Ukrainians are meeting the brutal Russian invasion with incredible courage. We can all learn from them.
I came to Ukraine as a doctor and teacher, with 30 years’ experience developing and implementing programs to heal population-wide psychological trauma. But as I have worked in person with children and adults who’ve lived through the war, and in the online Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) training almost 300 Ukrainian physicians and psychotherapists, I’ve become a student, appreciating and learning from the ways the universally traumatized Ukrainian people are meeting the challenges of the devastating Russian invasion — and wondering how these lessons from Ukraine can inform and enhance our own American lives.
First of all, there is courage, which Ukrainians have in abundance. Like their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just about every Ukrainian I meet is rising to and embracing the life-or-death fight against the Russians. Clerks and farmers are learning to use weapons they have never before held, and young people are, at some risk, carrying old ones they hardly know down flights of narrow stairs to basement air raid shelters. Women and children who have taken refuge in Western Ukraine and Poland — 60% of Ukraine’s children are no longer living in their homes — are grieving their separation from husbands and fathers who are fighting, but are steadfast in their commitment to maintaining their men’s single-minded focus on combat.
The heroic war effort has mobilized and is sustained by an extraordinary sense of national unity and connection. The death and destruction of eight years of war in Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region have touched all Ukrainians, and their tears of mourning have watered flowers of generosity in every part of the country. Everyone I meet has a relative or friend or college classmate who has died or been driven from their homes in Crimea or the Donbas. Lviv, a city of 700,000 in the West, where my principal partner, psychiatrist Roman Kechur teaches at the Ukrainian Catholic University, is housing and feeding 300,000 who have fled the fighting in the East and South. For the physicians and psychotherapists doing our trauma healing training, the loss of land 1,300 kilometers away, feels as painful and personal as an “amputation,” a word that many of them use.
When I mention this extraordinary sense of connection and courage to Roman, he shrugs: “We are all Ukrainians.”
This sense of connection is deepened and darkened by the shadows of previous mass murders of Ukrainians, by Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. “Our grandparents who survived hid from the Nazis in the forest,” a psychologist tells me. “Our parents, who never had a proper childhood, lived through Stalin’s terror and passed it all on to us. The trauma is in our DNA,” she goes on, implicitly endorsing recent scientific research I share with them that trauma can create “epigenetic” changes that can be passed on to succeeding generations, including alterations in DNA that inhibit the “expression”–the activity–of genes that help us cope with stress.
In person, and in our ongoing online training and mentorship, my Ukrainian colleagues have welcomed the potential for relieving present suffering and providing perspective on historical trauma offered by the approach that I and my CMBM faculty are teaching them — the various forms of meditation and movement, mental imagery and drawings, and small group sharing of past and present pain.
This hope for healing is matched by my Ukrainian colleagues’ dedication to looking squarely at their present situation and affirming their identity as individuals and Ukrainians. Forced to deal with an avalanche of Russian propaganda that labels them as “insects,” “vermin,” “Nazis,” and “murderers,” and denies their humanity, as well as the existence of their state, they’ve developed an amused skepticism. “The truth is very precious to us,” one psychiatrist explains, an endearing understatement.
This dedication to truth nurtures Ukrainians’ faith in democracy, the animating force of the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, which all tell me was the “true beginning” of Ukrainian independence. Ukrainians of every class and across the political spectrum seem to feel that personal integrity, public truth-telling, and national democracy are inseparable and fundamental. As I spoke with young people and families in Maidan Square, where The Dignity Revolution began, our own 1960s U.S. slogan that “the personal is political” felt like a living, actionable Ukrainian reality.
These Ukrainian virtues of courage and generous connection, their commitment to healing past wounds and embracing present truth, and their faith in and fidelity to democracy, have inspired worldwide admiration and support, and my own.
Tens of thousands of us have come to Ukraine as aid workers, health professionals, and fighters. Tatiana, a U.S. emergency medical technician, told me she finds “fulfillment as a Ukrainian descendant and a person,” in teaching Ukrainian volunteers “tactical first aid.” Martin, a decorated, retired German special forces soldier who trains and fights alongside Ukrainian troops, confided, on a 15-hour bus ride from Lviv to Warsaw, this “war for freedom and democracy” is helping to “wash away the guilt” he feels for having fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as I get ready to return to Ukraine this week to continue to lay the foundation for our trauma healing work, I feel as I did 60 years ago, sitting in a Black southern church, preparing for a civil rights march: I know that the cause is just, and I will be exactly where I need to be.
Across the border in Poland, I’ve been amazed by the hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who have welcomed more than 3 million Ukrainian refugees. In Warsaw’s main train station, I’ve met elderly couples and busy professionals who were inviting families they’d never met to stay in their homes for days, weeks, or months. And in Lublin, a city not far from the Ukrainian border, I spent a morning with Lukasz, a 44-year-old man who, instead of managing the family construction business, has turned his home into a shelter for more than 100 Ukrainian women and children who fear they might never again see their still fighting husbands and fathers. While Ukrainian women scramble eggs in the kitchen behind us, I asked Lukasz what it’s been like to open his house to all these refugees. “This,” he says, “is the most meaningful thing I have ever done.”
Ukraine’s struggle, and the national unity which sustains it, are also inspiring unaccustomed comity and cooperation In the United States. A Congress too divided and dysfunctional to address basic American needs has continued to set aside zero-sum party politics to support Ukraine with high-profile visits from both Republicans and Democrats, and massive humanitarian as well as ongoing and increasing military aid.
When I ask a friend in Congress whether this satisfying moment will nudge other members, and many more of us, to embrace common goals that can sustain and protect our own democracy, he responds, “We can only hope.”
I do hope. Every day, the Ukrainian example reminds me that all of us here in the U.S. — and around the world — need to recognize that we are joined to one another by common needs, aspirations, and humanity, and potentially enriched by learning from and sharing ourselves and what we have with each other.
I hope, too, that the obviously false facts and racist demagoguery that Putin has used to justify genocide will hold up an enlightening mirror up to the false facts, conspiracy theories, and murderous rhetoric that fill our own social media air, will urge us to ask if that is what we really believe, and if its results–genocidal conflict — are what we aspire to?
As I continue to admire and honor Ukrainians and learn the lessons they are teaching, I am looking more deeply into the precious and complex truths of my own life and our national history. I find that I am rededicating myself to the historical American values of freedom and equality, connection, community, and democracy, for which Ukrainians continue to risk their lives.
James S. Gordon MD, a psychiatrist, is the author of Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing and the Founder and CEO of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM). He is a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School, and was the chair (under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush) of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.
