Spiritual orientation of the psychological rehabilitation of combatants

Abstract

The paper examines the impact of combat stress on human personality, with a particular focus on identity disintegration. This is considered to be the most significant impact of combat stress, accompanied by the loss of values that generally make up a framework for assessing and interpreting current events. The conventional psychological treatments for personality reconstruction, which appeal to cognitive, emotional, motivational and volitional processes that make up the structure of the psyche, are found to be ineffective in cases where stress exceeds the average psychological resources of a person. Coping with extreme impacts assumes going beyond the familiar life experience accompanied by the reference to the spiritual level resources, among which religiosity is traditional for the mentality. This paper reviews the relationship between religion and psychotherapy, with a focus on the psychotherapeutic factors of religion aimed at combatants’ identity reconstruction.