| Dr. Yigal Ben Haim |
| Jul 9, 2007 |
Actually, it was only one year ago. Yes, that cursed summer happened here, in Haifa and the North. There was a war, Katyusha rockets feel every day. Haifa became a ghost town. Refugees fled their homes and returned again. As a therapist, I continued to work “as usual” in the Surgical Department of Rambam Medical Center, but now it was filled with wounded soldiers who looked just like children, like high school students, when their worried families gathered around them. Sometimes, after a Katyusha fell the vicinity of the hospital, the windows rattled and shook violently after the boom but we, the staff members, with all be fear and pressure we felt, would continue treating and working as if on automatic pilot. We did this even though no emergency orders were given, because this is how we’ve been trained; this is the profession we have chosen; when we give to others, we feel of the vitality of life.
All of a sudden I understood the concept “work makes free “or more accurately “work organizes.” Yes, work organized me to get up in the morning and leave my fears and pressures aside. For what is simpler than to run to work, forget and work, work and forget. In the afternoon, I would collapse into my bed at home – how lucky that my wife and children had traveled, or perhaps fled, to her parents in Yugoslavia. When “rain” from Lebanon fell during my disturbed afternoon nap, I would escape to the double walled area near the shower (we don’t have protected room) and then return to the release of sleep for another half hour.
Luckily, I also work in the Rehabilitation Department of the B’nai Zion Medical Center and so I had another place to where I could “escape” every evening, to make the rounds of patients in the department. The wounded soldiers began to arrive for rehabilitation and tell about the difficult experiences, about lack of preparedness and, sometimes, about the bedlam from which they were thrown into the fire, without appropriate equipment and with vague and entirely unattainable goals. They were lucky because their injury, as serious as it was, released them from the on-going nightmare called Lebanon. Now they are here in white beds, gathering up the broken pieces and attempting, with the staff’s help, to continue onward until they are discharged and sent home.
At the end of the shift, at night, I would mount my specially-adapted bicycle on the Dado Beach Promenade (whose name recalls another distant, cursed war) and ride away. What luck that Nasrallah was, for some reason, considerate enough not to fire after nightfall. Riding was just like sleeping, only in reverse: the effort provided release for the body, adrenaline flowed and the mechanism for forgetfulness worked excellently.
In bed at night, sometimes asleep and sometimes not, I could only remember the neglected, battered tank that we received in Be’er Sheva in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, in which we, as young soldiers, were sent into the Egyptian inferno until we were wounded and discharged. What can I do? For 33 years, this leg has been freeing me from all sorts of unwanted difficulties. The soldier-children, through no fault of their own, remind me of forgotten times. Indeed, I have chosen unusual work for myself; as a therapist treating trauma injuries, somehow I am always brought back to myself and my experience. Perhaps this is why chose this nearly impossible but definitely fascinating journey.
Approximately a week before the end of the war, I finally decided that the crazy world here in Haifa could get along without me and I went to visit my wife and children who were already in a safe place. That evening, as I was loading the stubborn, clumsy suitcase into the jeep – our “tank” – suddenly, at approximately six o’clock, a barrage of Katyushas fell from the dark sky, not far from the house. The bastard in Lebanon changed the rules and now he was firing in darkness, too… I was scared to death. Outside, there was a power failure. The darkness of Egypt descended (again I return to Egypt). I ran to the lavatory and then onward, to the airport. Leaving Haifa, the road is blocked. A panicking driver – at just the right moment – rammed into several parked cars and I must find an alternate route. Thoughts ran through my head and troubled me. No denial, repression or logic would help. Guilt pangs overwhelmed me, “Where are you going… or fleeing… abandoning the wounded in the field…”
The news did bring word of death and injury in Wadi Nisnis (the Arab, poor but beautiful section of Haifa). My luggage was already in the jeep. The diesel engine was growling and galloping forward. When I crossed the road to Zichron Yaakov, it was possible to feel the quiet, the silence and see the lights turned on (indeed, it was strange to see, for the first time, an ordinary place that was not at war).
I already reached another place, a land in which “there are no wars…” Calming thoughts came to mind: the hospital will manage without me for a week because – how wonderful – a therapist is not a surgeon.
When I returned from visiting my family in Yugoslavia (Serbia), the cease-fire had already come into effect. The city had returned to its ordinary, Mediterranean bustling. Really good.
On television and radio, the politicians and commentators who had led us into this nightmare are explaining themselves again and again, rolling their eyes and blaming each other. It is interesting how the diagnosis of post-trauma in literature is limited to the field of stress and anxiety disorders. What about the military, diplomatic and political context? It is possible to declare war within a few hours but the private damage can be stress and disability for a generation…
In a hospital, the wounded are being discharged at a surprisingly rapid rate. Young people who are eager to get home or perhaps to travel to India or South America or the devil know where. Even Uri, from the tank corps, whose legs were amputated and with whom I developed a special connection, had already taken his guitar and gone for rehabilitation at Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Slowly, I came to understand that this crazed summer has reached its end, its over… there is no more adrenaline from the therapeutic high. That’s the way it is in life and in therapy. You say goodbye again and go home until the next war.
For me personally, the stopping and returning to routine led to a genuinely depressive, sadness. That’s it. It’s over. Reality. .. How do we go on from here?
In an wholly symbolic manner, inexplicable warning letters began arriving at my home. They were from the National Insurance Institute about some silly debt of NIS 72 (less than $20) from 2004, a debt that doubles itself with fines with every passing day… Yet the letters they send, almost daily, are amazing and even include threats for collection through the bailiff’s office!! Let them take this old television, maybe that would force us to buy a new one, maybe even a plasma. However, the reality is that I am incapable of dealing with anything businesslike and certainly not with an aggressive pest from the National Insurance Institute… Sadness, anger and a desire to forget and blot it all out overwhelms me almost until the beginning of 2007. Ironically, it was the pneumonia that I suffered following a flu attack, including nearly one month in the hospital, that finally released me to take care of myself, get organized and even write this essay. To the point: the writing began after I promised Tali at the Israel Association for Family Care that I would write something about denial and the desire to forget, after the conference for therapists who had worked in the northern region during the war was canceled, for lack of public interest.
So I was recruited to write or, more accurately, to ask what actually happened to us here during that crazed summer. What is the stubborn desire not to go into it, not to talk, not to hear, to forget, to deny and to repress? “Yuck’” it just didn’t happen, until next summer.
Here is important to make clear that I am referring to a type of personal, internal understanding and closure; not to operational-business conclusions of which the have been more than enough by the municipality, Rambam and many other places. My question is what happens to the “rescuer,” the therapist and, particularly, to the person within me who became an internal and external refugee for nearly six months?
The internal message was, “Get on with it, stop whining, turn the page, deal with it, you’re a big boy now.” It is interesting to note that more six months later, there was a work meeting with an expert in trauma therapy and it was difficult to stop many of the participants from speaking endlessly about their experiences during the hallucinatory summer we experienced. So, perhaps it is worthwhile to be stubborn about speaking up and telling personal stories, despite the difficulties. Sometimes, we even tell our patients, “Yes, it’s difficult but let us look at it together and consider what happened, but this time in a empathetic, possible and safer place.”
Dr. Yigal Ben Haim is a psychologist and family therapist
