Why So Many Jewish Therapists Are Struggling Right Now, and What Actually Helps

Since October 7th, I’ve had more conversations with fellow Jewish therapists about their own struggling than I can count. Not about their clients, but about themselves.

And almost every one starts the same way: with someone apologizing for even bringing it up, as if their own reaction is somehow less legitimate than what they’re supposed to be holding for the people sitting across from them.

It isn’t less legitimate. And I think it’s worth naming plainly what is actually happening, because we haven’t named it enough.

Jewish therapists are absorbing something most training programs never prepared us for. They are sitting with clients processing the same collective trauma they themselves are carrying, often without any adjustment in caseload, supervision, or support. Some are also navigating antisemitism within their own professional communities, from colleagues, professional spaces, and institutions that once felt safe and no longer do.

That’s not vicarious trauma in the usual sense.

It’s closer to being asked to treat a wound you’re actively bleeding from, while also being told the wound doesn’t count, or worse, being blamed for having it.

What this looks like in the therapy room

In training more than 3,500 clinicians, I’ve seen two situations emerge again and again.

Sometimes a therapist becomes the direct target of an antisemitic remark from a client, colleague, or someone in their professional community and has nowhere clinical to put what just happened.

Just as often, it’s quieter. A therapist overidentifies with a client’s collective wound and, without meaning to, joins them in it, matching the client’s fear, anger, or outrage instead of remaining grounded enough to help the client process it.

Both are real. Both can affect the clinical work. And both can be worked through, but only if the therapist has somewhere to bring them.

What actually helps

What I’ve found most useful is combining somatic awareness with reflective supervision, not one or the other.

The somatic piece means noticing what happens in your body the moment something activates you: the tightness in your chest, the heat, the change in your breathing, the urge to shut down, defend, explain, or jump in. Often, the body registers the activation before we have consciously made sense of it.

Treat that signal as clinical data, not as a distraction from the “real” work.

The reflective piece comes next. What got activated, and why? Is this your history? Your fear? Your anger? Your own unresolved reaction? Or is it about the client and what is happening in the room?

Doing only the reflective work means you may be analyzing a reaction after it has already shaped the session. Doing only the somatic work means you recognize that something happened without understanding what it meant.

We need both.

A few things can make a real difference. Notice the physical signal when it happens. Bring the specific moment into supervision or consultation that week, rather than months later when it has become part of a pattern that is harder to trace. Ask yourself, in the moment or immediately afterward:

Does what I’m feeling belong to me, or to the material the client just brought in?

That one question can do a remarkable amount of work.

And build a standing place for these conversations. A consultation group, a supervisor, a trusted peer, or your own therapy. Identity-based activation should be something clinicians can examine openly, not something they have to justify bringing up.

If you’re a Jewish therapist reading this and recognizing yourself, what you’re feeling is not evidence that you are doing the work wrong. It reflects how much you are being asked to carry while continuing to hold space for other people.

Finding somewhere you can say that out loud isn’t optional right now. It is part of doing this work responsibly.

The people who hold everyone else need somewhere they can be held, too.