FEATURES OF COMBATANTS' AWARENESS OF COMBAT EXPERIENCE: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS

Abstract

Combat experience is a multidimensional psychological phenomenon that profoundly affects an individual's identity, worldview, and psychological functioning. After returning from combat, combatants face the challenging task of understanding and integrating traumatic experiences into a coherent system of personal meanings. This process is often hindered by fragmented memories, intense emotional reactions, moral injury, and social isolation. The purpose of this article is to analyze the theoretical foundations of combatants' awareness of combat experience and to identify the key psychological mechanisms involved in its integration.

The article examines cognitive, narrative, and existential approaches to understanding traumatic experience and highlights their role in explaining awareness, integration, and meaning-making. Particular attention is given to the main barriers to awareness, including fragmented traumatic memories, emotional avoidance, moral conflicts, and limited social support. Awareness is conceptualized as a dynamic process involving cognitive reconstruction, emotional processing, narrative integration, and the restoration of personal subjectivity.

The analysis demonstrates that meaning-making is the central mechanism through which traumatic combat experiences are integrated into an individual's identity and value system. Rather than eliminating traumatic memories, successful psychological adaptation depends on incorporating them into a coherent personal narrative. This process restores subjectivity, strengthens resilience, and creates the conditions for posttraumatic growth and positive personality transformation. The findings underline the importance of psychological interventions that promote awareness, meaning-making, and the restoration of subjectivity as essential components of long-term recovery and successful reintegration of combatants into civilian life.