After Dan, 28, returned from nearly 300 days of reserve duty in the Israeli military’s Yahalom Combat Engineering Unit, he realized that he had lost interest in everything—he had no passion for things he once loved, no desire for intimacy, and increasing irritation at those around him. But he didn’t think it was related to the words he feared most: post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I just became apathetic,” Dan told Davar. “It was like I was floating next to life. I lost interest in my partner, in my work, and if someone made a comment to me, I’d lash out at them, and then apologize a few minutes later. I was bored. I didn’t think anything had happened to me mentally. On the contrary, I thought, Aren’t I strong.’”
“I thought post-traumatic meant someone who shouts all day, sits in a corner, or doesn’t get out of bed,” Dan added. He said that upon finishing reserve duty, he felt a sudden loss of significance.
Dan, who asked to withhold his last name, described feelings of irritation with his partner, his parents, his colleagues, and his friends. “They’re talking nonsense, they don’t understand,” he said. “Friends who didn’t serve start to talk to you about their problems—mortgage, relationships, money—and inside, you’re angry. Because you just came back from there, and they just kept living their lives.”
Being called a hero was also hard, especially because of those who didn’t live to return home.
“They don’t see how much guilt you carry around,” he said. “Why did he die and not me? If I had arrived a day earlier, maybe I could have saved the hostages who were killed. If I had looked to the left, maybe I would have seen the terrorist who shot my friend. You have to live with that ‘maybe.’”
In an attempt to address the difficult experience of returning from reserve duty, Dan, along with 10 other reserve soldiers, participated in a workshop of the InHeal method for body-mind-spirit balance, sponsored by the Medical Care Rehabilitation Center based in Bat Yam. For five days, the participants were completely cut off from the outside world, sequestered in a large, isolated house in central Israel’s Moshav Tirosh.
“In our society, it’s harder for men to approach their emotions,” Dan explained. “I grew up in a Soviet upbringing, which further intensifies the difficulty. When you’re a soldier, it’s even harder. Little by little, I built walls, layer after layer. It’s hard to peel them off—it will take more time, and I’ll still need help.”
With that in mind, Dan described the workshop as a life changing experience. Studying the scientific side of trauma and giving a name to his constant state of hypervigilance provided relief, he said.
“I really felt how you learn how to calm yourself, how to let thoughts pass without taking over, using breathing and various physical and mental exercises,” Dan explained. “You also learn to accept what you’ve been through and the fact that it affects you. You give yourself space.”
The house at Moshav Tirosh is surrounded by vineyards and tranquil sandy paths. It is meant to be a quiet oasis, without phones or distractions, where the reservists can turn inwards. Over the course of the five-day workshop, participants receive individual and group therapy, both physical and mental. The goal is to acquire tools to deal with symptoms of trauma.
Before the war, Dan lived in Los Angeles for four years, working as a contractor and earning a good salary. After October 7, 2023, he got on a plane to Israel, and an hour after landing, he was already in uniform and deploying to Gaza.
“At first, there was a feeling that we probably wouldn’t be coming back,” he explained. “It was very scary. There were explosives everywhere—you would take a step and there’s a chance you’ll explode. And there is a lot of chaos and disorder all around you, terrorists with elderly people, children, women—everything mixed together.”
Dan lost several friends in the first offensive. In his second deployment, he participated in the first recoveries of bodies from the tunnels.
“There are a lot of mixed emotions in combat,” he said. “You’re doing a tough mission, you see hard things, and then you’re with the guys, joking and happy, then you’re scared, then you’re happy again, and then someone falls in combat, and you’re sad again, but you have to get up, there’s no time to mourn.”
Eventually, he explained, all his emotions started mixing together and he became indifferent to his emotional life. “You act on instinct,” he said. “You continue the mission, you don’t have time to process. After a while, it becomes normal. It becomes legitimate to see dead bodies.”
When he returned home after his second deployment, Dan felt that something was different. He was angry at everything and everyone and impatient. He went back to work but then stopped because he couldn’t focus. He turned to smoking and drugs for solace.
“At some point, I exploded, and then I isolated myself,” Dan said. “I couldn’t be around people. I realized this wasn’t good for me, that I couldn’t go on like this. I started reading about symptoms of post-trauma.”
During peacetime, the Medical Care Rehabilitation Center focuses on trauma recovery for survivors of accidents or serious illnesses, in addition to routine rehabilitative treatment. But the institute changed its direction following a meeting with Razi Barabi, commander of the reserve Givati Reconnaissance Battalion, who lost five of his fighters in the Gaza building collapse disaster last year.
“After what I and my soldiers went through, I realized that there’s a very heavy price on the soul. And as a commander, I have responsibility for my people, even beyond the army,” Barabi explained.
After the disaster, Barabi’s soldiers were still in the thick of the fighting and couldn’t even attend the funerals of their friends. When the fighting ended, they returned home with a third of their unit missing. A few days later, Barabi began receiving phone calls from his soldiers. They spoke about struggles they couldn’t explain, about impatience with their children and wives, sexual challenges and problems with concentration.
At first, Barabi thought it was normal, that time would help the healing process, but he soon realized that this was something more. He recalls one of his soldiers telling him that he felt that he had become a monster at home—that he was having outbursts of aggression towards his children.
“He’s talking, and I’m thinking to myself, for heaven’s sake, how is it possible that the best people in our country feel like monsters? What’s happening in their bodies, in their souls? Why is there no remedy for this?” he said. “I realized that there’s another war here, a war for the soul. Out of my responsibility for my people, I simply can’t let this happen.”
Their unit tried everything: combat processing workshops, psychologists and military counselors, a shared vacation in Romania, a chocolate workshop, and swimming with dolphins.
“Everything was very nice and comforting, but at the end of the day, beyond the words and the sharing, the trauma is still there inside,” he said.
Barabi decided to embark on a journey to understand more about the emotional healing he and his soldiers were in need of. He began to research trauma recovery, reading about the workings of trauma and whether it can be treated, visiting institutions that specialize in trauma and the mind-body connection, and meeting with leaders of hospitals, nonprofits and government bodies both in Israel and abroad.
As he was reaching the point of giving up, Barabi met Shauli Paz, CEO of the Medical Care Rehabilitation Center. He said that speaking with Paz was “the first time someone explained in words what I and my people are feeling.”
“Together, we decided to create a program specifically designed for my crew and others like them,” Barabi said.
Barabi’s team served as the pilot group for the workshop. Since then, over 200 soldiers have completed the workshop across 15 rounds.
“I realized this is what I had been looking for,” Barabi said. “That week was so special because of the intensity and depths we reached. We came out with something different—the ability to be in control, the ability to understand what’s happening in the body and mind and how to deal with it. Both in big ways and in small, everyday ways.”
Aharon Ben Shitrit, 37, places his hand on his chest and closes his eyes. He tries to calm down but struggles. In his normal life, Ben Shitrit is a married father of four from Be’er Sheva who works for municipality. But the past year and half have been anything but normal for him.
Ben Shitrit is a long-time volunteer with ZAKA, Israel’s postdisaster response team. In the first month of the war, he was on the team responsible for evacuating all the bodies from the area surrounding Gaza. He described witnessing extremely difficult scenes.
“Even before October 7, I saw many kinds of deaths, but never anything like this,” Ben Shitrit said. “There are volunteers who have been doing this for 30 years and haven’t been able to recover from it.”
On November 8, 2023, after the difficult period of identifying and evacuating the bodies had ended and the fighting in Gaza began, Ben Shitrit was drafted into the reserves. In total, he has served about 440 reserve days, not including his time with ZAKA. He never felt that he needed treatment until he noticed a change when he returned home.
“I became short-tempered, I became impatient, I became tense,” Ben Shitrit said. “People always said I was a sensitive and patient person, but I felt like I couldn’t focus on anything. Before I could sit for an hour with my child on the rug and play, now I get up after five minutes, I don’t have the energy for it.”
He said that his short-term memory was also affected. “My brain was probably busy suppressing things all the time,” he explained. “After a while, my father, who has also been volunteering with ZAKA for many years, told me that I needed to deal with it.”
During the workshop, he said, he was able to let go of things that he didn’t even know he was carrying.
“Suddenly, screams came out of me that had never come out of me in my life, tears that I never cried before,” he said. “I think you learn things here that every person needs.”
One of the therapists who led the workshop for Ben Shitrit and his group was Michal Shraga Slonim, vice president of the Medical Care Rehabilitation Center.
“Sometimes you need to look at thoughts like clouds,” Shraga Slonim told the group. “They can be light and white, or gray and full of rain, but they are clouds, and they pass. Thoughts are like that too. They are there, they exist, but they pass. We need to learn to observe them and let them pass.”
After one of the soldiers described a date at the movies during which he was constantly scanning the audience for terrorists, Shraga Slonim explained that the soldier was operating based on the fight-or-flight instinct.
“This instinct is not a bad thing,” she said. “On the battlefield, this instinct saved you, and it exists because you are healthy and human. But this thing that serves you in war, in survival mode, can destroy your life. It’s the same mechanism that helps you to disconnect from emotions, even from physical pain, in order to perform all the actions correctly during combat. When you return home, to friends, to work, to your wife, to your children—we don’t necessarily succeed in turning it off. It’s very, very natural.”
This explanation resonated with the soldiers, with many saying they finally understood exactly what was happening inside their bodies and minds.
Shraga Slonim said it was obvious from the returned soldiers’ hypervigilance that their bodies are continuing to release high levels of cortisol and adrenaline. “Some of them can’t sit still, they can’t speak calmly, they can’t listen to instructions all the way through. Their legs shake constantly,” she said. “Then, slowly, you see that something suddenly clears up. Their attention focuses, and their mind becomes calmer.”
She says that the main goal of the workshop is to prevent a post-trauma state, when the fight-or-flight response becomes the operating system in everyday life, before it is ingrained too deeply.
The Ministry of Defense has recently recognized the workshop and allocated a small budget for the center’s treatment.
“Soldiers who come here fill out a questionnaire before and after the workshop, and we see signs of significant improvement,” Shraga Slonim said. “The Ministry of Defense is discovering that the less conventional methods are actually very effective for many people.”
The conventional mental health care system for soldiers and victims of the October 7 attacks is in a state of crisis. In a critical report published by the State Comptroller about the mental health system during the war, it was revealed that the Ministry of Health was unprepared to provide psychological support and did not take sufficient action to address the victims’ needs. The waiting times for local mental health services remain long, with up to a six-month wait for an appointment with a psychiatrist or for therapy.
For now, the Medical Care Rehabilitation Center is funded through philanthropy and the hospital’s own funds, with the help of volunteer therapists. Each workshop costs about 150,000 shekels, or $40,000, to run.
“We always have to think about how to raise more money,” Shraga Slonim said. “More and more groups want it. The wives of reservists, children of reservists, victims of October 7, therapeutic teams, families of hostages and murder victims.”
Shraga Slonim has personally raised about 50,000 shekels, or $14,000, to run a workshop for soldiers’ spouses.
Ben Shitrit said that the workshop provided him with tools he can take with him in the future.
“You learn how to bring yourself to a place of mental and physical calm, how to work with your mind and also how to explain yourself to those around you,” he said. “You learn not to insist on doing it alone. You go home with tools—what to do when you get angry, what to do when you have intrusive thoughts, how to identify symptoms. If I manage to apply what I’ve learned here, I truly believe I’ll be better off, even better than before the war.”
Dan, too, noted feeling a greater sense of balance since completing the workshop. “I have more tools to cope, to look inside myself and know what to do with it,” he said. “It’s not that I’m never angry anymore and don’t have hypervigilance, but I do feel that it happens less. Something in me is more balanced.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Lily Sieradzki.
