When Words Hurt: Visual Journaling When There Are No Words for the Pain

When words hurt, you begin with the hands. Instead of asking a woman to tell you what happened to her, you give her a page, some colour and an image, and she puts down the thing that has no name yet. The page holds the experience whole and covered at the same time, and the word, if it comes at all, comes last and by her choice.

That is what I wrote in a chapter published in October 2024 in the anthology Safe Studio, from YAHAT, the Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies Association in Israel, under the title “When Words Hurt and Heal”: Visual Journaling with Women Evacuated from the Gaza Border Communities. The chapter is a testimony rather than a protocol, and it documents eight weeks of journaling with women evacuated to a hotel in the south of Israel. This page is its summary in English. Everything else I have published is gathered on the publications page.

My name is Rakefet Hadar. I am an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the training school for SoulPages guides. I heard about October 7th while I was in Mexico, and in the days that followed I learned that three women I knew from the Visual Journal Tribe community had been murdered in their homes that same Saturday. In early December I drove south with Maya Hod-Ran, a bibliotherapist, with no idea what was waiting for us there.

What happens when someone loses their words?

In the hotel lobby a woman sat down beside me. She had lost her daughter that Saturday. She made a page, and I asked her to give it a name. She broke into a heartbreaking cry, tried to describe what cannot be described, and then went silent.

That moment is where the chapter’s title comes from. Words, which are our ordinary way of telling someone who we are, had become another wound for her. In the visual journal the order is reversed: colour and image speak first, and text arrives last, if at all.

The SoulPages method is a way of working in a visual journal in which every page is built in layers, following a fixed sequence of seven elements, so that the word only enters after the page has already said its piece.

What is an open studio, and why is it so hard?

An open studio is a therapeutic model in which the making space is open to anyone who walks in, with no registration and no fixed group. In the evacuation centres it was open in the most literal sense: a table in a hotel lobby, and people of every age making their inner world visible without a scrap of privacy.

The first time I walked in I felt lost, as though I were being carried off by the general sense of loss around me. Neglect, mess and chaos, and around all of it a grand hotel inside which this was happening. The gap between the two was impossible to take in.

What finally worked was not an organised workshop but moving between tables. I went up to each woman who arrived, showed her my own journal, told her about the seven elements, and invited her to choose one image for what she was feeling right then. The hands began to make, and the words began to flow on their own.

How do you build a safe space when there are no walls?

Three things held the sense of safety before we ever had a room of our own:

• A personal journal for every woman. Notebooks hand-sewn in advance by dozens of volunteers. When there is no house, a sewn notebook is a place.
• The suitcase. We kept the materials in it, and it became an object that belonged to the group. Two women were put in charge of it, and it gave a small anchor to women who had lost everything they owned.
• Regularity. Two fixed days in the schedule, week after week, in a place where nothing else was fixed.

When we later moved into a closed studio, four walls made possible what the lobby could not: meditation, guided imagery and speaking out loud. The worries I had about the move turned out to be unfounded.

How do you work with pain without flooding someone?

Every week I gave real thought to what the session would be called. I chose metaphorical names that connect a woman to her strengths and to hope, the Tree of Resources, My Powers, Landscapes of Hope, the Inner House, because the name is the first thing she hears and it tells her what she is walking into.

At the same time I learned how important it is to leave room for the pain and the uncertainty too, not only for the light. As the group came together, the moment ripened for heavier material. In one session each woman was asked to recall a life-giving figure who stays with her, and two of them spoke about a mother who had died many years earlier and still supports them from a distance.

One session has stayed with me since. I called it Painting the Darkness. We worked with a technique in which rainbow colours are revealed from beneath a black ground, and I asked the women to write a paragraph beginning with the sentence “when I paint the darkness I will discover that…”. Fine lines of light started to appear out of a great darkness.

I also learned something there about my own language. I told one of the women I would bring her gold thread from home the following week, and she answered me sadly that when I say “from my home” it hurts, because she has no home and everything she had collected over the years had burned. I understood how much care words that are trivial to me can require.

What do you do in a week when making is impossible?

One of the hardest weeks was the one in which it was announced that hostages had been murdered in captivity. The atmosphere was unbearable, eyes gone dull, anger and disappointment, and the trauma struck all over again.

The women themselves brought the answer. They arrived holding newspapers and asked to work with the terrible headlines. I guided them to express the pain and the anger however they wished, and to add a pinch of hope to the page as well, and we worked with poems of hope we had printed in advance, each woman choosing one line she connected to.

That is the simplest instruction I have, and it holds on an ordinary day too: do not block the pain, and do not stay only inside it. Both of them on the same page.

What is left for a group after the facilitator leaves?

In the eighth and final session we made a collective visual poem, one line from each woman, out of the bags of images I had prepared for them at home. The excitement was enormous, and the sadness of parting sat right beside it.

That parting was not an ending. Together with the centre’s director I built a continuation plan: I would come back once a month for two days of workshops, and alongside that I would mentor volunteers who came weekly to run journaling sessions for the group. The hours that suddenly opened up in my days back home felt strange, and my heart stayed there.

Frequently asked questions

What do you do when there are no words for what happened?
You start from the material rather than the story. Choosing a colour and an image requires no phrasing, and it lets the experience be placed on the page without being said aloud. The text, if it comes, comes last and by the maker’s choice.

What is Safe Studio?
A project of YAHAT, the Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies Association in Israel, which ran therapeutic making spaces for refugees from Ukraine in 2021 and was reactivated when war broke out in October 2023. Some fifty such studios opened across the country.

What is the difference between an open studio and a closed group?
In an open studio the space is open to anyone who walks in, with no registration and no fixed membership, which makes it highly accessible but offers no privacy. A closed group in its own room allows meditation, guided imagery and personal sharing, none of which are possible in an open lobby.

Is it dangerous to work with newspapers and painful headlines?
Not when it is done with a facilitator and on one condition: something of hope goes onto the page alongside the pain. The women asked to work with the headlines themselves, and the instruction was to express the anger and add a pinch of light to the same spread.

Who wrote the chapter and where was it published?
Rakefet Hadar, in the anthology Safe Studio published by YAHAT in October 2024, edited by Dr Tamar Kichli-Borochovsky, Nona Orbach and Chen Jakobi. The chapter opens the section called Gathering Materials, on page 17. The anthology is in Hebrew.

Can you work this way on your own at home?
Yes, and that is exactly the intention. The sequence is fixed: intention, a background made without control, colour, image, line, and then one word. If making floods you every time you open the journal, that is the sign to work with a professional rather than alone.

I came home after eight weeks, and the sense that we were all part of one whole stayed with me. I said nothing clever there. I sat beside them, offered a material, and they added their own. Give yourself twenty minutes today, take a page, some watercolour, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you are feeling right now. And if something heavy comes up while you work, here is exactly what to do in that moment. There is also a free lesson waiting when you join the list: soul-pages.com

The full chapter was published in Safe Studio, an Anthology: Creative Texts in the Wake of the Iron Swords War, YAHAT, October 2024 (Hebrew), section 1, page 17.

With love, Rakefet

Is It Safe to Journal About Trauma? What an Art Therapist Wants You to Know

Yes, journaling about trauma can be safe and deeply healing, but not unconditionally. Safety comes from connecting to your strengths and resources first, approaching the memory only in small, chosen doses, keeping one foot in the present, and knowing how to close the page when you are done. Diving straight into your rawest memory, alone and unprepared, can overwhelm you instead of helping you.

Almost every article about journaling and trauma says the same two things: “journaling helps” and “this is not a substitute for therapy.” Both are true. But nobody tells you the part in between, the part you actually need on a Tuesday night when the notebook is open and your heart is racing. I want to give you that part. I am a trained art therapist, the creator of the SoulPages method of visual journaling, and since October 7th I have sat with hundreds of women survivors in Israel, holding a blank page together with a pain that had no words. This is what I have learned about doing this work safely.

Can journaling about trauma make things worse?

It can, if it turns into reliving instead of processing. Writing or creating about a traumatic memory brings it close, and if it comes too close too fast, your nervous system can respond as if the event is happening again: racing heart, numbness, fog, panic. That state is not healing, it is flooding. The practice below exists to keep you on the healing side of that line, where you touch the memory and stay yourself while you do it.

How does the SoulPages method approach trauma?

Not head-on. In SoulPages we never go to the trauma directly unless you brought that material yourself and you are ready to work with it. The trauma is there, we know it exists, and it is not the door we walk through. Every session begins by connecting to the strong, good parts of you and to your resources: people you love, parents and family, including the ones who are no longer alive, places that held you, moments you were braver than you knew. There are many, many ways to connect to strengths and resources on a page, and this is the unique heart of the method: the stronger that ground becomes, the more the hard material can soften and move at its own pace.

Community is a resource too, and a very significant one. Creating alongside other women, in a group or with a trained facilitator, means your page is witnessed and held, and what one woman dares to put on paper opens a door for all the others.

What are the signs you should pause?

Stop and step away from the page, gently and without any sense of failure, if you notice:

• Your body switching to alarm: pounding heart, shallow breath, trembling, nausea.
• Going blank or foggy, feeling far away from the room, losing track of time.
• The writing pulling you into the memory in loops, the same scene replaying without relief.
• Feeling worse after journaling, again and again, rather than emptier and lighter.

One hard session is not a red flag; it happens. The same overwhelm returning every time you open the journal is your signal that this material needs professional company, not more solo effort.

How do you journal about trauma safely, step by step?

1. Set a container before you start. Decide how long you will work, twenty minutes is plenty, and set a timer. Choose a stopping point before you begin, the way a swimmer checks where the ladder is before entering the pool.
2. Make a resource page first. Before you go anywhere near the hard material, fill a page with what steadies you: a color you love, an image of a safe place, words of someone who loves you. This page stays in the journal. It is the place you return to. In the SoulPages method this is not a warm-up before the real work; it is the heart of the work.
3. Work at the edges, not the center. You do not have to write what happened. Start with where you are now: what the memory feels like in your body today, what color it would be, what it needs from you. The center can wait months. It can wait forever. Healing does not require a full retelling.
4. Let images carry what words cannot. This is why I work in a visual journal rather than a written one. A torn paper, a smear of dark blue, a small figure in a large empty page, these can hold an experience at exactly the distance you can bear. The image says it without making you say it.
5. Close the page deliberately. When the timer ends, end. Some women draw a border around what they made, some write one closing word, some physically close the journal and put both hands on the cover for a breath. The ritual matters: it tells your nervous system that the visit is over.
6. Come back to the room. Name five things you can see, feel your feet, drink water, step outside. Give yourself ten ordinary minutes before returning to your day.

Why can images be gentler than words?

Words demand a story: first this, then that. A traumatic memory often is not stored as a story, it lives in fragments, sensations, colors. Asking it to become sentences too early can force you through the worst parts in order. An image lets the experience arrive whole but veiled, as a symbol that you control. I have watched this again and again in my SoulPages work: a page of color and torn paper says what happened without the woman having to say it, and the page holds it, so she does not have to hold it alone.

When should you bring this to a therapist instead?

Journaling alone is enough when the material is heavy but moves: you create, something shifts, you feel a little lighter or clearer afterward. Bring in a professional when it does not move, when the flooding signs above repeat, when sleep or daily functioning start to suffer, when there are thoughts of harming yourself, or when the trauma is recent and still raw. This is not a downgrade. A therapist does not replace your journal; the journal often becomes the bridge, and the pages you have made can travel with you into that room.

Frequently asked questions

Is it safe to journal about trauma without a therapist?
Often yes, if you pace yourself: time-limited sessions, working at the edges of the memory rather than the center, and a clear closing ritual. If journaling repeatedly leaves you flooded, numb, or worse than before, that material needs a professional alongside you.

Can journaling about trauma make you feel worse?
Temporarily, yes; touching pain stirs it. The difference to watch is direction: healthy sessions leave you a little emptier and clearer, while sessions that repeatedly end in panic, numbness, or spiraling mean you are reliving rather than processing.

Do I have to write about what happened?
No. You never have to retell the event. You can work with how the memory lives in you today, in colors, shapes, and single words, and let images carry the parts that language cannot hold yet.

What is the safest way to end a trauma journaling session?
End at the time you set, close the page with a deliberate gesture such as a border, a closing word, or simply shutting the journal with both hands, and then ground yourself in the room for a few minutes before returning to your day.

Is visual journaling better than written journaling for trauma?
For many women, yes, because images can hold an experience at a bearable distance without forcing it into a story. Written and visual journaling also combine well: a page of color and imagery first, then a few words if they come.

If you are reading this with a specific heaviness in mind, I want you to hear one thing: the fact that you are looking for a careful way in, instead of just diving, is already wisdom. Your pace is not a weakness. It is the method. If you would like a gentle, structured way to begin, my guide to keeping an art therapy journal walks you through the first pages, and the SoulPages courses at soul-pages.com go deeper whenever you are ready.

With love,
Rakefet