Now there is no life that would not change completely with the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine. But not only our everyday life has changed, but also our emotional reactions. Everything - from fear, anxiety, and anger to guilt and sadness - manifests itself so richly that sometimes it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to cope with these emotions at all. Because if earlier we had certain models of how to behave in each situation, and how to react, now all these models are broken, and in the head, there is complete chaos; every day we see things that should not exist in the civilized world.
Any emotional reaction is a normal response to the abnormal circumstances of war, says psychotherapist Volodymyr Stanchyshyn. We have the right to feel rage, we have the right to want revenge, and we can turn on black-and-white thinking and not feel guilty about it. We can grieve, we can cry as much as we need to. This is a book about the emotions of civilians in the rear: about those who remained in Ukraine and those who were forced to leave their homes, all those who volunteer, donate and wait for their relatives from the front, all those who start their day with the news and wake up to air raid alerts. We did not choose to live in a time of historical change, but war is something that cannot be abstracted from, so our task at the moment is to learn to cope on our personal level, to live in order to win this war.
Volodymyr Stanchyshyn is a psychologist-psychotherapist. Since 2019, he has been the head of the Mental Health Center "Laboratory of Changes".
Author of the books "Walls in My Head. Living with Anxiety and Depression", "It Takes Two for a Relationship" and the podcast "Because Love. War" on Radio Skovoroda.
