How do we maintain our inner ground when the reality around us keeps shifting? Has self-work turned into an endless search for “what is wrong with me”? And what does psychological maturity actually mean today? We sat down with psychologist Anastasiia Zabolotna to discuss resilience, personal boundaries, burnout, and the inner life of the modern woman.
This article was prepared exclusively for the international magazine Business Woman. On our pages, we share an in-depth analysis of our internal processes, professional insights, and an honest look at how to remain resilient without losing tenderness toward ourselves.
— We understand psychology better than ever, but do we truly understand ourselves? What are we still missing?
— It seems to me that we know significantly more about psychology now, but knowing psychology and understanding oneself are not the same thing.
Today, people easily throw around words like “trauma,” “boundaries,” “trigger,” “attachment,” and “resource.” That’s a good thing, because psychological literacy is genuinely growing. Yet a paradox often emerges: someone can explain with total precision why they behave the way they do, yet continue to live out the very same script.
That is why I believe what we lack today isn’t information about ourselves, but contact with ourselves. The ability not just to name an emotion, but to notice it in the moment; not just to know our needs, but to allow ourselves to act on them; not just to understand our boundaries, but to tolerate the discomfort that comes with defending them.
To me, psychological maturity isn’t about analyzing yourself to perfection. It is about being able to notice what is happening within you, understand it well enough, and still remain capable of acting in alignment with your core values.
Contemporary research on psychological flexibility shows that a key pillar of mental well-being is not eliminating every unpleasant thought or feeling, but staying connected to reality and moving toward what matters to you—even when emotional discomfort is present.
— Why can someone spend years recognizing a problem and understanding its roots, yet change nothing? Where does change actually happen?
— Because awareness is a vital part of therapy, but it isn’t the whole therapy.
There are meta-analyses of psychotherapeutic research showing a clear link between insight and therapeutic outcomes. Understanding yourself truly matters. But that correlation is moderate, not absolute: insight alone is simply not enough.
I often explain it quite simply: you can completely understand why you are afraid to tell people “no,” and yet say “yes” the very next time you wanted to refuse.
Real change begins right where new understanding translates into new experience and new behavior.
A person doesn’t just need to think differently; they have to try acting differently—tolerating the anxiety, setting the boundary, stepping into a hard conversation, asking for help, stopping the avoidance of uncomfortable situations. And that is very often where the hardest work begins.
Familiar patterns of behavior may be painful, but they are known and predictable. New ones have no track record of safety yet.
For me, real transformation occurs at the intersection of three things: awareness, emotional experience, and action.
Sometimes people spend years hunting for yet another explanation for their behavior, when the next therapeutic step is no longer to “understand more,” but simply to do something differently.
— The concept of “working through yourself” is immensely popular today. Isn’t self-work turning into an endless search for what’s “broken” in us?
— Yes, and I see a real danger in this trend within popular psychology.
The phrase “I need to work through my issues” often carries a hidden premise: that something is wrong with me and needs fixing.
A human being is not an endless psychological renovation project.
Every single one of us carries vulnerabilities, childhood experiences, fears, contradictions, and imperfect reactions. But psychological health does not mean the complete absence of these things.
Psychotherapy isn’t meant to engineer a person stripped of triggers, sadness, fear, or internal conflict. Its purpose is to help someone feel more liberated in their own choices and less governed by automatic reactions.
I personally prefer a different framing: not “fixing ourselves,” but getting to know ourselves better, learning how to be gentle with who we are, and expanding our range of possible responses.
Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into the perfection trap: identifying one “flaw,” then another, then a third—and never actually starting to live.
At some point, psychological work should return a person from the therapy office back into life, rather than turning therapy into life itself.
— Where is the line between healthy self-reflection and over-analyzing oneself? Can we get “stuck” in our own psychology?
— Yes. In psychology, there is a crucial distinction between reflection and rumination—the repetitive looping of the same thoughts over and over.
Healthy reflection helps me grasp something and then move forward.
Over-analysis sounds entirely different: “Why did I say that?”, “What did they think of me?”, “Why did I react like that?”, “Is this my trauma or a defense mechanism?” You think relentlessly, but clarity never arrives. Instead, anxiety rises and your capacity to take action shrinks.
Today, rumination is recognized as a key transdiagnostic process tied to psychological distress; extensive research reviews consistently link high rumination to a broad spectrum of mental health disorders.
So I offer a very simple checkpoint.
After reflecting, ask yourself: “Is it clearer to me what to do next, or did I just run ten more laps around the exact same thought?”
If analysis leads neither to acceptance, nor to a decision, nor to action, and only ramps up inner tension—we are likely no longer exploring ourselves; we are trapped in our own analysis.
— How has the psychological reality of Ukrainians shifted over recent years? What long-term effects are we only beginning to see?
— I think the most important thing is to avoid reducing the psychological state of Ukrainians purely to the word “trauma.”
What we are living through is far more complex.
We aren’t in a scenario where a dangerous event took place, concluded, and a recovery phase began. For millions of Ukrainians, the stressors have been ongoing for years: air raid alerts, loss, uncertainty, separation from loved ones, mobilization, displacement, financial strain, and non-stop news of danger.
At the same time, it’s vital not to pathologize every single reaction. The World Health Organization stresses that during war, nearly every person experiences psychological distress, but that does not mean everyone will develop a mental health disorder.
Yet Ukrainian data clearly underscores the weight of this burden. According to a 2025 nationwide WHO survey, over 70% of respondents reported symptoms of anxiety, depression, or severe stress over the preceding year, while only about a fifth sought professional support. As of 2026, the WHO estimates that mental health issues affect around 10 million people in Ukraine to varying degrees.
I believe much of the emotional fallout will only surface later.
As long as an active threat exists, the psyche largely mobilizes around survival: keeping up with work, raising children, helping relatives, earning a living, volunteering, and making decisions.
Often, the real emotional crash arrives not during the danger, but once safety is finally restored.
After the war, our work will extend far beyond trauma recovery. We will have to process deep exhaustion, delayed grief, family breakups and transformations, the reintegration of veterans into civilian life, the experiences of children whose formative years were spent under fire, and the fractured sense of basic safety and trust in the world.
Alongside all of this, however, I witness another reality: the extraordinary adaptability of Ukrainians. Resilience doesn’t mean we don’t feel pain. Sometimes resilience is simply the capacity to keep living, building relationships, working, and holding onto our humanity despite the ache.
— Can someone be psychologically resilient not because they have learned to control their emotions, but precisely because they let themselves feel them?
— Yes. In fact, I would replace the word “control” with “regulation.”
Regulating an emotion doesn’t mean forbidding it.
We cannot command ourselves: “Stop feeling afraid right now,” “I won’t be sad today,” or “I will never get angry again.” What we can learn is to notice the emotion, understand what it is trying to tell us, tolerate its intensity, and choose how we respond.
That distinction changes everything.
Modern research on emotion regulation demonstrates that chronic avoidance of feelings, emotional suppression, and rumination are linked to poorer mental health, whereas acceptance, cognitive reappraisal, and flexible responding correlate with far better psychological outcomes.
A resilient person is not someone who feels nothing.
In Ukraine, promoting the ideal of an invulnerable person who never cries, never fears, and never tires is particularly dangerous.
Genuine strength often looks completely different: “I am scared right now, and I acknowledge it; I am hurting, and I let myself grieve; I am exhausted, and I am asking for help.”
Resilience is not the absence of a reaction. It is the ability to move through the experience without abandoning yourself.
— What is currently causing the most harm to our minds: non-stop busyness, information overload, the cult of productivity, or the pressure to constantly be “in a resource state”?
— I don’t think any single one of those is the main culprit. It’s the shared premise behind them: the notion that a human being must constantly operate at peak capacity.
We are expected to perform at work, keep growing, be wonderful parents, exercise, eat clean, travel, nurture relationships, read books, go to therapy—and ideally remain completely “resourced” throughout it all.
Human psychology doesn’t work that way.
We are built on cycles of activity and recovery. There are seasons of productivity and seasons of depletion. There are losses, illnesses, crises, and war.
Demanding relentless resourcefulness from Ukrainians right now is especially detached from reality.
To me, one of the most toxic contemporary tendencies is turning a normal human state into a personal failing:
“I’m exhausted—so I must have managed my life poorly.”
“I’m sad—I need to quickly boost my energy.”
“I lack motivation—I must push myself harder.”
Instead of listening to their own fatigue, people pile on self-criticism for daring to be tired.
I want us to reclaim our right to not always be productive.
Mental health isn’t about existing in a permanent high-energy state. It’s the capacity to observe where you are and respond to yourself with flexibility.
— Are there human experiences that psychology shouldn’t attempt to “cure”—such as grief, loss, disappointment, or loneliness? Where does the problem end and life simply begin?
— This is one of the most essential questions in psychology today.
Not every pain is a pathology.
If someone loses someone deeply important, their pain doesn’t signal a malfunction. It simply reflects how much that person meant to them.
If an important relationship ends, disappointment is entirely natural.
If someone is lonely, sadness is an authentic response to an unmet need for connection.
The WHO highlights that psychological distress during crisis situations is a natural, widespread human response that subsides over time for most people; a mental disorder develops only in a subset.
Psychology’s job is not to strip away every uncomfortable feeling.
Often, we cannot take the pain away—nor should we.
What we can do is help someone avoid carrying it in isolation, hold space for it, weave the experience into the fabric of their story, and gradually rediscover their footing.
The boundary lies where emotional distress becomes so prolonged, severe, or pervasive that it robs someone of the ability to function, sustain relationships, care for themselves, or adapt over time. In those moments, professional support and clinical evaluation are warranted.
Pain in itself does not equal disorder.
Perhaps the most deeply humane purpose of psychology today is not only helping people change what can be changed, but teaching them how to coexist with what cannot.
Psychological health isn’t a life sanitized of pain.
It is the capacity to stay alive and present inside an authentic life—with its love, loss, fear, joy, uncertainty, connection, and heartbreak.
Photo: from the author’s archive