Cite as (APA style): Dobiala, E. (2026). The European Room for Listening as Field Resonance as an Ethics of Presence in Times of War. The Global Psychotherapist, 6(1), 224-233 http://doi.org/10.52982/lkj306
Abstract: The European Room for Listening (ERL) began to take shape in 2023 as a collective international response to the war in Ukraine. It was initially connected to the WAPP Support Project (Poland) and supported by colleagues affiliated with the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) from France, Denmark, and Kosovo. At first, it offered a space for Ukrainian supervisors of Positive and Transcultural Psychotherapy who, in the midst of war, needed somewhere safe to speak, to be heard, and to remain professionally present while surrounded by loss. Over time, the ERL transformed into the European Room for Listening Association (France) as a place for a transcultural field of resonance. Psychotherapists and supervisors from across Europe began to join, not because of shared theoretical views but because of a common ethics of listening and presence.
Within this field, listening itself became regulatory and transformative. It allowed both for support of Ukrainian colleagues and for the recognition and integration of transgenerational dynamics that the war had reawakened across Europe. For many participants, this process felt like a collective coherence – a return to humanity through tenderness, silence, and co-presence.
The ERL demonstrates that listening can be an act of care and even of resistance – a quiet form of action. Presence, in this sense, becomes not only therapeutic but also epistemological: a way of knowing that emerges in the encounter between people.
Keywords: Positive Psychotherapy, resonant field, emotional regulation, war trauma, European solidarity, relational ethics