All art therapists of Ukraine are writing together a textbook for survival in the war

Why is that? Several arguments come to mind.

1. The reason for the fear and anxiety that we have not yet experienced is our imagination, which forms all possible and impossible catastrophes in the brain. Depicting this tension allows you to evaluate it as an existing reality.

2. Catastrophic thinking makes us even more helpless in a situation of uncertainty. But when we pick up a pencil and draw lines on paper, we kind of return the existing moment and the image becomes real. This makes it possible to protect your brain from imaginary horrors.

3. The sheer amount of pain and destruction around brings many to uncertainty about decisions and options. But constant art therapy training, for example: “Draw something strange, something fantastic” trains our brain to look for options not previously defined and not identified by our consciousness.

4. A constant desire for control and certainty is necessary for survival, but in art therapy we allow spontaneity and randomness, gradually accepting a strange pattern and trying to explain it to ourselves. This practice becomes very necessary when we are in a situation of lack of control.

5. The ability to choose in the creative process the simplest aspects outlined on the sheet develops the necessary creative decision-making skills, which provide the ability to quickly and creatively navigate and find unpredictable solutions in a crisis situation.

6. Art therapy is filled with a strong energy potential of the living room, and this is mainly about the future, such constant and systematic skills of art therapy regulation allow you to remove excessive destructive stress and activate the mechanisms of internal balance and awareness.

7. By introducing, for example, a systematic creative process with children, we organize the internal chaos associated with the situation of war, and therefore form the opportunity to plan further actions to create a new reality.

These are small thoughts that further strengthened my unshakable belief that art therapy is a wonderful direction in the most difficult periods in the life of mankind!

We create and fight!

Ukraine is a special country in the world, choosing creativity as a weapon, medicine, strength and hope for a better future.

Understanding that there are laws of the universe and they are balanced in the highest harmony of balance, we remember: “If it is very hard and painful for us now, we can definitely believe that it will not always be like this!”.

@Victoria Nazarevich 2022. Art therapy in war