Helina Blogs

  In her monthly blog, Elif Shafak explained how there are emotions in the languages we speak. Kurdish is my mother tongue. It's the language of my great-grandparents and poetry, and it represents a dream of one day returning to my roots, to a place that I once called my motherland—a land that I only remember vividly. Farsi is the language I was exposed to as a little girl due to my mother's heritage, but then I completely lost it. It slipped through my fingers because I couldn't hold on to it. I still hear it like beautiful pebbles somewhere in the distance, out of my reach. Arabic is the language I used during my childhood years in Iraq. It shaped me into the woman I am today. It turned me into a nomadic writer who profoundly appreciates creativity in everything. It made me understand the melody, cadence, olive trees, historic alleyways, neighborhood, and bazaar with skillful goldsmiths, carpenters, artists, and religious and historical sites of Iraq and all the melanchol...

A Proud Palestinian Teta Defending her Land At the top of my mind, as it is for so many of you, is the renewed bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians. I can’t help but see weapons for one side, and band-aids for the other. The question that is worth asking amid this conflict is how can the United States ever be trusted on human rights and peace building when it is giving more money for bombs than for cease-fire solutions?  As I watch the news and the see the double standards, I can’t help but relive the life of that young girl running along a dusty dirt road in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm who thought that the quicker she moved the less of a target she would be. All the sudden I am also that young girl of mass exodus living in a sanctioned country without enough to survive, whose family fled to the sheltering mountains to escape mass murder from Saddam Hussein’s regime. My dormant PTSD symptoms are immediately triggered, and I am shaken to my core in a fight-or-flight s...

I have always been a curious learner. In high school, college, and graduate school, I looked forward to taking on the next challenge and writing papers to demonstrate my unique analysis of various treatment modalities for my patients. As a world traveler, I found joy in embarking on cumbersome journeys. I challenged myself both mentally and physically to summit some of the hardest mountains, from base camp at Everest to Kilimanjaro. I did it all. I even had the courage to join my fellow nomads to provide care for hundreds of trauma victims on the front line in stark environments in Northern Iraq and Western Syria. This all changed when I found myself leading an entire organization. Now that I was its very first female executive, a role I worked hard to obtain, I was no longer the ambitious, curious learner and trauma-informed pharmacist who was eager to apply her training to change the lives of the patients she oversaw on the psychiatric unit. "What gives me the right to be here?...

To understand trauma, we must first understand the complex structure of the brain. The human brain develops from the bottom up, starting with the part of the brain that is responsible for our survival. Next, we have the emotional center or the limbic system, which is responsible for memory, emotions, and encoding of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. The limbic brain also scans the environment for danger based on past experiences that have been encoded. The neocortex is the last part of the brain to develop because it is the least essential to survival. The neocortex is responsible for keeping the 2 other parts of the brain in check by applying rational thought and reasoning to our decisions. In times of distress, the neocortex is overtaken by the overactive limbic system and survival instincts, putting the body into the fight-or-flight response, a function of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). When responding to stress, the brain uses 2 roads. The first is what neuroscientist Josep...