Within the span of a few days, we went from reports of a possible American strike on Iran to its cancellation, and once again it became clear just how much a single message from Washington can shake an entire country.
I watch the zigzag of world leaders reach Israelis at exactly the moment we are trying to carve out some room to breathe during summer vacation, sabotaging our last chance for a respite.
Against the backdrop of the security developments of recent days, from reports of a broad American strike on Iran to US President Donald Trump’s decision to call it off, the sense sharpened once again of how deeply uncertainty has become woven into Israeli reality.
Even before decisions are made or facts are confirmed, the public space is filled with reports, assessments, interpretations and open questions about possible security developments. For the Israeli public, even when there are still no answers, the waiting itself, the attempt to decode every hint, already becomes a psychological burden of its own.
It happened again this week. For days, the reports dealt with the possibility of a broad American strike on Iran and then came Trump’s decision to cancel it. Within a short time, the headlines, the assessments, and the scenarios shifted once more, and social media erupted.
At that very moment, on NATAL’s helplines and in its clinics, the phones started ringing. “I just can’t hear the word maybe anymore, I feel like I’m falling apart.” This sentence, spoken this week in a choked voice by a mother on NATAL’s helpline, distilled what is happening in the psyche of an entire nation.
Anxiety levels, already at the edge, spiked further. Words spoken thousands of kilometers away pierce straight into the psyche of the people here at home.
The current timing is not coincidental. We are in the middle of summer vacation. After long months of tension, thousands of Israeli parents are trying to do the most basic and human thing: to give their children, and themselves, a few days of quiet.
To take a breath, to connect, to go to the beach or on a short getaway – not as a luxury but as therapy, and as a vital need for mental health. To get through a single day without calculating the route to the nearest protected space.
And then a headline like this arrives, pulling the rug out from under our feet and turning the simple aspiration to sanity into a nerve-fraying, existential dilemma: Should we travel? Should we stay? Should we go to the beach, or is it better to stay close to a shelter? And, in the end, will we not find ourselves facing closed skies, or a reality that ignites in our hands?
As clinicians, we see that the psyche’s greatest enemy right now is not only the physical threat, but the endless fog. Uncertainty has become a quiet terror that erodes everyone’s mental defenses. The human brain, body, and mind would rather receive bad news, but clear and final, than live inside an eternal maybe.
When there are facts, we know how to organize ourselves. But when the forecast changes three times a day, the brain gets stuck in a constant state of alert. The pulse races, the muscles tense, and the result is chronic stress that breeds extreme fatigue, irritability, and painful regressions in the clinic.
“Just when I managed to calm down,” patients tell us, “everything floats back up again.”
Living in a wounded reality
For leaders around the world, ambiguity is a geopolitical tool. They play chess. But when these words land on Israeli ears, they undergo a destructive transformation. The public here is too wounded and too exhausted to listen to them with the cool detachment of political commentators.
For us, half a sentence on X/Twitter or a vague statement in a studio is instantly colored with the shades of mortal danger.
The psychological energy we spend trying to figure out what he meant this time is immense, and it comes at the expense of what truly matters: our children’s peace of mind, and our own ability to simply live in the present.
In times of emergency, leaders are the public’s emotional regulators. Their role is to generate stability and trust. When the leader of the world’s most powerful nation changes his messages without a clear rationale, the sense of threat and isolation only grows.
The public encounters a wounded reality, and within it, as therapists, we, too, find it harder to hold on to those hidden threads of security. This endless cycle of anxiety wears down all our resilience.
Our mental health, and our children’s, does not exist in a sterile vacuum – it is bound by hidden yet heavy threads to leadership responsibility, both local and global.
After all, “home” is not only a physically protected space, but first and foremost the psychological experience that someone is holding reality steady, allowing us simply to be – without having to stand guard every single moment.
The time has come for the leaders of the great powers to understand that their words and statements are not measured only on political chessboards, or as part of a media strategy in the studio.
Their words do not stay overseas; they land in our living rooms, shatter the routine of summer vacation, and are etched directly into the body, cracking, again, all of our inner sense of home.
The writer is a clinical social worker and director of the clinical unit at NATAL.
