In the Silence After Shelling: A Psychologist's Witness to War

A soldier told me he couldn't cry because crying meant the enemy had won.

She trained for years to help people process grief, anxiety, and loss. Nothing prepared her for the moment a seven-year-old drew pictures of tanks instead of dinosaurs, or when a soldier couldn't remember his own name because trauma had fractured it beyond recognition. This is the raw, unflinching memoir of a British/European psychologist who left the safety of her London practice to work with displaced persons, shell-shocked soldiers, and traumatized families in war-torn Ukraine. Through intimate case studies (with identifying details changed), she documents what psychological warfare actually looks like: the hypervigilance that never switches off, the dissociation that makes survival possible, the moral injuries that therapy alone cannot heal, and the particular devastation of witnessing children lose their childhoods to violence. But this memoir is not voyeuristic trauma tourism. It's an honest exploration of her own breaking points: the secondary trauma absorbed by therapists who absorb others' horrors, the ethical minefield of working across cultural and linguistic barriers during active conflict, the question of whether individual therapy can address collective wounds, and the guilt of returning to safety while her patients remain in danger. Through visceral scenes in makeshift clinics, conversations with interpreters and fellow aid workers, and her own therapy sessions back home, the narrator exposes the psychological architecture of war: how trauma compounds across generations, how humans demonstrate staggering resilience even as they shatter, and what it means to offer presence when solutions are impossible. She interrogates the limits of Western psychological frameworks in non-Western contexts, questions whether her presence helps or exploits, and reckons with the privilege of choosing to witness war rather than being trapped in it.

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