By: James S. Gordon, MD

My third trip, longer than the first two, will take me to Odesa, as well as Lviv and Kyiv, as I do workshops for the highly stressed psychotherapists, physicians, educators, and community volunteers who are meeting urgent needs. As I move from place to place, I issue invitations to participate in the population-wide trauma healing training for which I’m laying the foundation.

Lviv first.

In the midst of air raids, I lead a workshop for a group of 20 “railway station psychologists.” All of them have day jobs, and they volunteer for 24 hours a week at the Lviv train station, meeting through the night, as well as during the day, with children and families as, fleeing from the Russian-occupied East of Ukraine, they descend from the trains.

These psychologists, fiercely committed but understandably weary, combine meditation and self-expression with a deep and growing understanding of the importance of connection for themselves, as well as those receiving their care. As I describe our CMBM program, they recognize their kinship with us, and tell me they look forward to participating in our trainings.

Listening to the railway station psychologists tell me about some of the displaced people to whom they have briefly attended, I’m once again struck by the healing power of small doses of care and hope. In Lviv, and throughout this trip, my mind wanders back to a poem of William Blake’s:

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wild flower;

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour

The next two pictures were taken at the CGI Annual Meeting in New York in September 2022, where CGI staff facilitated an introduction to someone I hadn’t seen in several years.

The old acquaintance, whom I was so happy to see again, is Petra Nemcova, a former Czech supermodel, who, having survived the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, has devoted herself, via All Hands and Hearts, the nonprofit she co-founded, to healing trauma and rebuilding education in communities devastated by climate change and war. You can see Petra and me happy to be reunited.

Petra, in turn, introduced me to Mykola Kuleba, the Founder and CEO of Save Ukraine Rescue Network, an extraordinary organization which, since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014, has brought 100,000 of the most vulnerable civilians out of the combat zones in which their homes were destroyed and their lives threatened.

When, a month later, I go to Ukraine, Mykola, who is sitting with me here, hosts me in Kyiv, and we explore how CMBM can best serve the internally displaced people for whom he and his staff and volunteers are caring in shelters and social service programs across the country.

More on Mykola and Save Ukraine, and who I met, and what I learned and did, in the entries to follow.

By: James S. Gordon, MD

Though 7-year-old Oleksandr was in Lviv, on his way with his family from intense fighting in the eastern city of Pavlograd to safety in Poland, he gave the central place in his drawing to the grave of a murdered cousin. His mother told me he is “normal” during the day, but screams in his sleep.

His 13-year-old sister, Anastasia, dreams about and draws herself leveled by a Russian bomb that destroyed the train station near her Pavlograd home. 

In the CNN clip below, after you see me work with Sofia and Angelina from Irpin, whom I’ve written about in previous blogs, you’ll have a chance to meet Oleksandr, Anastasia, and their family, and to see Anastasia’s drawing.

“Children’s bleak drawings show extent of trauma on Ukrainian civilians”

CNN Newsroom | May 24, 2022

Watch the video on CNN.com. (Link opens in new tab.)

By: James S. Gordon, MD

Eight-year-old Sofia, whose picture I shared with you yesterday, sits beside me in July, in a park in Irpin, next door to Bucha, in a now placid neighborhood where earlier in 2022, Russian soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians.

I’ve asked Sofia what the war was like for her before she and her family, like so many families in Irpin and Bucha, fled.

“Terrible,” she says, making a small, sour face. Then, as I wait for more, she repeats it, “Terrible.”

I want to know more, and I know, as a psychiatrist who has worked with children during and after wars for 30 years, that words about terrifying experiences don’t come easily. “Would you draw ‘terrible’ for me?” I ask, sharing a piece of paper and crayons.

Sofia bends to the task. She draws a small, child-size body, eyes closed, covered in the red of blood, lying on the ground. Next, a vertical figure standing over the body, holding an automatic weapon. “This,” she tells me, “is the Russian soldier who killed the girl.” Behind him rises a third figure, a Ukrainian soldier, who, she says, with some satisfaction, shoots the Russian.

We sit together silently, contemplating the murder and revenge Sofia has summoned up. It’s a lovely day, with chestnut blossoms filling the limbs of tall trees, perfuming the air.

Sofia picks up another crayon, draws a plane flying low above the figures. Suddenly, she scribbles a burst of red on the Russian soldier. “Now, I believe he’s really dead,” she says in a voice that is as uncertain as it is hopeful. 

Sofia’s drawing haunts me as I listen to other children. They have heard that Russian soldiers have killed children, and, like Sofia, they fear that nothing, not even brave Ukrainian soldiers, will permanently remove this alien menace.

In a park in Irpin, a suburb next door to Bucha, where Russian soldiers terrorized the population, murdering and raping civilians in the early weeks of their 2022 invasion. Here are 7-year-old Sofia and her 10-year-old brother. They hid out with their parents for weeks, and then fled. Now, months later, they’ve returned, among the first children to do so, and are picking up the pieces of their lives.

Here is 19-year-old Angelina. She’s showing me the place where she slept, in the basement of her partially destroyed home in Irpin, where she and her family hid during the entire Russian occupation. I taught her Soft Belly Breathing and Shaking and Dancing, and her father, a long-haul truck driver, and his next door neighbor, joined in. Angelina is now sharing her wartime experience and what she learned from me in a hotline for young people in the Eastern part of Ukraine, who are still living under Russian occupation. 

A grace note about Angelina’s coping capacity, resilience, and sense of humor: the pennants above her bed are those of favorite football teams that, during the Russian occupation, she could only follow in her imagination.

Here are a few of the several million children who have fled, most often with their mothers, from Ukraine. These kids are living in a shelter for 100 women and children in Lublin, Poland, run by a man who left his construction business to embrace what he describes as, “the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.” The kids are safe and well cared for by devoted mothers, but they cry at night for fathers fighting on the front lines of Ukraine, and often enough, wet the beds in their sleep.

By: James S. Gordon, MD

On this chilly April morning, psychiatrist Roman Kechur brought together 20 leaders of major Ukrainian groups of psychiatrists and psychotherapists to learn about CMBM’s work, strategize about how we can bring the work to Ukraine, and, of course, practice Soft Belly Breathing.

Later in the day, Roman’s colleague, psychologist Khrystja Turetska, took me to the school she had attended as a child, which has now been repurposed as a shelter for 60 people who had fled their homes in communities on the front lines of fighting. 

The man pictured in the blue sweatshirt (with his son and mother) is from the devastated city of Kharkiv and is one of the people we talked with at the shelter. He loved the Shaking and Dancing I did with him, and saw it as an ideal way to relieve the anxiety that has disabled him since his home was bombed. 

We also met a mother of two from Kyiv who told me that her 7 year old son was “angry all the time”. Trying to “calm him down” has not worked. She immediately, intuitively appreciated my suggestion to get him to hit a punching bag, nodding vigorously when I said he had to get the anger out before he could calm down.

Finally, we talked with a young man from the destroyed city of Mariupol. An artist and photographer, he wanted me to explain “how human beings could do” what he saw the Russian soldiers do to Ukrainian civilians. I tell him what I can about the way Putin and his circle have dehumanized Ukrainians, accused them of being “Nazis” and “vermin,” and relentlessly propagandized against them. It is a good talk and, as you can see in the last photo, although we remain confounded by the horrible, gratuitous cruelty exhibited by the Russians, we are glad for these moments of sharing. 

By: James S. Gordon, MD

Before I tell you about the Ternopil training, I’d like to tell you how we got here. 

I knew, from February 24, 2022, the first day of the Russian invasion, that I and The Center for Mind-Body Medicine had to be in Ukraine. It felt, to me, a bit like the Spanish Civil War, a pivotal moment, a struggle for freedom and democracy in the face of brutal aggression by an authoritarian government.

I knew, of course, that my colleagues and I could only play a small role, but that it could be an important one, bringing to the Ukrainians trauma healing tools and support that could help them deal with the terror they had experienced and the threats they were facing: first, teaching community leaders to use our program of self care and mutual help for themselves, and then teaching them to use what they’d learned, what had helped them, with all those whom they serve.

This is what we’d done in Kosovo, during and after the 1998-1999 war, what we have continued to do in Israel and Gaza for 20 years, in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, a model we’ve used with war traumatized veterans in the U.S., with communities that have been terrorized by mass shootings, overwhelmed by climate-related disasters, and demoralized and devastated by the historical trauma that indigenous people have suffered. 

Ukraine was, of course, far larger–45 million people–than any of the overseas communities in which we’d previously worked, but it felt important to do whatever we could. 

The picture above is of my first meeting in Ukraine, 15 minutes after I arrived at my hotel in Lviv. The man is Roman Kechur, and the woman is Roksolana. 

All I knew before I met him was that Roman was a physician, and that he was the only contact I had in Ukraine. It turned out, in one of those happy coincidences that we call synchronicity, that he was exactly the person I needed to meet: one of the leading, most respected psychiatrists in Ukraine, the chair of the department of psychology at Ukrainian Catholic University, the head of four major psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and psychotherapeutic organizations, and a wonderfully open-minded, brilliant, and welcoming human being. Roksolana, Roman’s interpreter, made it possible for us to explore so many possibilities for collaboration, for Roman to understand our program, and to plan to introduce me to exactly the people I needed to meet.

You will undoubtedly notice that Roman and Roksolana and everything behind them is red. That’s because within minutes after I arrived at my hotel, the air raid sirens went off, and we needed to adjourn to the basement bomb shelter. 

By: James S. Gordon, MD

Here are some of the 138 physicians, psychotherapists, educators, and leaders of women’s groups who participated in The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM)’s 9-day intensive trauma healing training in Ternopil (July 2023). Every one of these women and men, who are deeply committed to helping others, has been traumatized by the atrocities perpetrated against family members, friends, patients, and students, as well as by what they, themselves, have suffered.

Here, they are practicing slow, deep, Soft Belly Breathing, an antidote to the fight-or-flight and stress responses–the anxiety and agitation, the difficulty concentrating and fear for the future–with which so many of them have to contend. 

I’m breathing slowly and deeply with the participants, so relieved that Pact, our funding and implementing partner has brought us all together, already impressed by the commitment of the people who’ve come, and so curious about what will unfold in these next nine days.