Jack Laurence

Nigel and Amanda are now stuck in a foreign country, being held hostage by a group that says if they don't get their money within 24 hours, they will be dead.

The reality of their situation hits home even harder later that evening.

How was it in the news so quickly?

Obviously, you're now sitting there not only with the fear of, you know, becoming one of these videos and death, but I'm assuming quite a bit of guilt.

So the deadline comes and goes, and of course no money is handed over.

However, Adam from the group comes back to Nigel to inform him that he's spoken with Nigel's sister, and that the money was going to take some time to organise.

So they're planning on moving them to a more permanent location, one they said was more comfortable.

They say that the most stressful part of kidnapping is simply the unknown.

Not knowing what will happen to you, where you might be moved to, what the kidnappers might do to you in the form of violence and torture, if they will let you go home at all.

Nigel says their situation had an extra element of the unknown, and that was the personalities of the men who had taken them.

Well, Nigel, it actually wasn't a stupid idea at all.

You see, what Nigel was doing, deliberately, consciously, strategically, was something that hostage psychologists and crisis negotiators have studied for decades.

And the evidence suggests he was absolutely right to do it.

The instinct to humanise yourself to the person holding you captive is not weakness, it's not naivety.

It's one of the most intelligent survival strategies a hostage can employ.

Research on civilian abductees has found that those who sought to build reciprocal relationships with their captors through conversation, acts of care, finding common ground, did so as a deliberate strategy to reduce the harshness of their captivity.

The logic is straightforward.

It is significantly harder to hurt someone you know, harder to execute someone whose children's names you know, whose dreams you've heard, whose faces have become familiar rather than foreign.

By asking questions about their lives, families, ambitions, Nigel was not making friends.

He was making himself a person, not a commodity, not a paycheck, a human being.