By ETHAN BRONNER

KHAN YUNIS, Gaza - Toughlooking ambulance drivers in this central Gazan city are drawing images of their fears with crayons. In the northwestern village of El Atatra, in an overheated hall without electricity, 10-year-olds are closing their eyes and imagining a reassuring place. In Gaza City, women who have lost children to political violence are dancing away their tensions .

Gaza, the Palestinian coastal strip filled with refugees and hardship, is not generally thought of as a center of New Age sensibilities. But through the intervention of a classically trained but alternative-seeking American psychiatrist, nearly 10,000 people here have been taught techniques to reduce anger, ease family tensions and give them a sense of control .

“My husband is ill, I lost a dear friend a few days ago and the Israelis shelled near our house last night,” Hadba Abu Daha, who lives near the Israeli border crossing of Kissufim in east-central Gaza, said during a recent session. “Being in this group makes us feel safe, like we are on Ali Baba’s carpet.

Here we can express our feelings and know that someone cares about us.” Ms. Abu Daha and others said that the techniques, designed for people in stress and offered here free of charge, were useful not only for them, but for their children and husbands, to whom they teach the techniques.

The force behind the training is Dr. James S. Gordon, a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School in Washington D.C., a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a onetime chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. He is the rare American, and Jew, who has been regularly visiting Gaza since 2002. “We don’t have the power to change the tragedy they are mired in,” Dr. Gordon, 68, said .

“But we can help them gain a sense of control so they can look at the world differently.” The program, he reported in a peerreviewed article in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in the United States, has produced reductions in stress, depression and hopelessness . Blending elements of psychotherapy with self-help techniques, the system may sound a bit contrived.

Participants, divided into groups , meet weekly for 10 weeks and are led through a series of exercises involving closing their eyes, relaxing their bellies, “talking” to their pain, imagining a safe place, drawing and dancing.

But the program’s graduates are enthusiastic and Mind-Body is now everywhere in Gaza, with scores of instructors, and waiting lists of people seeking to get in. “Counseling is new in Arab culture,” noted Shaher Yaghi, a Mind-Body counselor . “People don’t want to be seen as crazy, so they avoid therapy. But in a group there is less of a stigma. A woman can’t easily go out alone in our culture, but here she brings a friend.

” Some counselors are trained psychologists, but most are not. Dr. Gordon, who has spent $3 million on the Gaza program, all raised from private donors, has trained 200 group leaders here in weeklong sessions. The training is essentially an intensive version of the sessions that the counselors will later teach, along with some of the theoretical backing.

To ease concerns here over the music and dancing, which are part of the technique, but are frowned upon by the strict form of Islam that holds sway here, the genders are segregated and the music tends to have an Islamic or folkloric quality to it.

Dr. Gordon is now talking with the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank, run by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, about bringing his technique there .

He has also spent time training Israelis who endured rocket attacks by Hamas. For a while a couple of years ago, there were closed eyes and soft bellies going simultaneously in Israel and Gaza, a few kilometers apart.

For some participants, optimism emerges quickly. In El Atatra, a small group of 8- to 10-year-olds were in their fourth Mind-Body lesson, and had been asked to draw three images: themselves, their biggest worry and what it looks like after their problem is solved.

Hazem, 10, drew his problem, as did many of the others, as an Israeli tank aiming its barrel at a house, something that happened in the war 19 months ago. His solution drawing, however, was unusual. It showed the soldier in the tank and the inhabitant of the house emerging and shaking hands.