Nina Lytovchenko
PhD (Psychology), assistant professor of the chair of general and practical psychology. Nizhin State University named after Mykola Gogol (Ukraine)
ORCID: 0000-0002-7358-070X
Kateryna Boryshkevych
student of Nizhyn Local Lyceum, Nizhуn State University named after Mykola Gogol (Ukraine)
DOI - https://doi.org/10.52363/dcpp-2023.1.8
Keywords: extreme situation (life condition), traumatic situation, life event, experiences, meaning, meaningful life orientation, narrative, combatant.
Psychological research is aimed at substantiating and describing the personal characteristics of person's experience of extreme life situations. A unifying feature for concepts (life, critical, crisis, emergency, traumatic, extreme situations) is the extraordinary in the life experience of a person. This situation significantly affects a person, causes strong emotional experiences, causes changes in the structure of the personality (primarily in the value-semantic, emotional-volitional spheres of the personality), transforms it, leads to a sharp change in the basic characteristics of life. The influence of an extreme situation occurs in such a way that a person activates experiences as a special internal work to overcome life events or injuries and the need to attract resources to overcome the situation. Subjective experiences are a special form of internal activity aimed at restoring psychological balance, the lost meaningfulness of existence. The specifics of the experience depend on what meanings a person puts into the situations he is experiencing.
As a result of the conducted empirical research and comparison of the features of experiencing extreme situations with the experience of life events, crucial and statistically significant differences were found, related to the combatants' experience of a sense of their mission in this world, the conviction that the experience of difficult events is full of meaning, with a positive assessment of the past life path, satisfaction with what has been achieved and resolved. The research shows that the vast majority of those under study who had to experience extreme situations have valuable experience characterized by the formation of new meanings. Among those under study of the control group, on the contrary, have predominated realistic experiences (worries), during which the individual accepts reality as it is, adapts to it, and refuses the meaning of the life that existed before.