Mention of the balls that helped children

 

The war has brought us to a point, so that with a new, rather painful letter, we can walk along the path of loss and despair, change and constant perception of the impossible, mourning the past and gaining new experience.

So, child psychologists faced the question of what methods of reflective art therapy should be offered to children in bomb shelters during the alarms and the cold winter of 2022. When we had no idea what to do next, and whether there would be “next” at all, but, of course, the children needed to be given hope.

And more than a year later, I want to remember the experience of our balls, which we wound from old sweaters. The psychologist disbanded them in bomb shelters and gave them to children during alarms in Nikolaev. Or children who were sitting in the basements of a school in the Kiev region, without going out into the fresh air for almost 3 weeks, wound themselves whole bunches of threads, which the psychologist looked for friends at home and tried to bring between blows for work. Or, during times of anxiety, I wound balls to the psychologists of volunteer centers in order to send another package with what they could find in the more or less safe city of Rivne.
We spun… spun with kids and adults… old and new… both day and night.
As one girl said: “I wind this thread like my tears, which I can no longer cry, because I have no strength.” I’m writing this so I don’t forget.

Either a means or a technique in art therapy, we will still explore, discuss with colleagues, look for the right methodology, because this is the path of science. But it must be said for sure now: “Our balls of strength, courage, endurance, joy, faith, recovery were very helpful to us then.”

They were small and large, of the same color and in combination with different threads, which were assigned a certain meaning or emotional load – and it became easier.

They were worn on the body and clothes, and they became a truly symbolic object of attachment to life. There was something original, unconscious in this, about us and the umbilical cord of life, which kept our consciousness in the construct of reality, the mechanisms of self-preservation were turned on.
Such a stereotyped act of exhausting seemed to pump us into the dangers and horrors of war, was a symbolic reference to an act consciously performed as an act of a motivated choice to do something for change when there was no real change possible. We did it symbolically.

I remember how our children wound 9-12 balls, giving each one a special meaning for survival, and then gave it to their loved ones as a particle of faith, who coped with anxieties and made this symbolic mini-art object, giving it the power of survival.
This should be remembered and kept in the arsenal of a crisis psychologist along with breathing and bodily exercises.

And what fairy tales the children wrote about these balls, what strange meanings they were given in order to withstand the impossible. This is already our historical past of integrative crisis art therapy.

Do you remember, colleagues?
@Victoria Nazarevich