From Group Therapy to Social Cohesion
This project was funded by the British Embassy in Kyiv in 2023-4 and aims to spread knowledge of various therapies and how they can help reduce stress among victims of war. It is now in its final stages, with participating community-based organisation reflecting on their experiences and considering how to follow up and to spread more widely what they have learned through the project. The main collaborative event was a workshop in the Carpathian mountains (details here).
One of the participating partner organisations has sent us some reflections on their own experience:
“The workshop in the Carpathians was very useful for us – it was the first one we had attended where we didn’t have to be up early organising it all but could instead enjoy socialising, switch off from the usual demands and enjoy pleasant impressions from around us. Having the chance to be away from the daily pressure enabled us to understand better the constant stress we had been under.
«Having the chance to be away from the daily pressure enabled us to understand better the constant stress we had been under.»One of the main things we taught our staff was how to look after their own mental health while working intensively with people who have suffered.
We learned about the ways that other organisations work and understood better that they were facing similar difficulties to us, so we shared how we coped with these things. On our return we realised how important it is to give our colleagues the chance to escape to a safe place where you can relax properly and not always be interrupted by sirens blaring – people are now taking this in their stride, no longer running to safe places underground, but it still affects us all.
The training we had during the first stage of the project enabled us to raise the level of tolerance of stress amongst our staff members who directly provide psycho-social support services for women and children affected by the war. One of the main things we taught our staff was how to look after their own mental health while working intensively with people who have suffered. Thirty-two members of staff benefited, most of them members of mobile teams helping hundreds of people in rural areas across southwestern Ukraine. Our main target group are families of displaced persons forced to leave their homes in conflict zones. Due to poor rural infrastructure people in villages do not have access to psychological support. The mobile teams use the knowledge and skills they received as part of this project training, helping specialists to use games to understand how clients are feeling as well as understanding their behaviour, gestures and facial expressions.
One of the main things we taught our staff was how to look after their own mental health while working intensively with people who have suffered.
By learning more about maintaining mental well-being ourselves we plan to extend this as fully as possible with new colleagues, particularly those in a formerly occupied region where the battles have been hardest fought. Our team members there go to bombed towns and villages and give support to those who have witnessed such events but were not so badly injured they were taken to hospital. We have already launched three more mobile emergency response and provision teams for children and their parents, and we will evacuate young families if necessary.
Overall, we have improved the psychological welfare of our staff, their ability to deal with stress, and their stamina to continue work in a difficult situation. We were also able to improve the delegation of authority and division of responsibilities within the organisation, as staff members discovered organisational skills that surprised even themselves. One of our social workers has become the coordinator of our region and has increased the effectiveness of the mobile teams in that area by 40%.
Seeing new strengths in members of staff we are keen to help them develop these further and give them opportunities to develop their careers. We have noticed that giving our staff the chance to be creative at work has a positive effect on their psychological well-being and enhances their commitment to our charity.
One of our successes is a psychologist with our mobile brigades, whom we supported to apply for and win the post of programme coordinator for our region in a major psychological wellbeing programme. In addition, she has been appointed an adviser to the regional governor on psychological wellbeing. We have all felt part of her achievement! These days we are so used to sharing stories of woe that we have forgotten how important it is to feel proud of the success of others.
Whilst we have been working, the number of vulnerable groups has been increasing, particularly one new group: the mothers, wives and children of those killed in the war, taken prisoner or lost without trace. This is a challenge for our team. With each month the number of requests grows for support from widows or wives of prisoners of war or wives whose husbands have been wounded (mentally and physically) and have returned home almost as strangers unable to get back into civilian life.
the number of vulnerable groups has been increasing, particularly one new group: the mothers, wives and children of those killed in the war, taken prisoner or lost without trace. This is a challenge for our team.
We understand that working with these groups requires specific skills and a high level of resilience. There are so many nuances that you have to consider when planning group therapy with different groups of beneficiaries. For example, we are sure that it is not a good idea to include in one group IDPs together with widows whose husbands died in the area where the IDPs came from.
In addition, many women are embarrassed to see a psychologist and say “how can a psychologist help me with my problems, they aren’t going to bring my husband back to me!” We are sure that we need to conduct some informal work amongst the population in general to make it more acceptable to see a psychologist. So we plan a project called “Mental Brunch” – informal meetings with psychologists, life coaches and art therapists in a café over a cup of coffee where the specialists will talk about their work to help people preserve their mental health and stabilise their emotional welfare. These meetings will be held three times a week with groups of no more than six people. We aim to reach out to hundreds of women as well as to colleagues in other organisations who are also in need of psychological support.
The café have offered us use of their premises for these sessions free of charge as their owners have themselves suffered as a consequence of the war and understand how important it is to get help for the future of these women. We also have the support of the regional mental health centre, the regional coordinator of the programme «ТИ ЯК?» initiated by the wife of President Zelensky, local bloggers and local influencers.
The year ahead will be a difficult one and we are already planning a series of team-building events using methodologies we have learnt and tried out throughout this project. One of our new ways of working is to have joint brain-storming sessions, which are so useful and quite entertaining. Our team consists of a wide range of men and women of different nationalities and educational levels… and during these sessions we joke a lot and suggest creative approaches which in the end bring us to interesting results.”
The BEARR Trust is now looking into ways of continuing or broadening the work of this very successful project.
