Israelis reacted with fierce joy and immense trepidation to reports of an imminent hostage deal that would begin to bring the 98 captives still held by Hamas home as early as Sunday. Many months of fearing for the hostages and fighting to bring them home have made their fate a deeply personal issue for an entire country.
The euphoria surrounding their release and sense of closeness to them are natural but also pose pitfalls that we should be aware of, Hostage Debriefing Team Leader Glenn Cohen told The Jerusalem Post this weekend.
“We all have certain perceptions and feelings about the hostages, but they are not necessarily accurate or beneficial,” cautioned Cohen, who previously served as the Mossad’s Head of Psychology and trained IDF commandos and pilots to handle captivity.
Feeling like the hostages are our siblings, sons, or parents, can create very strong feelings towards them, including ownership. This may lead us to believe we have the right to demand certain things from them, he explained.
“We have to remember that what’s important is them—they’re not ours and we have to respect them,” he said.
“It’s wonderful that Am Yisrael wants to be there and support, but this isn’t a homecoming heroes parade down 5th avenue. This needs to be the opposite.” he said.
A diver coming up from the depths
Cohen offered the metaphor of a diver coming up from the depths. The hostages will need to come to the surface slowly and gradually to decompress from what they have been through, he explained. A failure to manage this necessary assimilation could be dangerous or detrimental to the hostages’ health.
“We need to allow them [to] slowly meet the outside reality,” he explained, adding that “we really need to make an effort for them and their surroundings to be disciplined and patient. They may want to consume too much food or media, but it needs to be served to them literally in bite sized pieces, so it’s not physically or emotionally overwhelming.”
“Their surroundings need to slowly expose them to stimuli and other people. Even though friends and extended family have good intentions, they need to give the hostages space and time before interacting,” he added.
Cohen also touched on another aspect of feeling so close to the hostages, explaining that “our national and personal resilience are directly correlated to the way we perceive the hostages’ situation and what they’re enduring. The worse we perceive their situation, the weaker our resilience is.”
“Paradoxically, the public may feel the need to see captivity as more negative than it was — assuming the hostages went through the absolute worst imaginable, in order to justify their own opinions in the wake of the horrific October 7 attack,” he added.
“I know what happened on October 7 and so, I assume that everything that was happening on October 7 is also happening in captivity,” he said, explaining the mindset. “But that is just not accurate,” he added.
While it’s vital to show the world how terrible the hostage situation is and “while captivity is hell, it is a mistake for us to assume that every single person who was there went through certain things,” said Cohen.
These assumptions often lead to rumors and misinformation spread about what the hostages endured in captivity which is harmful to the hostages, their families, and to the public.
These assumptions can traumatize the public, Cohen explained, offering as an example a young patient of his who told him he was traumatized since he had heard that all the female hostages were being raped every day of captivity and even committed suicide.
“I told him, ‘this is just not true. You’re traumatized by something that’s in your mind, based on misinformation.'”
“On the one hand our minds are our greatest assets, but they can also be our greatest enemy if we let our imagination run wild” he added.
This assumption of the absolute worst can also be harmful to the hostages who are left to deal with the stigma of what people imagine they have gone through.
“We have to be very, very careful, to protect their privacy,” Cohen said, offering as an example of a damaging rumor the idea that a female hostage has had an abortion in captivity.
“That is a good example of something that is just not fair. It’s misinformation; it’s directly harmful to the hostages and to their privacy.”
Cohen also warned against judging hostages who express positive feelings towards their captors or captivity—which Cohen said shows a healthy survival mechanism.
“Instead of seeing their captors as monsters who want to kill them, they see them as human beings who they can connect with and therefore influence,” said Cohen, explaining that this is directly beneficial to the hostages.
“Some of us just can’t handle that,” he said, adding that some freed hostages, who had described their captivity and certain human interactions were literally cursed at by people in the street who could not cope with hearing anything that humanized Hamas terrorists regardless of the importance to the hostages.
“We have no right to be judgmental of them,” Cohen stressed.
The principles described by Cohen are those that will guide the teams who meet and care for the hostages from the moment they cross the border, he added
Centering the needs of those returning from captivity is a “critical part of how [professionals] will welcome the hostages.
Speaking about the elation the public and the hostages will feel as they come home, Cohen cautioned that it is important to put things into the context of a wider perspective.
“What we are going through is an ebb and flow, there have been a lot of ups and downs along the way, and we have been in a down. Now, the release is going to be a real flow moment,” he explained, adding that the situation is far from over and “we still have a long way to go.”
“There will be a lot of jubilation when they come, but afterwards that will subside and there will be an ebb, for both the public and the hostages,” he said, explaining that “the hostages will need to come to terms with the prices paid and the long rehabilitation needed after such an extended trauma.”
An “ultramarathon mindset,” aimed at helping those who run marathons over the traditional 42.2 km., can help the hostages and the public through this, Cohen said.
This mindset includes breaking down herculean tasks into smaller pieces, Cohen explained, adding that this was a tactic used by the hostages to cope with their time in captivity.
“A lot of them said, ‘ok I’m going to get through this day by day. Every day my goal is to just get through this one day.'”
Another characteristic of an ultramarathon mentality is embodied in three “golden rules” – drink before you are thirsty, eat before you are hungry, and rest before you are tired.
“We need to take care of ourselves, not wait until we reach burnout, but to take care of ourselves and think about it preemptively,” Cohen explained.
“We need to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of other people.”
Jesus Christ is King
