He is a little boy ten years old. He sits forward, all bunched up, griping the edges of the chair with small hands, feet barely touching the floor. His voice, without the full support of breath, is timid, low. "I don't like to live in this house." His gaze is averted, cast down. He seems stunned, dull, defeated. "I could not stop the tank." It is our first session together at GCMHP clinic. This is what I see before me, this crushed little boy. Yet, two months prior I know that Osama The Lion lived entirely up to his name when he jumped up out of his bed, leapt to the window, clutching the sill, and confronted directly, within ten feet from his face, the fearsome howling of treads, turret, and gun barrel of a tank as it came crashing into the wall of his home. His mother, grandmother and five siblings ran desperately into the kitchen, but the tank turned and began to crush them under the rubble of the kitchen wall. Osama tells me that he screamed and howled, and wanted to stop the tank from killing them. He tried to match his voice to the thunderous roar of the deadly tank but could not, and he was overwhelmed. The family managed to escape through a hole in the far wall into a neighbor's home where they still live, next to the ruins of their own home. They had awoken to instant terror at four am when the sudden assault began. That was two months ago. The father brought Osama to GCMHP because of radical changes in the boy's behavior. Osama was being physically abusive with his smaller brothers and sisters, and his teachers reported that he had become severely disruptive and troublesome at school. Assessment and plan: Osama, the Lion Boy suffers the Trauma of Defeat, crushed by an overwhelming force of terror, destruction and death - the tank! that could take him, his family, and all life with its implacable crunching irons of death. Plan - Provide actual experiences of mastery for the boy. Reframe the boy's behavior in heroic terms - without burdening him with the message that he was, or should be brave or without fear. Provide actual experiences in the home with the family in which Osama can care for, and protect, and perhaps even 'save' his mother, grandmother and siblings - without parentifying him or distorting his development as a child. For the family - normalize the entire terrible event in the context of the military occupation of Palestine.

This is a story of a child from Rafah, by Dyaa Saymah, a mental health worker at Khan Younis clinic.