Poetry as survival: trauma, stigma, and spiritual meaning in the case study of a Ukrainian-American poet-chaplain

This study explores how poetry operates across distinct phases of cumulative, multi-layered trauma through the life history of a Ukrainian-American poet-songwriter and military chaplain who survived religious persecution in the USSR, military conscription, coercive psychiatric hospitalization, imprisonment, migration, and personal loss, and currently serves during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Drawing on qualitative life-history research and analysis of the respondent's poetry, findings indicate that poetic expression is not continuously accessible during trauma; rather, it is suspended during acute survival states and re-emerges retrospectively as a mechanism of integration, meaning-making, and identity reconstruction. Across the life trajectory, poetry functions as a private container of selfhood under stigma, a delayed narrative integrator of traumatic experience, a medium for transforming grief and reconfiguring attitudes toward death, and a relational and spiritual resource within pastoral care. This study extends poetry therapy scholarship beyond structured interventions, highlighting poetry as a context-dependent, lifelong adaptive practice at the intersection of trauma, spirituality, and systemic violence.