A comprehensive approach to overcoming the consequences of severe psychological traumatization of adults

Abstract

This article presents the experience of the art-psychotherapeutic rehabilitation project of ATO veterans, former prisoners who were held captive in the territory of the so-called “Donetsk People's Republic” (DPR) and “Luhansk People's Republic” (LPR), as well as their family members. The theoretical and methodological foundations of psychotherapy of mental trauma in the dimensions of various psychotherapeutic directions are highlighted. On the basis of this, the authors developed a conceptual and organizational structure of a holistic project built on the methodology of the psychodynamic paradigm in its combination with art therapy. The task of studying the regularities of the psychotherapeutic process in the created and researched space was realized, the difficulties of the psychotherapeutic process and strategies for overcoming them were analyzed. The experience of the implementation of the project shows that the psychological regularities of individual and group unconscious functioning steadily trigger the process, as a result of which the entire project, together with all its participants, eventually begins to function as a single large psychotherapeutic group. Therefore, ensuring the quality of psychotherapeutic assistance in this format is impossible without regular supervision, which allows psychotherapists to make sense of their experience, ecologically live its traumatic components, stay within the limits of a professional position, namely patient, benevolent and empathic support of the healing process. The authors showed that in such projects, a conscious, planned, controlled departure of psychotherapists from a strict psychoanalytic setting, which is characterized by benevolent neutrality, calm emotional involvement and strict adherence to the framework, towards greater support, emotional transparency, and flexibility of psychotherapists in maintaining the framework conditions is appropriate. The obtained results require further understanding, but are already a serious empirical basis for the development of psychodynamic psychotherapy of trauma and the understanding of group social processes of a society involved in war and forced to restore its balance.