PSYCHO-EDUCATION IN THE PSYCHO-REHABILITATION PROCESS OF COMBATANTS OF THE RUSSIAN- UKRAINIAN WAR: THE PSYCHO-EDUCATIONAL MODEL OF THE “MEMORY ARCHIVE”

Abstract

The article presents material that is a synthesis of theoretical understanding and empirical application of psychoeducation during the provision of psychorehabilitation services to participants in the combat operations of the russian-Ukrainian war. Psychoeducation, or psychoeducation, is a separate psychological service, the potential benefit of which is currently beginning to be revealed in the process of working with war trauma. After all, earlier the use of this type of psychological services was not sufficiently represented in psychotherapeutic processes, and in the scientific literature there is a shortage of profile studies on the role of psychoeducation in psychological practice and psychorehabilitation. Psychoeducation in the broadest sense is psychological education, the general purpose of which is to explain and convey to people the necessary information about mental health, psychological problems and their consequences for the individual. The use of psychoeducation is effective when working with post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment disorders, acute stress reaction, etc. It is especially appropriate to use psychoeducational models as integral complexes of preprepared materials that become an effective tool in the psychologist's work, helping to increase the awareness of the recipient of psychological help about the special mechanisms of his inner life and contributing to the stabilization of the psycho-emotional state. The article focuses on informing recipients of services who have a history of intrusions in the form of flashbacks about the roots of this phenomenon, explains the mechanism of occurrence of such a phenomenon as an exciting intrusive episode (flashback). The higher mental function – memory – is considered, information is given about different types of memory, the process of processing memories is analyzed. The complex structure of memory in psychology is usually divided into four main mnemonic processes: memorization; preservation; playback; forgetting. A holistic psycho-educational model called «Archive of Memory» is proposed, which consists of three components: the theory of mental and biological processes; metaphor, which is visualized on the diagram; an example from a real case and is used when working with recipients of psycho-rehabilitation services who complain about the presence of flashbacks. It is noted that a flashback is an episode of a separate story in which a person had to face severe stress from extreme factors that directly threatened life, accompanied by the experience of strong emotions – feelings of own powerlessness and horror, which seemed to «split» from the integral sequence of events, becoming of a kind, «fragment». Such a violation of the integrity of the memory makes it impossible for the mental system to internally process this impressive experience, preventing its transition to the «Memory Archive».