celebration, and then we had the murders of the Reiner couple. This question keeps coming back in my work, in my community, even in my own nervous system, and maybe many of our listeners, too. My own internal world formed in the presence of real danger from hateful people. The hatred didn’t end. It recedes, then it returns. And at this time of year, Hanukkah, the Christmas season, talking about joy or resilience without acknowledging that reality, frankly, feels dishonest.

MARA GOVERMAN: And disingenuous. So you’re already pushing against a lot of the language people usually rely on: resilience, optimism, even healing.

JOSH FEDER: Yeah, that’s because those frameworks often assume that there was some kind of before when everything was okay, and then the danger ended. Right? But for many Jews and for people from many other groups, historically and presently, that just isn’t true. I mean, pause for a moment. Notice for yourself, right, when you hear the word healing, what kind of assumptions does that come with? Does it imply safety? Does it imply closure, or does it imply kind of forgetting what happened?

MARA GOVERMAN: You said this isn’t just trauma, it’s developmental. Can you say more about that?

JOSH FEDER: Development matters. For me and many people, this hate isn’t something that I encountered as an adult, with a kind of time when I had perspective and choice and maybe somebody to talk with about it, right? This exposure happens early, when identity and a sense of safety or trust are still forming. Research in Northern Ireland by Paul Connolly and his colleagues showed that children as young as three years old can talk about their dislike of rival groups. Psychiatrist Dori Laub writes about how trauma disrupts the sense that the world is a reliable place. That’s not just fear, right? When people talk about difficulty experiencing joy, especially this time of year when people talk joy, joy, joy,this often reflects really an existential fracture.

MARA GOVERMAN: Josh, is that what we’re talking about, Erikson’s trust versus mistrust stage? Exactly.

JOSH FEDER: This experience of joy that we’re expected to pursue depends on having a secure sense of safety. That was Erikson’s first psychosocial stage, trust versus mistrust. But when you grow up in a world where you are repeatedly attacked, that sense of safety is actually maladaptive.You need to function on a foundation not of trust exactly, but of vigilance. So this trouble feeling joy, or lack of joy, that people talk about this time of year, isn’t pathological. It’s kind of a prerequisite to survival.

MARA GOVERMAN: It’s actually biological. I’m remembering Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and safety is one of the first at the bottom of the pyramid. So I understand that. A lot of the clients that are coming in during this time of year and experiencing these horrific world events are talking about guilt.So, in any case, I want to slow this down a little bit because I think many listeners may recognize themselves here. There’s often a quiet shame attached to not feeling light or joyful, especially when others seem to experience that joy.

JOSH FEDER: Right, shame comes before guilt, and that shame compounds the injury. Shame, meaning there’s something wrong with me, right? And that shame compounds the injury. It asks people to feel broken for adapting accurately to reality.Let me say that again. What you’re saying to people when you say, “Oh, you should feel joy at the holiday,” and maybe you feel guilty about the joy, I don’t feel joy, but then you feel that’s because there’s something wrong with me. You feel the shame because there’s something wrong with me. And yet what you’re doing by not experiencing what people are asking you to do is actually an accurate adaptation to reality that people aren’t recognizing that this societal push to experience joy demands that you not recognize that there is danger present, right? So if joy has felt elusive, for listeners, if joy has felt elusive in your life, you’ve got to ask yourself, did vigilance protect you from something? Is it protecting you, even right now?

MARA GOVERMAN: You said resilience can be the wrong framework altogether.

JOSH FEDER: Right. So resilience is usually framed as bouncing back, right? That implies returning to a baseline sense of safety that may never have existed. That’s the point here. Historian Yehuda Bauer emphasized that for Jews anyway, there’s this episodic, recurrent threat, right? And that’s a best case, since antisemitism is always lurking under the veneer of civil acceptance.

MARA GOVERMAN: Promoting resilience can feel like a demand to forget history.

JOSH FEDER: Right, or to pretend that past attacks just aren’t relevant. We’re not saying forget it, but we’re saying, look, we’ve moved on from that. Either way, that robs a person of the psychological necessity of living without illusions. But this isn’t to say that people exposed to chronic and intergenerational trauma are condemned to living without any kind of sense of feeling or emotion, and that’s the point of the podcast. We need to arrive at a more authentic place, one that’s different from the conventional idea of the pursuit of joy, and yet where life feels worth living.

MARA GOVERMAN: Right, and being comfortable with the uncomfortable and still finding those moments of joy. Let’s back up and talk about vigilance some more because it keeps people alive. It’s survival. It’s biological. But it does also extract a cost.

JOSH FEDER: Right. Well, that’s the central paradox. Vigilance preserves life. It also suppresses spontaneity and a sense of ease. Rachel Yehuda’s work on intergenerational trauma, about methylation of codons and things like that, where you can see in Holocaust survivors, how these survival adaptations get passed down biologically. Psychologically. So, a parent is under some chronic stress, and even grandkids of Holocaust survivors have the same methylations that keep their stress response very trigger-happy. So, you're more likely to be alert and ready to fight or flee, that sort of thing. So, these aren’t really disorders; these are adaptations that create a kind of preparedness.

MARA GOVERMAN: But preparedness and hypervigilance can take over everything.

JOSH FEDER: Right. So people cope by overworking or making themselves indispensable, or carrying moral responsibility for everyone around them. And those strategies can work for a little while, but only so long, because they kind of consume you over time. Maybe you’ll notice where vigilance lives in your body and ask yourself, is it everywhere, or are there places or times that vigilance can rest?

MARA GOVERMAN: So the goal isn’t to eliminate vigilance, is it?

JOSH FEDER: No. That would be unrealistic and frankly hazardous. The goal is to contain vigilance, to manage its persistent and pervasive prevalence in the present, so it doesn’t constantly occupy every internal space inside us.

MARA GOVERMAN: You are making a really important distinction between the sense of joy and the appreciation of feeling alive.

JOSH FEDER: Right. Joy is typically imagined as having this quality of lightness. If you read survivor accounts like Viktor Frankl’s experiences in the death camps during the Holocaust, he describes what sustained people. It wasn’t happiness; it was a sense of meaning, dignity, and connection. That can include grief and anger, and it doesn’t require denial of your lived or intergenerational experience.

MARA GOVERMAN: That certainly sounds like permission.

JOSH FEDER: Yeah. It is. It’s a different metric of health. Instead, you can say to yourself, “Why don’t I feel more joy?”, but instead, maybe try asking yourself, “Where do I feel and when do I feel most alive?”

MARA GOVERMAN: You're talking about reframing the questions. And I also want to talk about what doesn’t help, because people often mean well in trying to promote happiness, but inadvertently cause pressure and harm.

JOSH FEDER: Absolutely. I am often promoting the idea that it's always good to think about three good things that have happened at the end of a day as a gratitude exercise, which reminds you that there are good things in the world on a tough day. But when we force that all, it is problematic, it's sometimes asking people to deny that there are difficult things going on. Another thing is premature forgiveness. “Oh, we need to forgive.” That's what's gonna release us, you know, we don't want people taking free rent in our minds, so we're gonna forgive them, we're gonna move on. Well, okay, I get that, and that can be a real release. But when you do it before or without really understanding what the meaning of that is, then you're sort of giving history a pass when it's not actually safe to do so. Another thing that happens is that some people universalize narratives that erase the specificity of their own experience.  In my case, Jewish experience. It could be the same for the Black experience or whatever group you’re part of, right? It’s sort of like when you’re Black and you see a sign that says, “All Lives Matter.” You’re saying, “Yeah, yeah, I get that. But what about Black lives?”  Because we have specific problems with many more black people being incarcerated. And for me, the violence rates against Jews are actually a lot higher than for any group in the country in the US right now. And you know, if we say, we don't want violence against anybody, well, yeah, but we have some specific problems in the Jewish community, that's a problem. It's all supposed to be about light and everything else. So this universalizing is actually problematic. So these approaches. This forced gratitude, premature forgiveness, and universalizing narratives they can recreate the original injury. Being told your fear or anger or vigilance is incorrect, or at the very least, inconvenient.

MARA GOVERMAN: So what do you think really helps?

JOSH FEDER: Continuity and contribution.  That should be enough for people to remember from this podcast. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that hatred seeks erasure. Continuity defeats it.  Also, we need to develop our understanding of a kind of bounded safety, meaning knowing where hatred isn't without pretending that it's nowhere. So, that might mean going to your community center with your pals and being able to celebrate in a way that is warm and engaging, and it's safe for now. Contribution means finding ways to build a better world. Judith Herman reminds us that functional responses to trauma involve reclaiming our voice and engaging in meaningful social action.

MARA GOVERMAN: I think you’re saying that the drive to help others isn’t merely a lesser choice than experiencing joy.

JOSH FEDER: No, it’s resistance. It’s refusing to let suffering end in silence. And again, for listeners, it’s important to think about what kind of continuity, cultural, relational, moral, you anchor yourself to when the world feels hostile. And the Reiner murders in particular are, right. A lot of us grew up with some really great movies. Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, stuff like that. And the sad murders of Rob and Michelle, I mean, it puts yet another hole in your soul, doesn’t it, to think that for whatever reason, however this unfolded, maybe partly related to our inability to help some people with mental health difficulties or other aspects that came into that. And on top of that, for instance, there’s gun control already in Australia, but a whole bunch of guns were in the possession of the terrorists who murdered the people at the Hanukkah celebration. Or at this time of our recording, law enforcement hasn’t found the shooter in the Brown attack this past week, as well. I mean, you think about that, and then you think about when the world feels pretty awful. How do we anchor ourselves? What do we do about that? Where do you find community? How can we help people feel better? We talk a lot, Mara and I, about responsive caregiving. When we are trying to help kids who are impacted by conflict, whether it’s in Northern Ireland or the Middle East or other places, our research and our advocacy has been about helping caregivers, parents in particular, to respond to their kids in a way that helps them to be regulated and connected, with meaningful flow of interaction. And that’s what’s happening when you’re at your community center, whatever place and time it is, where you feel more alive. And it’s also avoiding hateful media or doom scrolling, things like that. And really, that just kind of brings me to my hero, Fred Rogers. When we were writing this podcast, Mara said, “You gotta bring Fred into this.” And she’s right. It’s about finding good people. One of the things Fred said, and I’m paraphrasing, is that when times are difficult, find the good people, because there are always good people. He’s right, and we need to do that. 

MARA GOVERMAN: Well said. So as we close, I want to ask the hardest question. If hatred persists, what does survival actually look like?

JOSH FEDER: Well, that’s the heart of it. It looks like living meaningfully without surrendering historical truth. It looks like moments of warmth, shared laughter, intellectual delight, and experiencing the kind of love that knows the costs we pay to have these experiences. These aren’t betrayals of vigilance. These are acts of defiance. Much more than that, they’re authentic experiences of what it means to be alive.

MARA GOVERMAN: And the intentional knowing that that’s exactly what you do adds a more meaningful experience to every moment. Thank you, Dr. Feder, for taking on this really deeply challenging problem, and hopefully, we’ve offered some really good ideas for our listeners.

JOSH FEDER: Thank you, Mara, for helping me do that.Everything from Carlat Publishing is independently researched and produced. There’s no funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

MARA GOVERMAN: And if you found this episode valuable, which we sure hope you did, please share it with others who need to hear this message.

JOSH FEDER: Thanks to all of you for tuning in. Until next time, take care. And remember, when you look for good things, more good can happen.