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About Ola
Ola Watad
Ola Watad is a psychologist holding a master's degree in clinical psychology. She works from an integrative perspective that places attachment, trauma, the therapeutic relationship, and social and political context at the center of psychological understanding, particularly within Arab and Palestinian experience.
Professional Background
My professional training took shape across study, clinical work, research, and working with people and their stories.
Education
I completed a master's degree in clinical psychology at Reichman University, graduating with distinction. Through my studies and clinical training I worked with a range of therapeutic approaches, among them psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, with a particular interest in attachment, trauma, and the relationship between psychological experience and the body.
Before that, I completed a bachelor's degree in psychology and Arabic language at the University of Haifa. It was a path that helped me bring psychological understanding together with an attentiveness to language, culture, and the context a person lives in.
Clinical Work
Therapeutic Center, Jaffa
I worked within the psychological services unit in Jaffa during my specialization in clinical psychology. My work included psychotherapy with children and adolescents, parental guidance, psychological assessment, and initial intake interviews.
A central part of my work was accompanying individuals and families from the Palestinian community in Jaffa, offering therapy in Arabic and English, with particular attention to experiences of trauma, family relationships, and the psychological difficulties that arise within social and cultural context.
Clinical Work
Headspace, Jaffa
I worked as a psychologist at Headspace in Jaffa, offering short-term psychotherapy to adolescents and adults that combined psychodynamic understanding with integrative methods suited to each person's needs.
My work there included individual sessions, group therapy, psychological assessment, and parental guidance, with an emphasis on building a safe space in which a person can make sense of what they are going through and work with distress, relationships, and life transitions.
Professional Philosophy
I don't treat psychological pain as a symptom separate from the person carrying it. I ask: in what relationship did it form? Under what pressure did it persist? And what was it trying to protect at a time when protection wasn't available?
Areas of Focus
Attachment and Attachment Styles in Adult Life
I'm interested in how our relationship to closeness, trust, need, fear, and boundaries takes shape within relationships. Attachment styles don't stay behind in childhood; they keep surfacing in our romantic relationships, our friendships, our choices, and in the ways we reach for safety or protect ourselves from it.
Cumulative Trauma
I approach trauma as it appears within its wider context: personal, familial, social, and political history. Some painful experiences don't begin with a single, identifiable event; they accumulate over time, within a family, a memory, a place, a loss, a fear, and the conditions that taught the body and the psyche how to survive.
Human Relationships
I'm interested in relationships as the space where what we learned about ourselves and others repeats itself: how we love, how we get angry, how we withdraw, how we ask, and how we try to stay close without losing ourselves. Old wounds surface in relationships, and so does the possibility of something safer and clearer.
Identity and Belonging
We move toward questions of identity and belonging, especially where they meet estrangement and exile, inside the homeland and beyond it. I stay close to experiences in which a person feels spread across languages, places, families, memories, and expectations, trying to understand where they stand, where they belong, and how to carry their story without getting lost inside it.
If this way of working speaks to you
A short message is enough to begin. You don't need to have the whole story in order before asking for a safe space to understand it.