Two Season 1 guests addressed post-traumatic stress directly — Emad Badi (EP 4) from an analytical perspective and Osama Alfitory (EP 10) from lived experience. Together their accounts form one of Damiri's most important through-lines.
Emad Badi argued that PTSD in Libya is not individual but societal. Years of civil conflict have distorted the collective moral compass. He introduced the term "selective empathy": people condemn violence against their side while being willing to inflict the same on others. This, he said, erodes any shared national identity.
He observed that Libyan friends who moved to London developed symptoms — claustrophobia on the Underground, panic attacks — only after reaching safety. Trauma suppressed inside Libya surfaced when the environment permitted it. Some sought therapy in London. Badi himself acknowledged he may have suppressed memories he has not yet unpacked.
Osama Alfitory described what PTSD looks like from inside. In 2015, living alone in Amman, he began dreaming every night of the same person — a decomposed body in a military jacket he had photographed during the revolution. He had not consciously remembered the photo. One day he opened an old hard drive and found it: the exact image from his dreams. His mind had filed it away; four years later it returned in high-definition clarity, with tactile sensation. He woke crying.
He sought therapy and continued by Skype. His therapist told him: some World War II veterans experienced the same thing after 30 or 40 years. Those it comes to early, she said, are the lucky ones.
Both guests identified the same barrier to treatment. In Libyan and broader Arab culture, trauma symptoms are commonly attributed to supernatural causes — jinn, sorcery, spiritual weakness — rather than recognised as a medical condition. Alfitory was blunt: telling someone to pray and read Quran instead of seeking professional help compounds their suffering. He referenced Anthony Bourdain as evidence that even people whose lives appear enviable can be destroyed internally.
Alfitory described how sustained exposure to conflict rewires the sense of what is normal. When asked how he felt seeing Gaddafi's body, his answer was: "I was used to corpses by then." This numbness — functional during conflict — becomes the problem afterwards.