Hallo! "Yaroslavna" Is Listening

By Anna Vasilyeva

      "Yaroslavna", a women’s crisis center, started its work four years ago. "Yaroslavna" staff - professional psychologists give individual and group consultations, work on the hot line. In 1998 1200 women were helped, and during the first three months of the current year more than 250 people have called the Center hot line. To the mind of the director of the Center Albina H. Pashina desolation is one of the main reasons for a woman’s psychological discomfort. In the last 10 years there was a powerful shift in people’s consciousness associated with the changing conditions of life. Before that we had all had roughly the same income, our problems were more or less alike and it was only natural to share them with other people. Today the society split into rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful people. Today it is a settled opinion that if you have not achieved material well-being, it declares your professional and personal bankruptcy before anything else. Being afraid to gain the character of a failure a person stops sharing his or her life circumstances with even close friends. The social circle gets smaller and smaller, and in the end the person may be in absolute isolation.
      "I can’t go anywhere as I have no decent things to wear and no money to pay for myself. I can’t invite anybody either – I have nothing to serve the dinner table with", the psychologists working on the hot line have to listen to such complaints many times a day. It looks like they can offer little help here. But in fact the root of the problem tends be in the wrong attitude and not objective reasons. Indeed, it was not long ago that we gathered around the table with cooked chicken legs for dinner at best, after hunting for those legs around the town. And we were not at all feeling unhappy because of it! Today, alas, we lost this simplicity and humanness that helped us so much before. We are afraid to invite guests: what if they believe our apartment to be too shabby. We are afraid to share our pains with a friend: what if she just thinks I am a misfit. As a result we go on withdrawing into ourselves while desperately needing company.
      About 60% calls to "Yaroslavna" are connected with the social intercourse problems – mainly with close relatives and family members. As a rule, women who turn to "Yaroslavna" can’t see the true reasons for their psychological discomfort and attribute it to some fictional circumstances. The psychologist’s task is to determine the reason of the situation and only then help a person find possible ways out of it. Here is one of the most typical examples.
The woman who applied to the Center was 35 years old and a housewife. Her husband was a big businessman, they had a son of 9. The woman said that she was impossibly happy about her marriage, and the only thing that did not let her live were the relations with her mother-in-law. The psychologist thought it strange that the woman’s feelings were so painful towards her mother-in-law she met four times a year at best. They needed quite a few consultations to discover the real problem of the client which she doing her best to hide. Before marriage this woman had taught literature, often visited concerts, poetry parties, and forums. The husband forbade her to work, and before long her interests were limited by the household. She was tortured not by conflicts with her mother-in-law but by a painful feeling of her own irrelevance, professional and personal failure. "What a nightmare my life was!" She exclaimed after one of the talks. "Subconsciously I realized my trouble was that my husband stopped treating me as a personality. But I resigned to it and have never afforded to spill out irritation that was choking me!"
      Quite a lot of women who don’t work find themselves in such a situation. Their husbands take them just as necessary objects for comfortable living conditions; plus the "objects" are completely dependent on them. "He wouldn’t see a person in me! I am a nobody for him", this is a general complaint among off-the-job wives of wealthy husbands. As a rule, they accept both the psychological discomfort and sexual disharmony in their families, and appeal to the Center hot line only when it comes to direct physical violence.
      Interpersonal relations have aggravated due to the economical crisis. Since last autumn the number of the calls related to unemployment problems and consequent family violence have gone up two- to threefold.
      "After a period of material well-being my husband had his salary reduced to 500 rubles per family member. It is now not enough for even basic foodstuff, and he demands that various dainties should be on the table when he comes home from work. He can’t believe that his salary is not enough even to buy shoes for our two kids."
      "My husband has lost his job. It’s been three months now that he is sitting at home and doesn’t make any attempts to find another place. He has completely withdrawn into himself. In the morning when I get ready to leave for my work he pretends to be asleep and tries not to get up before I leave. When I come back he is sitting on the sofa and refuses food. I don’t know how I can help him. He wouldn’t discuss his problems with me. Sometimes I am afraid he will make away with himself."
      But though financial difficulties are certainly an objective fact, a person in the state of inner balance will much easier mobilize his own resources to overcome them. Specialists of the Center are deeply sure that it is the psychological state and not the exteriors that is the primary cause of all troubles.
      There are a lot of calls on mother-daughter conflicts. Mothers would not understand that their children have the right for their own point of view on things, and daughters lack the patience to explain their line to parents.
A young woman journalist contacted the Center complaining of her mother. She was doing her best to prevent her daughter from setting her private life aright. Any man coming to her house was thoroughly criticized. At last the daughter managed to get married. For some time mother and daughter did not have any contacts, but after the birth of a child mother offered to help with the baby. In no more than half a year the young woman’s husband had to leave the family as he could not stand his mother-in-law’s nagging that he did not support his family well enough.
      Another example.
One of the clients of the Center was a woman of 48, a mother of three. She was depressed with her mother being too tense about her private life. Mother lived on the other side of the city but was constantly calling her daughter and criticizing her husband and children. As the daughter had been brought up in old-fashioned traditions she was readily absorbing her mother's words though she herself was satisfied with the relations in her family. The mother though found many faults in her husband and children and insisted on her abandoning them. As a result of the acute conflict between the habit to obey her mother and love to her family the woman developed serious depression.
      In such cases, when it is impossible to establish direct contact with the mother the psychologists advise their client to give up contacts with her for some time. Mother needs to realize that her position has no future and learn to build up new relations with her daughter.
      The reverse situations are also typical, that is when mothers apply to the Center with complaints of their daughters’ behavior. It is not uncommon to listen to such claims for example:
      "My daughter is a prostitute! She divorced her husband and lives with her two children. Now she keeps changing her boyfriends. She needs to be deprived of mother’s rights!"
      "Yaroslavna" psychologists try to explain to the mother that her daughter has the right for common female happiness. As a rule, a mother raising claims like that to her daughter was unlucky with her own private life. The psychologists help the woman to decompose her past, realize that her views are far from perfect, and it’s not worth it to enforce them upon her daughter. It’s only then that the woman gets a chance to become a friend to her daughter, to get her support.
      Sometimes "Yaroslavna" hot line is used by women who are literally on the edge of despair. Recently the Center has got a call from a 28 year old woman who is prostituting for three years. She came to Moscow from a small town, left her child with her parents. She had to leave because in the home town she couldn’t make her living. In Moscow she kept trying to make an honest living but all her attempts failed. Once she got acquainted with a young man and shared her problems with him. He happened to be a pander. At first she wanted just to make some money and leave the business. But now three years have passed and she hasn’t saved anything, but what’s even worse she got under her criminal boss’ foot.
      The Center specialists do their best to make women believe in their own power, help them make the right choice. Tell them about people who had been in such circumstances but found courage to give it all a new start.
      It is very heartwarming when the Center’s efforts give real results. One of the clients needed a year of hard work, but the result surpassed all expectations. When she first came to the Center she was not capable of making any decision on her own.
      "My husband was constantly beating and humiliating me, - she is telling. All the scenes happened with our 12-year old son to see them. I needed three visits to "Yaroslavna" to feel some inner changes. Once when my husband wanted to hit me for some insignificant fault I braced myself up and looked up at him directly in the eyes. At that moment I suddenly realized that I was no more afraid of him. He was confused and put his hand down."
      In some time the woman found a job and divorced her husband. We could make it the end of the story but it has continuation. About a year after the end of her training in the Center she called it again, this time to share her joy. She said that she had come together with her former husband recently, but now both of them were completely different people. She has learned to respect herself as a personality and made her husband do it too. And he in turn realized that equal companionship would give him much more that self-affirmation by the way of violence.
      The Center activities are not limited by the work with adults. The psychologists of "Yaroslavna" developed a series of programs to help problem children and adolescents, first of all in children’s homes. It’s not a secret that such children have great trouble adjusting to life in the "outer world". They are easy victims of the criminal world and are often used in the most dirty and dangerous operations, of which prostitution and drug pushing are most prevalent. The majority of orphan home children are unable to make a living and are often cheated and deceived. In some estimations about 90 percent of them die for some reasons in the course of five years after they get out of a children’s home. It’s obvious that the system of education established in children’s homes and boarding schools is an absolute failure. First of all it’s related to the staff working with children. Most of them have authoritative character and treat their pupils as little soldiers subdued by their will. The Center experience shows that our teachers in general tend to have various emotional disorders: lack of delicacy and understanding, irresponsiveness to new ideas, reluctance to cooperate. And mind that with the growth of a teacher’s experience all these negative features increase, and are most prominent with the children’s homes staff.
      In August 1998 the Center "Yaroslavna" started working on a project supported by the International Women’s Club. The project included 4 boarding schools in Moscow and a Moscow region orphan’s home for children with mental derangement. The main efforts of the Center were focused on teachers and fosterers. In the course of the psychological training many of them realized that all those years they were inflicting major emotional damage not only to their pupils but to themselves.
      Working with children was no less challenging. The children were extremely aggressive towards each other, they took their mates just as competitors for toys and sweets. It was practically impossible to work with them in groups. Step by step the psychologists still managed to achieve some positive changes. While in the beginning the children did not use any words but "I want" (I want jeans, I want a VCR etc.) after some time they matured emotionally. The psychological exercises were very helpful. In one of them a child is to write on sheets of paper what he likes and what he doesn’t like. The children wrote: "I don’t like when my Dad beats my Mom", "I like it when the sun is shining", "I would like to sit on the Moon and play with stars"… Maybe it was the first time these kids got a idea of their inner emotional world, realized they have the right of their own little joys.
      On the New Year eve the psychologists decided to make a present to their pupils. At first the children thought that the grown-ups brought them candies, but they took out candles and sat the kids in a circle. When the candles were lit everybody fell silent enchanted by the fire. "Every one of you can make your dearest wish" – the kids were told. There was a boy sitting among them who stammered since his birth. He looked at everybody with eyes full of tears and said, "I wish to learn to speak."