They came out of hell in Gaza and were released back into life. But, even while they are here, now free, their captivity comes back to haunt them and refuses to release its grip on them. It surrounds them when they drink their morning coffee. It accompanies them throughout the day as they desperately try to adhere to a new, minimal routine. It envelopes them with their blanket when they go to sleep. Its shackles choke them as they breathe, pressing on their lungs and burning their heart when they recall their captivity.
"Some of the triggers are sensory. They are related to smell, sound or sight. Some of the hostages who came to hospital here in Israel after being released were immediately reminded of the hospitals in Gaza, as the screens between the beds were the same color."
Since October 7, more than 90 hostages (including foreign nationals) have returned alive from Hamas captivity in Gaza – the majority of them women and children. Each and every one of them has experienced a different, terrible ordeal in captivity, and have had to deal with a different situation on returning home to safety in Israel. However, according to experts who deal with treatment of the victims of captivity, all of those returning share one thing in common: nobody will succeed in beginning a course of personal treatment to recover as long as there are still 101 hostages left behind (this week it was claimed that at least one half of them are still alive). And to use the professional jargon: "as long as the acute trauma has not come to an end."
As far as those returnees from captivity in Gaza are concerned, the triggers that reignite the trauma are everywhere, on many occasions in what are ostensibly the most mundane, day-to-day locations. "One of the female hostages, for example, jumps at every knock on the door," tells us Prof. Ofrit Shapira Berman, an analytical psychologist from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an expert in "complex post-trauma" treatment, a term that will be clarified here. "In captivity, this particular woman hostage was shut up in a room, and every time that people from outside came, she was forced to wear the traditional Muslim head covering for women, the hijab. Thus, every innocent knock on the door now immediately sends her back to Gaza.
"Some of the triggers are sensory. They are related to smell, sound or sight. Some of the hostages who came to hospital here in Israel after being released were immediately reminded of the hospitals in Gaza, as the screens between the beds were the same color."
Prof. Shapira Berman, analytical psychologist Prof. Merav Roth and psychologist Iris Gavrieli Rahabi did not need to wait long before deciding to take action, the decision was made already on October 8. On that day, the day following the 'Black Sabbath', Shapira Berman published an announcement in her therapists' group, asking: "Who volunteers to treat survivors?"
Within an hour, no less than 450 analytical psychologists had signed up for this venture on a volunteer basis. Since then, this special volunteer task force has been providing long-term (for three years) treatment at no cost to all the victims of the attack from the Gaza border communities and their families, including victims from various circles that are not entitled to state funding. For that purpose, the task force volunteers have been working to raise funds and donations around the world.
Following the establishment of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the task force volunteered to function as the clinical center providing it with professional service. The therapists from the volunteer task force also treat those hostages who have returned to Israel as part of the release deal in November 2023. "During the treatment sessions, one of the women hostages shared the fact that she was unable to remain outside her home without an armed individual next to her. When she is on the street, she looks in all directions to see from where the imminent disaster will appear," Shapira Berman recounts.
According to the expert therapists, those released hostages now trying to settle down in areas once again under rocket and missile fire, and as such are required to enter the safe rooms once again, are currently experiencing particular difficulty. "This is an extremely harrowing experience for those who were abducted from their safe room in the first place, for them, danger lurks in every corner," Shapira Berman explains.
"The released hostages have essentially returned to a country in chaos, to family members who are falling apart at the seams, burned out and hurting. Thus, the entire recovery process is extremely complex for them. If we normally use grounding techniques in post-trauma cases and for example, we say to the patient 'now you are safe,' 'what you are experiencing at the moment are memories,' 'it is not happening here and now' – in the current situation, when we are still in the middle of a war and there is no safe location, we simply do not have the ability to say this to them."
"Becoming friends with a terrorist"
Although considerable knowhow and experience has been accumulated in Israel on the treatment of trauma victims, all the experts we spoke with agree that this time, we are dealing with a unique situation. "The current trauma is of a completely different kind," explains Prof. Asher Ben-Arieh, the Head of the Haruv Institute for the Study of Child Maltreatment, who specializes in training professional therapists responsible for treating children who have been the victims of abuse, neglect and trauma.
"We understand that we are currently dealing with a new form of trauma that we are not familiar with. In the early stages, we thought that this was a trauma that is similar to the trauma of abuse among children, in which the victim experiences, among others, a feeling of betrayal. The feeling that the person who harms you is the one who is supposed to protect you. But then we came to understand that there is an additional element involved here: the sense of failure that the hostages returning from Gaza have experienced. This is especially so in regard to the children who were taken hostage, and they experienced the element of failure more severely."
Q: What is this feeling of failure?
"Take, for example, the children who were abducted. How do you treat a child who was told by the adults around him that if he enters the safe room and acts according to the instructions, everything will be alright, and he then did as he was told – and nothing at all was alright? How do you rebuild his trust in the adult world? Everything has fallen apart for him.
"The fact that all the support systems collapsed, and that all that we told the children that was supposed to protect them failed – this is something quite dramatic that created new forms of trauma. Anybody who claims to understand this new trauma has no idea what he is talking about. We are contending with all this right now, and in all honesty and modesty, I admit that we are still learning how to approach it. Nobody in the entire world has ever had to deal with acute trauma that has been going on for almost a year now."
Indeed, as stated above, in terms of the treatment of victims of captivity who have returned from Gaza, many therapists use the term "complex post-trauma", which was coined in 1992 by the psychiatrist Prof. Judith Lewis Herman, a renowned researcher from Harvard University, author of Trauma and Recovery, a book that became a significant milestone in the study of post-traumatic disorders and their treatment. Lewis Herman based her study, among others, on her work with released American prisoners of war from Vietnam.
"Prof. Lewis Herman discovered that people suffering from complex post-trauma tend to activate dissociative mechanisms, in other words mechanisms of emotional or sensory detachment, with significant difficulty in their emotional regulation," explains Prof. Lewis Herman. "In parallel, she identified in them a tendency towards somatization, in other words, a tendency to convert and communicate intolerable psychological distress as bodily symptoms. This situation involves, for example, pain with no medical explanation. The difficulty in exercising emotional regulation might be manifested in a tendency to hurt oneself.
"In her work, she discovered that the common factor shared by these symptoms is that we are dealing with repetitive and ongoing trauma – which occurs in the context of relations of dependency and authority. We will see complex post-trauma among people who have survived captivity and also among victims who have undergone sexual abuse during childhood, and survivors of concentration and death camps.
"Among the people that I treat, and we have treated hundreds of trauma victims from October 7, the most common picture is not that of post-trauma being caused by a single incident, as is the case with traffic accidents for example, despite the terrible atrocities that they experienced. The main story of the returning hostages and those people who survived the attacks on the Gaza border communities is complex post-trauma, which is related to trauma that has been ongoing for months or years, and which involves the element of betrayal.
"Not only were the captors in Gaza monsters, but there was also a state of dependency on them. A monstrous captor, whenever he is not engaged in the abuse of the hostage is often perceived by the captive as a 'good' object. Thus, the hostages' entire mental conduct during their captivity is focused on an attempt to soften up the heart of the abductors, to get in their good books, to calm them down so that they refrain from hurting them.
The experts underscore an additional problematic component: The hostages returned to Israel in the midst of an extremely disconcerting socio-political situation. Shapira Berman: "They see that we are apparently not succeeding in bringing back those who have been left behind in Gaza, and on the other hand, these people are being turned into 'enemies'. Their relatives are being told, 'You are the reason that it is not possible to bring them home, as you are demonstrating – and that bumps up the price.'
"The dependency is also due to the fact that the captors and the hostages lived in the same physical domain. Everyone was exposed to the same danger. When the IDF was bombing Gaza – both hostage and captor could have been killed. On occasions, the captors shielded the hostages with their body. There were situations in which the captors were emotionally linked to the hostages, especially when the hostages were children or women. People were holed up together for 50 days or more, and in such a situation complex relationships by nature will tend to develop."
The psychologist Iris Gavrieli Rahabi, brings the example of a boy, who during his treatment, described how a Hamas terrorist who was guarding him tried to make friends with him. "Somebody of whom you are scared to death is guarding you, so you hate him – but you also have to make him come to like you. As far as the boy is concerned, on the one hand this can be absolutely crushing, while on the one hand it gives rise to considerable feelings of guilt.
"That boy, when he was still very young, tried to explain to a terrorist why it is difficult for him to be his friend, and he had to do so without sparking any anger. The boy felt that he must tell the Hamas guard something personal about his family, about their life, and this burned him up inside."
Prof. Shapira Berman emphasizes just to what extent this confusion continues to have an effect on the children who have returned from captivity, even today. "The children we treated in the task force were busy trying to decipher who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. It is supposedly as clear as daylight: The good guys in fairy tales are also the strong, and there the children experienced a very different situation. Ostensibly, it is clear that we are the good guys – but 'we' did not succeed in rescuing them for 51 days.
"Beyond that, the danger of being killed in Gaza was actually more down to our military, while it was the terrorists who would say to the hostages 'You are safe here, we will look after you.' That mental disorientation is extremely problematic."
The experts underscore an additional problematic component: The hostages returned to Israel in the midst of an extremely disconcerting socio-political situation. Shapira Berman: "They see that we are apparently not succeeding in bringing back those who have been left behind in Gaza, and on the other hand, these people are being turned into 'enemies'. Their relatives are being told, 'You are the reason that it is not possible to bring them home, as you are demonstrating – and that bumps up the price.'
"The more the state of shock wears off and the released hostages begin to connect to their own emotions, the more they begin to speak about this. It really bothers them. The disorientation confuses things.
"And they also have to face an extremely difficult question: How can it be that suddenly people are cursing the hostages' families? Who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here? From here, the experience of betrayal begins to increase, which is the most difficult in a state of ongoing trauma. The experience of betrayal here is multi-layered: the army failed to protect them, their parents failed to protect them, the government does not protect them – and now those who were abducted are actually being blamed for all this."
According to Shapira Berman, there is an additional problem that gives rise to the increased feeling of disorientation. "Almost all the hostages underwent some form of brainwashing while in captivity that the State of Israel is not interested in them. The terrorists would say things such as 'you will be here for many years,' alongside comments such as 'within a day or two you will be released.' In doing so, they shattered the hostages' sense of trust, and when you shatter a person's trust and hope – you essentially turn that person into the living-dead."
Q: I assess that it is extremely difficult to come out of it.
Shapira Berman: "I think that this will be the tragedy for the coming generations. Not the missiles, but the tremendous mass of people who feel that they have been abandoned. That is the experience."
Recalling the home that was destroyed
According to Gavrieli Rahabi, the treatment unit is not yet profoundly aware of what the long-term impact will be on the spirit and behavior of the returning hostages. "Although there is some degree of experience in treating released captives, in this case it occurred in the middle of a brutal massacre. Everything happened to these civilians inside their own homes, on a Shabbat morning, when they were completely exposed. The youngsters who were celebrating at the Nova music festival, many of whom were under the influence of various substances at the time; young people who saw indescribable atrocities in front of their very eyes, they saw their friends being shot, butchered and abused. This is an intense degree of shock. To date, we have experienced nothing on a comparable scale to this. It is completely unprecedented."
Each hostage bears a different experience from their period of captivity. Prof. Shapira Berman: "Some of the hostages were abducted after suffering injuries. Some of them were completely alone. Some of them were abused and hit by their captors while others suffered no physical abuse. There are children who were abducted together with their parents and those who were taken on their own. There are children who told of how they were badly beaten and were tied up throughout their time in captivity.
"There are children who saw a relative being murdered in front of their very eyes prior to being abducted. Some were abducted during the very early stages of the October 7 attack and so were less exposed to the savage scenes of barbaric violence. There are children who were held in tunnels and those who were held in houses above ground.
"All of these factors have a direct and intense impact on the depth of the trauma and the chances of recovery. There are children who grew up with a strong sense of mental fortitude, and there are children who had already experienced trauma in their past, for example with a parent who had been sick, or those who had coped with their parents' divorce in the year preceding their captivity."
Gavrieli Rahabi: "There were hostages who were kept in total darkness and those who did have access to light. Some people knew who their captors were and others were kept in houses without knowing who was guarding them on the other side of the wall. There was one woman, who was abducted together with her children, and the first thing that happened to her when she understood that they were being taken into Gaza was a total 'shutdown' of all her mental activity. She entered into a totally automatic survival mode. All she could think about was how to ensure that the children remained quiet, how to take care of them, how to communicate with the terrorists. In contrast, there was one family that incorporated a number of generations who were held together in captivity, and they were totally convinced that they would survive and would be released."
According to Gavrieli Rahabi: the main common denominator among all the captives was the fear of the IDF shelling or the concern that Israel would attempt to rescue them – and then the terrorists would kill them in response. "Many of them came back to talk of a terrible fear that the terrorists, even the more 'affable' ones, might hear that a friend or relative of theirs had been killed in the bombing, and then would take it out on them in a fit of rage. One of the mothers recounted that each time she heard a rifle being cocked, her heart almost stopped beating and she was sure that 'that's it, they are going to kill us'."
According to the expert therapists, many captives returned home in a state of emotional numbness, which then gradually thaws out over time. "One of the therapists told me that she has a constant humming sound in her head," Gavrieli Rahabi describes. "When I asked her what does that humming include? she says: 'Those are my conversations with the terrorists'."
According to the psychologists, after the feelings of joy and relief that accompany the act of returning home from captivity, all the hostages were in a state of shock at what they then saw here in Israel. "People could simply not believe what they saw. Israeli society torn apart – disputes, arguments, responses of a severe lack of empathy and estrangement. Many of those who succeeded in returning from Gaza came back but have no home," says Gavrieli Rahabi.
"One of our patients was preparing for the meeting and considering what to wear, and then she remembered, 'Ah, I don't have that particular shirt anymore. I don't have anything. My house burned down, I have no photos and no books. I used to be a person who took good care of herself, and now, all of a sudden I am going around collecting donations.' Everybody feels that they are living on borrowed time. They are concerned that it won't take long for people to forget them. They have come back to face existential and survivalist anxieties."
Nightmares recur at nights
"Two types of medication kept the hostages going during their period in captivity – love and caring for others," says Prof. Merav Roth. "They managed to hold on for the sake of their loved ones. There is a secret alliance that exists between the people here and the hostages being held in Gaza, and that is the strongest bond that keeps them going. Not the quarter of a slice of pitta bread a day, but the knowledge that there is somebody waiting for them back home in Israel. That is something extremely touching and heartwarming to learn about the human race, and I am committed to that alliance.
"Our patients are still at the core of the trauma. They are forced to contend not only with the captivity, but also the more acute challenges, each of which in regular times is extremely rare. The murder of a husband or a relative, been uprooted from your home, the loss of property, the inability to return to work. All the various aspects of their own personal identity – address, family structure, profession – have now all disappeared. Their entire identity has been broken and smashed into pieces. They have come back to an entirely different world and are experiencing a situation in which the reality surrounding them is completely strange to them. Therefore, first and foremost we are earnestly attempting to gradually reconstruct the broken mirror of their identity. To help them cope with a life that has disappeared.
Many of those returning from captivity have family members who are still being held hostage in Gaza, and in such a situation – without any firm ground under their feet – they have absolutely no ability to begin the process of recovery.
"They are currently busy channeling all their energies into an effort to release their loved ones," continues Prof. Roth. "The mothers are holding on for the children. There was one daughter whom I accompanied to the meeting with her mother who had been released from captivity. When they arrived at the border crossing point and were reunited – she immediately asked, "Where is dad?" The question was answered by a deafening silence. A silence that I will never be able to forget. For 50 days the daughter had been waiting to speak with her mother, for 50 days the mother had been waiting to hug her husband, who had been murdered, and then to hear her daughter. And at that moment they were unable to speak.
"Another mother who was held hostage together with her son is now having to contend with his questions on a daily basis, such as 'Will dad come back when I am old?' 'Is dad already dead?' This is a totally crazy situation."
During her treatment, one of the women hostages recounted that while in captivity, at night she was only able to fall asleep after she would recite and commit to memory the words of all the Hebrew songs she knew. In the morning, which were the hardest hours of the day for her, it took her time to tell herself 'I am a hostage. That is the truth of the situation. It is no dream.' Even now, when she is back at home in Israel, the mornings are the most difficult. She is pent up with anger at what happened. She came back to discover that her best friends and some of her relatives, are no longer with us. That, in essence, she is now alone.
"There are freed captives who have returned, and their families, who managed to keep it together as long as they were fighting for the return of their loved ones, have now collapsed. That is the face of trauma that simply does not end."
Prof. Shapira Berman agrees: many of the children who returned from captivity in Gaza were there with mothers who had lost a partner or one of their other children – not to mention the fact that they underwent a particularly nerve racking experience in captivity. Now they must also contend with the post-trauma of their children in addition to their own. Some of the mothers are still active members of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, and the state of the families is getting worse day by day.
"I hear people cursing the hostage families and I simply cannot understand how we have become so inhuman and heartless. How is this possible? There is also a growing phenomenon of gaslighting with government ministers leveling accusations and hurling threats at them. I work with the families and they know that their children are now slowly dying in the tunnels in Gaza. Who really expects them to sit and stay quiet?
"In this context, the term 'enemy' has now become a word that is too readily brandished and this just adds to the ongoing breakdown of the families. It is incredibly insulting, and I don't know how they will be able to return to society afterwards."
Q: And what happens to the children who have returned? What are they experiencing?
Prof. Shapira Berman: "When children suffer distress that they are unable to withstand we will soon be able to observe regression. There are children who have gone back to wetting their bed at nights. Not only among the hostages. We are witnessing children with outbreaks of rage and separation anxiety. Their basic sense of trust in the world has been undermined. They have nightmares. Dreams of people they left back in captivity. Concentration difficulties. Difficulty in adhering to set frameworks and boundaries as in captivity everything was prohibited. Even crying. There was no definition there of what is permitted – only what is prohibited.
"They show clear signs of sadness, silence and withdrawal. There is considerable preoccupation with 'good guys,' 'bad guys,' 'the strong,' 'the weak,', 'winners' and 'losers.' They ask themselves if this might happen to them again? Why were we abducted and why did they not murder us? They are asking extremely frightening questions. The encounter with chance and the unpredictability of life is a scary ordeal at any age, and when you are only a child your experience of this phenomenon is that much harder."
Over the course of the last year, a special study has been conducted at the Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petach Tiqwa, as part of the treatment of 19 children released from captivity. The study, which was led by a multi-disciplinary professional team at the center, and whose results were published in the prestigious international scientific journal Acta Paediatrica, revealed that the patients suffered from symptoms of significant weight loss coupled with psychological trauma, in addition to complications resulting from extremely poor hygiene, wounds and infections that had been incurred during their captivity.
"Besides the decline in their physical state of health, the most worrying aspects that we came across as medical staff were the mental aspects," states Dr. Noa Ziv, a senior physician at the medical center and one of the principal investigators of this study. "We discovered that all the patients had been forcibly taken from their homes. Some 24 out of 26 patients were witness to either the murder or abduction of other family members during the massacre. They all provided indications of the psychological terror that they had been subjected to, with various strategies of psychological warfare – including isolation, terrorization, limiting their supply of food and water, and psychological abuse.
"On admission for treatment at the unit, all the younger children (less than seven years old) displayed a timid behavior pattern, some of them suffered from recurring nightmares. In addition, some of the children had been trained to speak in a low whisper and it was only after their admission to our unit that they gradually began to resume their normal volume of speech."
In order to illustrate the tremendous amount of work that still awaits the therapists, Gavrieli Rahabi offers us a chilling image: "The pace of treatment is akin to using a drop of water to wet the lips of a man who has not eaten for months."
And she brings an example to highlight this: "One of the patients did not cry after returning from captivity, as she was busy trying to function. It was only when she was present at a chance event in which they spoke about a relative of hers who had passed away many years previously that she began to cry for the first time. I asked her why this particular incident had triggered the tears, and she replied: 'Because that relative died a good death. With all his family surrounding him.' When that particular woman came home from captivity, they wanted to tell her how her husband had been murdered, but she begged them not to tell her. She currently needs to be in a state of not knowing to serve as a 'psychological bullet-proof vest' to protect her. This is what working with trauma is like. Slowly. This is a situation in which the oxygen froze inside the cells, and we now need to thaw it out slowly but surely."
According to Gavrieli Rahabi, the entire State of Israel is currently in a state of abstract trauma. "I use this term on purpose. Just as we have second generation Holocaust survivors and a second generation of those who underwent the Yom Kippur War, we now have a whole section of the population that has been severely affected by the trauma of October 7. We are talking about 200–300 thousand women, men and children who are suffering from trauma. We have an entire society here that requires rehabilitation. We may have heard numerous atrocities and horrors that people experienced and witnessed, but we fully understand that there are still plenty of difficult issues that will only come to the surface later on.
"As far as trauma treatment is concerned, we are talking about a decade ahead, assuming that everything comes to a conclusion now and that we are actually able to begin the recovery process. It is important to understand that there are houses that were destroyed that need to be rebuilt, but we also need to rebuild and restore the psychological home that has been destroyed."
Full of survivor's guilt
We contacted Prof. Judith Lewis Herman, now 82 years-old, at her home in the US, with a request to share with Israel Hayom some of the considerable experience she has accumulated over the years. Lewis Herman believes that although the trauma from October 7 and the captivity of women and children is clearly something highly unusual, extreme and ongoing – the therapists will be able to use the existing knowhow in this field.
"It is possible to attain a full recovery, but above all it requires social support and a safe and stable environment," stresses Prof. Lewis Herman. "If the victims are isolated and still at risk then recovery is not really possible. This is something we are familiar with from war zones, those who are subject to real danger wherever they go or escape to."
According to Lewis Herman, in order to be able to understand how to treat captivity-induced trauma, it is necessary to understand its long-term destructive impact on an individual's mind. "During captivity, a relationship of domination exists between the captor and the hostage. In captivity, the attacker is the most important figure in the victim's life. The captor's main objective is to subdue the captive by gaining control over all aspects of his life.
"As part of a famous large-scale study published by Amnesty International in 1973 on methods of torture and coercion, it emerged that terrorist organizations and people traffickers, involved in selling people and children for use in the pornography industry around the world, use the same tactics as in captivity along with the same methods of abuse."
Lewis Herman explains that the use of violence is one of these techniques. "What we are dealing with here is the systematic sowing of fear and feeling of helplessness, alongside the constant threat of death or mortally wounding the victims. We can then add to this the forced enforcement of capricious rules, and punishments alongside the granting of rewards are designed to cause the captive not only to fear death or the captor, but also to be grateful for the fact that the captor has mercy on them and allows them to live. Additional methods are isolation and erasing an individual's identity – such as changing their name or their attire and pressuring them to convert to a different religion."
According to Lewis Herman, in order to survive during captivity, the victims cling to another consciousness, what is referred to in the professional jargon as 'dissociation'. "They willfully suppress thoughts, reduce their mental experience – for example, they refrain from remembering their loved ones as this would be much too painful. They also refrain from the thought of the future, as this generates longing and hope that then give rise to disappointment and desperation. Even the sense of time changes in captivity. Erasing the future and the past results in a sense of an endless present. A present that is an ongoing nightmare. The psychological tools that support survival during captivity are likely to accompany the victims even after their release, possibly even continuing to haunt them for decades afterwards."
Despite the destructive psychological implications of the methods used in coercion, Prof. Lewis Herman is convinced that it is possible to attain a full recovery. "It is by no means a rapid process, there is no prescription for a medication that you can take and then everything instantly fades away, but it always surprises me to see how even children who have grown up in the most terrifying, threatening and abusive environments, are somehow able to preserve a sense of fairness and a healthy ability to develop relationships.
"I had patients who didn't have a single soul in the world to trust, apart from their pet. The mental resilience that you see in their survival is truly inspiring. Anybody who has grown up or been exposed to such threatening circumstances, who has seen the worst things possible that humanity is capable of doing – must be surrounded by people who represent the best values of humanity. People who seek to treat and cure."
Lewis Herman explains that on their way to recovery, many survivors seek to help others and to raise awareness. "The renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the psychological survival of victims who had endured extreme violence, calls this the 'survivors' mission.' Whoever has a 'survivor's mission' will be able to make a good recovery."
Q: What can the state, and we as society, do to help the returning hostages get better?
Lewis Herman: "This must begin with an effort by the government. It needs to place the return of the hostages, their safety and their ensuing treatment at the top of its priority list. It is also imperative to establish a support system that is capable of listening to their stories, the true reality of their experience. We cannot expect the hostages to be heroes and to live according to the ideals of heroism, and it is definitely wrong to accuse them or shame them for what happened to them or the manner in which they survived. The hostages are full of survivor's guilt. 'Why did I survive while my sister was murdered?' Of course, there is no answer to such questions. It has nothing to do with what the hostages did. The environment that receives the hostages after their release must celebrate their return – and provide them with all the support they need."
One of the most effective treatment methods, according to Lewis Herman, is the use of support groups. Together with a colleague, at Cambridge University, she wrote Group Trauma Treatment in Early Recovery, a handbook for running support groups for people recovering from post-trauma.
"Support groups and self-help groups for Vietnam veterans were found to be extremely effective," she determines during the interview. "In these groups, the members understand each other, they can speak about all the issues of which they are either ashamed or afraid. These are issues that might not be understood or possibly even criticized by people who have not been there. Such victims are on occasions accused of 'not having been sufficiently brave.'
"In the groups, they are able to share their stories, understand each other, and find solace in that. The support groups have also been found to have a successfully therapeutic effect on women who have been subject to abuse during childhood. At the hospital in the US, we ran a large number of support groups for trauma survivors, as they have been proven to be extremely uplifting and energizing, they break down the barriers of isolation, enabling the provision of support and cure. I am sure that this can be of great help also in the current trauma that Israel is facing."
