הטיפול בחטופים: שיחה עם אריק אבנרי – פסיכולוג קליני בכיר, המתמחה בטיפול בפדויי שבי

I fell in the Sevi in the Yom Kippur War. I was wounded in the air. For many years I've been dealing with soldiers from Egypt, not those who were with me. But I didn't know, and it hurts me very much, that this knowledge we will use today. I was in the air for three days. I didn't know everything. Like today, what the intelligence officer told me, the Arabs are talking about a war and the Jews refuse to hear about it. And on Saturday, October 6th, a very severe bombardment began on the Hermon. I don't remember the whole story, how we got there. We were stuck, like those who were on October 7th, 23rd, we were stuck, we heard shots and sounds around us in Arabic. There is a great image on October 7th, when I fell in the Sevi, and on October 7th, 23rd, four of my family members in the village of Gaza were severely wounded. I mean, I'm hurting from all angles. I was a young man in the Sevi, I was a young and strong man. And so, all the subject of the events, there were difficult events, I'm not so interested in going back to them, but really, what everyone imagines, what is the Syrian Sevi, you can think about it, it can be electric shocks, it can be explosions, and all kinds of things. Not to mention the psychological events, Golda died, Moshe Dayan died, he was 73, today there is no country. Hamas also fell, we conquered the whole country. I mean, you see, 50 years later, it's gone. The way I dealt with the Sevi, was that I was completely detached, and all the time I told myself, I look at everything from the side, at my behavior, at the behavior of my friends, because I was in a group, and at the behavior of the Syrians. At the very least, I was angry at the Syrians, because I thought that their job was really to hurt me. And when I went through the events, I thought, they don't act like Ari Kavneri, but because I'm an Israeli soldier, and even when I felt pride, that they are so afraid of the Israeli soldier that they need to humiliate him in such a way. And so I didn't feel humiliated, I felt like a representative of his army. Already then, in the Sevi, I thought that I had to do something with the information I was writing, and I thought about going to the university, and I said, I will go to a place where no one will be able to tell me later whether it was true or not, and really, my master's thesis is the concepts of self-determination in the Syrian Sevi. I am on the committee of the Ministry of Health for post-trauma, that I was among those who created the way that the wounded were received. I am also in the army, in the group that thinks how they will be received, and I think that the treatment that was done there is in the best way, and the treatment, I know from the army, the treatment took a long time in the army, and we were received. What I can't say about the civilian sector, in the civilian sector, I saw the programs that they receive, in my opinion, it's a slap in the face for a lifetime, and the politics here is very, very strong between the various ministries, everyone wants to be the father of all the programs, but in the end, there will not be one authority that needs to monitor after the Sevi victims, both the children, the youth, the adults, and the elderly, for a long time, because the effects will not appear immediately. Immediately there is the experience that I went out to freedom from terrible slavery. The symptoms, both among children and adults, at first we will see them less, because there is the most exciting meeting of life, and that of both the child and the adult, with the closest people to them, and it will put out all the symptoms that may later appear. But at the first stage, there is joy, there is very good energy from all sides. The problem will be in a longer period, not immediately, and so the idea is that they need to meet first of all with the closest people to them, and only then to expose them to a greater range of symptoms, both the child and the adult. The common things of an adult cat and a child cat, which for everyone is a very strong shock, the transition from a place where there were very few symptoms, to a place with many symptoms. Therefore, in both cases we need to make sure that the first symptoms that each of them will experience are the people closest to them. For a child, it can be a parent, a father, a nanny, or even a friend of his age. For an adult, the best meeting is with the family, with a friend, with the mother, and even friends from the army. What is important in treatment, both as a child and as an adult, is that the person who will be treated will be a professional, which is their support. I will also explain why. The tendency of each person, many times when we meet, we want to hear about the emotional experiences he had. But the mechanisms that activated him while he was in Hamas, it was of exhaustion and the activity of such a protective wall. Closure. Therefore, we cannot break this wall, unless it is allowed. That is, sometimes peers, adults, which I know better, it takes them years until they allow themselves to talk about the difficult experiences they had because of the protective wall that I mentioned. This protective wall allows them to act and they also return to it and it helps them to act afterwards. First of all, only a qualified professional is needed. Here in the Gaza Strip, we know that entire communities and entire families were separated. It's like foundations, how we put it together. And the most important thing is that it will be someone for a long time, not a short time. Because today there is a great demand because of their return, but, as happened to Shavuim, who I am part of, after we returned, in fact, no one will look at us and see what we need. After many years, when people have already gone with their difficult experiences, which could have been in the form of photos, in the form of photos that return, in the form of lack of sleep, which is one of the things that affects, I think, both children and adults, only after years, they started to deal with it. And the more you deal with it later, the more severe the injury.