It has now been almost a year since Putin and his government invaded Ukraine. We are once again experiencing, with all its horror, a war in Europe, just as we were beginning to emerge from a global pandemic.
Since the Second World War, in Europe we have lived, having built a safe, stable and prosperous world A world in which human well-being and care for the environment are fundamental values. To a large extent, first the pandemic and then the invasion of Ukraine have broken this mirage.
This new reality full of uncertainty in the face of so much unpredictable horror It reaches our psychology consultations. Most of the time implicitly.
The general anxiety with which many people come to our consultations, in part, has its origins in these events.
It is not something that belongs only to the people who visit us, it is something that impacts each of us. And that, somehow, transcends us all is part of the environment in which we currently live.
Examples of how we experience uncertainty
Some examples of how uncertainty and war are present are the following for me:
Anabel arrives at the consultation without knowing how to define what is happening to her, what made you come to my space. We are reviewing the different areas of his life and in all of them, although there are aspects that may be more satisfactory, there are no clear themes to start working on. She speaks of a general feeling of restlessness and impending disaster. Throughout the sessions we explain the aspects of her life that provide her with a feeling of stability, most of them, and we explore what it is like for her to be in a world that she feels clearly unstable for the first time in her life.
Pedro has a company that he has created after years of work in his sector. The company is doing well. However, the feeling of anguish and that something horrible is going to happen and your company is going to go bankrupt is permanent He comes to the consultation with the fear that the anxiety he feels about the operation of the company will cause, for example, a heart attack. The reality of your company is that it is highly unlikely to go bankrupt and the reality of the broader socio-historical context is that everything can change from one moment to the next. It is that broader context, in fact, that is marking Pedro’s anguish and anxiety.
For as long as she can remember, Esther you have needed to plan and organize what happens in your life Until recently he had managed to combine these aspects of his way of being in the world with leading a life that he found relatively satisfactory. However, her catastrophic thoughts have taken over recently. Her social relationships are almost non-existent and leaving the house is a task that she cannot perform. We meet through the internet, we explore the scary situations he suffers from and little by little we find possible meanings for each of them.
Coping with the lack of information
A phrase from the founding book of Gestalt Therapy (Gestalt Therapy: Arousal and growth of human personality, by FS Perls; R. F. Hefferline; and P. Goodman) makes a lot of sense in this context: success comes by hitting the target of reality.
When as psychotherapists we can see the suffering that each person brings to us as something that, in some way, is also affecting us personally, we can perceive that person better and accompany them with greater honesty and sensitivity
This way of accompanying is for me a way to create much-needed certainty for ourselves and others: I am and I will continue to be here with you. And, beyond that, it is one of my ways of fighting for peace. I create peace when I convey to others that as human beings we are going to find each other and separate ourselves at the same time that we will take each other into account.
The key questions
How do you deal with uncertainty?
What is your way of creating peace?
How do you feel the invasion of Ukraine is impacting your life?
The examples given in this article do not correspond to real people, although they do faithfully reflect situations that occurred in therapy sessions.
