PARIS: Long-term hostages typically take years to recover from feelings of helplessness and isolation, say experts, after two women were released by Marxist rebels following prolonged captivity.

Clara Rojas and former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo, kidnapped in 2002 and 2001, landed in Caracas aboard a private jet on Thursday hours after Venezuelan helicopters plucked them from a secret location deep in the Colombian jungle.

Their joy was evident, written on their faces and expressed in words.

“This is like living again,” said Gonzalez during a tearful embrace with her daughters on the tarmac. “Sometimes I think it's a dream.” But previous experience shows that this initial euphoria could easily give way to darker, more somber moods, experts say.

“We tend to think that the victim has been fortunate to walk away from the incident alive, but the emotional consequences of hostage-taking are substantial,” said Ellen Giebels, a psychologist who has written extensively on the hostage experience.

More than a third of all hostage victims suffer symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, including anxiety, panic attacks and survival guilt, said Giebels, who has also studied the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the rebel group that kidnapped the women and holds an estimated 750 other kidnap victims.

“After six years, it is no longer a hostage situation, it is imprisonment,” commented Patrice Louville, a psychiatrist at the Cochin hospital in Paris.

“Even if they are relieved to have been liberated, depression is likely to follow very quickly.”

All survivors of hostage situations react somewhat differently, experts caution, and it is impossible to say how Gonzalez or Rojas will adjust to their newfound freedom.

But captives held over long periods tend to pass through several psychological stages, studies based on interviews with hostages have shown.

After a brief period of denial — described by one expert as the “why me?” phase — hostages instinctively focus their energies on coping with and adapting to their situation.

They may keep a diary, make detailed plans for their post-hostage future, or gather scraps of information about their situation.

At some point, driven by intense feelings of isolation and uncertainty about their fate, they are likely to cross a psychological boundary and develop a relationship — sometimes intimate — with their captors.

In the case of Rojas, that intimacy extended to having a child in 2004 fathered by a FARC guerilla fighter, though the circumstances of their union remain unknown.

Rojas found out her son — who was taken from her when eight months old — was alive and in government care only on Dec 31, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said he was not in rebel hands.

“One could ask whether this is a symptom of the Stockholm syndrome,” a situation in which a hostage forms a strong emotional bond with his or her captors, said Giebels.

“But a 'syndrome' makes it sound like there is something wrong with you. In fact, it is quite normal to develop friendships, or quasi-friendships.”

In interviews with dozens of hostage victims, many had expressed sympathy with the circumstances and causes of their captors, she added, noting: “That way of seeing the situation also helps them cope.”

Both Rojas and Gonzalez embraced their FARC guerilla escorts before climbing into the helicopters waiting to spirit them away.

Liberty will feel strange, predicted Louville, saying: “They will need time to get used to daily life” outside of captivity.

Just how long depends not just on the two women but the support they get from family and friends, he said.

Other factors are important too. In the case of Rojas, the fact that she spent eight months with her son before separation is important, said Nicole Garret-Gloanec, a pediatric psychiatrist and president of the French Psychiatric Information Society.“It is the length of time during which the child formed a bond with his mother, and the quality of that bond, that count,” she said.

There are two other critical conditions that could pave the way for a smoother transition to normalcy, said Giebels.

If the two women were even remotely aware of the possibility — at the time of their kidnapping — that they were at risk, it should have helped them live through the experience. Given their link to politics, they probably were.

The other is the apparent lack of torture or physical abuse.

“FARC is not known for abusing their hostages,” said Giebels. “To the extent that hostages are not subjected to violence, it is often easier to recover.”—AFP