Now That It’s Over : Readjustment: After weeks of roller-coaster emotions caused by the war in the Gulf, everyday life may prove to be a letdown, experts say.

So now the war is over.

America is riding on a victorious high: The good guys won; truth and justice triumphed.

For a moment, anyway, cares and problems seemed to vanish. Flags flew and yellow ribbons hung from every tree. The war consumed the national consciousness: Who could worry about the trivialities of life? Who could think about lost loves or car payments?

But life goes on. Mortgages come due and the children need new shoes. There might not be enough water to take a shower, and as more companies announce layoffs, your job might be next.

“The war has been a large distraction,” says Dr. D. Ray Bardill, dean of the School of Social Work at Florida State University and president of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy. “It won’t be long before we’re back to the unexciting reality.”

After the fever pitch of war and the thrill of victory, the return to daily life can only be an anticlimax, experts say.

“Anything that seems real important and occupies people’s time, when that is gone you have a letdown,” says Tony Jurich, a clinical professor of marriage and family therapy at Kansas State University who has worked extensively with veterans of the Vietnam war.

“You have the postpartum blues, and the post-NFL blues that come after the Super Bowl,” he adds. War may be played out on a far grander scale than football or a pregnancy, he says, but the feeling when it’s over is just as empty.

“Through the five, six weeks that we were actually fighting, the war became the major event in our lives,” Jurich says. “It became a regular part of our conversation. You’d run into a friend, and you’d say, ‘Hi, how are you? What do you think about the Persian Gulf?’ ”

Now that the war is over, “for most of us, that vacuum normally will not be filled with something of this import. We’re back to normal life as in, now what do we do? That poses a major problem. It forces us to confront reality,” he says.

Television newsman Charles Osgood devoted his CBS commentary one day last week to the subject of post-war letdown: “You get hooked, and you need somehow to withdraw. There needs to be a withdrawal from Persian Gulf War dependence.”

Osgood was talking about the way the war consumed Americans: how they became glued to their television sets, stopped going to movies or renting videos, breathlessly awaited Pentagon press briefings and began to read meaning into the eyebrow movement of Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, who conducted many of the televised press briefings from the Pentagon.

Osgood was talking about the rock star-like popularity of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who became the darling even of many onetime doves. He was talking about how families came to discuss weapons systems at the dinner table, how children did coloring books of the Middle East, how focusing on the war approached the level of a huge, collective addiction.

“The general, people in the press corps, these people have become household figures,” says Kevin Bowen, director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “They’re the umbilical cord that has connected us to what has been going on in the Persian Gulf.”

For observers of the war as well as for those who participated in it, “the whole new world that we were brought into and we were participating in on a daily basis just sort of evaporated,” he says. “There’s bound to be a natural letdown from that.”

Lane Retallick, a painter and general contractor in Encino, agrees: “I was definitely just hypnotized by the whole thing for the first few weeks. I’m finding it hard now to wake up without the press briefing from Saudi Arabia.”

“My husband reads all these naval battle books, books about strategy and diplomacy,” she says. “I could never read them, and I never knew how he could read them. I never understood until this war that war is intellectually stimulating. That’s a terrible thing for a person who was opposed to the war in Vietnam to admit.”

The war in the Persian Gulf became “the most intense experience in our lives, even though it was 6,000 miles away,” Retallick says. With the fighting over, she predicts a news “withdrawal.”

Martin Phillipps of the Bayley Seton Mental Health Clinic on New York’s Staten Island says war spectators will get back to their normal lives. “People can get over CNN without too much trouble,” he says. “It’s just like a miniseries for them.”

But Retallick is less certain. She says she felt as if Kelly had become a friend. Now that the general has announced his retirement from the Army, she says she wishes he would stay in touch: “I want to know what happens to Gen. Kelly.”

And CBS commentator Osgood expressed mock outrage. “They’re taking the Gen. Kelly show off the air?” he said. “Wait a minute, it was my favorite show.”