"Time has no significant meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance."
-Leo Buscaglia
When the hostages were finally released from Hamas captivity after two years, the world met them with cameras, tears, headlines, and flags. But when the doors closed and the lights dimmed, when they were finally alone with their families and began the process of rebuilding their lives, the real mental battle began.
It is as if time itself has forgotten them; the world has been living while their own lives stood still.
For those held for two years, release is a collision of timelines. Their timeline, frozen in the moments of abduction on October 7, and everyone else’s, which has continued. They will have to deal with family members who have grown older, perhaps some who are no longer here, with the dramatic changes the world has undergone, technologically, politically, and socially, and with the disorienting reality of picking up a life that did not wait.
When former IDF soldier and Hamas hostage Gilad Schalit was freed in 2011 after more than five years in captivity by Hamas, he struggled to describe what it felt like to step into daylight before a sea of people. “I saw dozens of people, hundreds of them,” he said later. “There were so many people there. It was a strange feeling, a sense of shock.”
While the outside world had seen his face on posters, news bulletins, and campaign banners, for Schalit, time had barely moved. His peers had gone to university, started families, moved cities. He was still, in a way, the young soldier abducted at 19.
This temporal dislocation – the concept of time being out of sync, and the emotional shock of emerging into a world that has changed without you – is a phenomenon reported across decades, continents, and conflicts. It is not necessarily a medical diagnosis, but it is definitely a psychological concern.
Ingrid Betancourt was captured by the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and held in the Colombian jungle for six years. After her release in 2008, she told CNN, “I feel that I’m on another planet.”
In her mind, the jungle was still the present – the clothes she wore, the voices she heard, the routines that kept her alive. But the world she returned to had evolved. Technology was different. Politics was different. People she loved were different.
“I didn’t belong to the same time anymore,” she would later write in her memoir.
The phrase resonates with dozens of similar testimonies from hostages and prisoners of war: a kind of personal time warp that can’t be captured by medical terminology alone.
How life shrinks when in captivity
In long captivity, life shrinks. Days merge into weeks, then months. For some hostages, especially the many Israelis, such as Alon Ohel, who were held in isolation or kept underground for two years in tunnels, there was little to distinguish one day from the next. Some hostages were kept in apartments, were aware of days and dates, while some were left, literally and figuratively, in the dark.
British clergyman Terry Waite, kidnapped in Beirut in 1987 and held for nearly five years by Hezbollah, spent much of that time chained to a wall in solitary confinement.
“Time takes on new meaning when you’re deprived of natural light, freedom of movement, and companionship,” he later said. “You live in your own head.”
The outside world might follow every rumor and update. For the person inside, there are no headlines or any sense of the future. Only the slow, grinding repetition of survival.
When release finally comes, it can feel like stepping out of a cave into blinding light and realizing the world outside has been living a parallel story all along.
This collision of timelines can often shape how former hostages rebuild relationships after captivity and process what happened.
For Waite, it meant returning to a Britain that had moved on without him. Children of friends were suddenly grown. Language had changed. The Cold War was ending.
“I had created my own inner world to survive,” he recalled years later. “When you come out, there are big adjustments to make.”
Brian Keenan, abducted in Beirut in 1986 and held for more than four years, put it bluntly when he said, “It was like stepping into a film that had kept playing without me.”
The music was different, the cultural references unfamiliar, the world older. He was still anchored in the moment he’d been taken.
Psychologists refer to this as ambiguous loss, essentially mourning something intangible. There is no grave to visit for the years spent in captivity. No ceremony for missed birthdays, weddings, and ordinary life.
This grief can be intense. For some, it arrives immediately. For others, it creeps in over months, even years. It can also ripple outward to families and communities, who have lived through their own suspended time, waiting, hoping, fearing.
Trauma specialists have long recognized this temporal rupture in survivors of prolonged captivity, political imprisonment, and war. Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote Trauma and Recovery, describes trauma as an event that “shatters the sense of time and self.”
Her three-stage recovery model, establishing safety, remembrance, and mourning, reconnection, is in many ways a road map for stitching a torn timeline back together.
“It’s not just about treating symptoms,” Herman once said. “It’s about helping a person reintegrate into a world that has moved on, while honoring the part of them that has been left behind.”
Similarly, humanitarian psychologists at the International Committee of the Red Cross have warned that post-release support is often poorly tailored to the specific psychological needs of hostages. One ICRC analysis noted that former hostages “struggle to regain control over their lives.”
Captivity trauma is chronic rather than acute. It involves powerlessness, isolation, and forced adaptation over long periods. That changes how memory works, how relationships form, and how the mind perceives time itself.
Psychologists and humanitarian workers often describe the first hours and days after release as overwhelming. For Schalit, the sheer sight of crowds was a shock. For Betancourt, it was an overload of the senses after years of jungle isolation.
Researchers who studied former POWs from the Vietnam War and American hostages released from Tehran in 1981 documented measurable physiological spikes in stress levels at the moment of release.
In those first days, the mind is forced to compress years of missing time into a single, blinding present.
What often determines how a survivor fares is not only the care they receive, but how society receives them.
Families and communities, too, have been living in suspended time. They may have imagined their own stories of the captive’s return, family reunions, built a mythology around survival. But the real person who returns may be changed and may need time, space, or silence rather than immediate celebration.
Humanitarian psychologists stress that reintegration is a social process. It requires patient family support, community sensitivity, not just clinical treatment.
This is especially true in mass hostage events, such as October 7, where entire communities share in the waiting.
Not all hostages endure the same experience of time. Some are held in groups, others in total solitude. The latter face a particular distortion.
Psychological research on solitary confinement echoes this. People who spend long periods in extreme isolation often report disrupted sleep cycles, disorientation, and difficulty reconnecting with the rhythms of ordinary life. Their clock no longer ticks the same way.
Unlike physical injuries, temporal dislocation doesn’t leave scars that can be photographed. It can manifest in subtle ways, such as a captive who still dresses or speaks as they did when abducted; someone startled by technology that feels as though it were “from the future”; a parent struggling to relate to a child who is now an adult.
As one ICRC psychologist wrote, “We can’t ask someone to pick up where they left off. That place doesn’t exist anymore.”
There is one heart-lifting story that emerged this week of Israeli ingenuity in maintaining a sense of reality while in captivity.
Avi Ohana, father of freed hostage Yosef Chaim Ohana, told Israeli media on Wednesday that at one point, Hamas terrorists gave the hostages a small radio so they could hear the Muslim call to prayer. “Not so they could listen to broadcasts, just the muezzin. But they saw electric cables running through the tunnels and managed to connect them to the radio. He told me, ‘Dad, you won’t believe it. Elkana Bohbot and I caught Army Radio, and we heard you being interviewed. It gave me strength.’”
Similarly, Noa Argamani, rescued by IDF soldiers last June from Gaza, has waited for the opportunity to continue her relationship with partner Avinatan Or, only just released this week. A romance put on hold for two years, and now they must attempt to carry on as if it is still October 8, 2023. But it is not.
Now that they are home, they have returned to an Israel that has palpably changed after two years of war, and to people whose lives have changed in waiting for them.
They now have the chance to rebuild their lives in peace and move on from the terrible ordeal. For the first time in two years, time is on their side.