The Russian-Ukrainian war conflict has led to copious migration of Ukrainian women and children to other European countries since February 2022, highlighted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as the fastest and one of the most substantial since World War II (UNHCR, 2022).
Aware that most psychological research on the conditions of Ukrainian refugees has focused primarily on the detection of more strictly psychopathological and individual issues, such as depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Timmer et al., 2023), we chose with the present work to focus on psychological dimensions of equally profound but less explored impact. In particular, it has been observed how, following compulsory military conscription in Ukraine, there has been a redefinition of family ties in the direction of forced mono-parenting for a very high number of households. Most Ukrainian refugee persons in Italy, in fact, have been mothers with their own children. The issue of parenting and its changes and challenges, as well as the representation of it that mothers themselves construct, involves identity dimensions and resources at a deep and structural level, thus strongly affecting mental health (Jolof et al., 2022).
Thus, an attempt was made to explore the experience of some groups of Ukrainian mothers with respect to their own parenting in a phase of painful change and readjustment, with the aim in perspective of building, thanks to a greater understanding achieved, more effective parenting support.
The use of qualitative methodology enabled the researchers to work from an action-research perspective, aimed at activating processes of reconstructing the experience of validating one’s subjectivity (the personal search for meanings) and the experience of agency for the women involved. Data collection took place through several focus groups conducted by Ukrainian female mediators held during several summer camps conducted by the D.O.C. Cooperative in the summer of 2022. Subsequently, analysis of the interview transcripts, translated into Italian, was conducted. The method used for reviewing and interpreting the material, grounded theory, made it possible to limit theoretical pre-conceptions and identify the main themes (core categories) that would best highlight the mothers’ experiences.
The satisfactory saturation point for researchers’ agreement on reliable results was expressed in the following core categories:
Self-representation
Time suspended: lack of narrative
Social networks and affectivity
Parental identity
Each core category has a number of sub-themes, which better highlight specific aspects that emerged from the women’s shares.
In summary, parenting is narrated as “suspended”: the many changes being faced, fraught with great uncertainty, constitute impediments to a full and rich evolution, and make women feel “trapped” between a now lost and idealized past, a traumatic present, and a future that is difficult to imagine. The research findings showed that one feels that one is in a phase of invasion and destruction in psychic terms as well. The representation of the role of mother is overburdened, pervaded by feelings of loneliness and fragility, accompanied by the fear that one’s anguish will infect one’s children. There emerges a strong anger at what has been violently interrupted and torn away, alternating with a sense of failure and guilt in feeling that she cannot meet expectations with respect to strength and adaptability. A sense of confusion and difficulty in perceiving the relationship space with their children as safe are interpretable as the result of dimensions of trauma and dissociation.
Nevertheless, aspects of resilience are also found in the interviews, related to the possibility of regaining generative value in the relationship with the other through the reinterpretation in a positive sense of the change itself, a resource that could reflect favorably in the relationship with the children.
Key words: parenting, trauma, dissociation, adulthood, war
DOI: doi.org/10.36131/psichpsicoterapia240403