About psychology but also about her new book entitled "The key to acceptance", the author Irini Tsachouridis shared with us the following:
Is there a positive psychology book?
Positive Psychology is a discipline concerned with flourishing and well-being. That the Positive Psychology focuses on "positive deviance" and not on treatment, does not mean that it ignores difficulties and problems. Instead, it focuses on their meaning and how we might take a more constructive approach to what happens in our lives. The Key to Acceptance, as a positive psychology book, tries to help its readers to do just that, to reexamine the Meaning they attribute to what happens in the symbolic stories it contains and subsequently in their lives.
What is meaning making?
Too often in our lives we focus on what happens and are quick to classify it as good or bad, tending to sometimes take an attitude of complacency and sometimes an attitude of demonizing what is happening. But would our lives be different if we realized that what we call good has potential risks and possible disadvantages that are not obvious at first reading, while what we call bad has hidden benefits and blessings that the conventional mind cannot easily think of us; Wishing to avoid speaking academically and research-wise, I will share a personal experience with you.
Many times in my life I have realized that this meaning is of crucial importance. Many times the "good scripts" and successes turned out to have a price that I could not easily calculate. Other times, what I avoided and considered difficult and negative, led me to paths that I could not imagine before.
Signaling and emotional intelligence
And yet, the feeling with which we live in each moment is determined by how we interpret the events that happen to us in each moment and not by the "intelligence" that we will discover over time. So what meaning we give to what happens is a catalyst for our well-being and will determine the ratio of positive and negative emotions with which we will live our daily lives. Many will now say, “so what can I do? I'm used to giving meaning to what happens in a certain way". And yet, the good news is that there is room to improve our understandings. And when I talk about improving meaning, I don't mean saying that bad is good! This kind of quote-unquote "positive" thinking is simply not possible and has nothing to do with Positive Psychology.
The real improvement of meaning-making has to do with "opening" our inner gaze and going beyond the separation of events into "good" and "bad". To go beyond dipoles and begin to perceive and actively seek the multidimensional and dynamic nature of situations and events.
The Key of Acceptance by adopting the narrative approach, attempts to help the reader do just that, namely to practice the most "open" interpretation of life's events as possible. In this way, the book tries to apply the principles of Positive Psychology, helping us to build a more permanent and lasting well-being.
How does he try to do this?
Through the stories he tells, which aim to help the reader practice a more "open" and holistic interpretation of life's events. The language of narrative and images has enormous power in communicating ideas and experiences to the reader without imposing, without making him a passive recipient. This active relationship of the reader with the stories helps in a true involvement of the reader and in the gradual building of his own experience through the stories. The more symbolically written a story is, the more "open" its lessons are, the more essential and deep what it communicates, and above all, the easier it becomes for the reader to live with the story and integrate his own experiences into it.
The book, its stories and the concept of positive psychology
The river of life constitutes the first story of the book. This story invites the reader to make sense in a broader way of the unpredictability of life, this unknown that happens to us and we cannot do anything other than to interpret it in a more holistic way.
The gift of Purpose constitutes the second story of the book, a story that aspires to completely deconstruct the concept of Good and Evil, positive and negative. After all, would everything be different if we didn't have ready-made and pre-made mechanical-automatic ideas about what is Good and Evil? Have we seen the people in our lives do the same as the heroes of the story? Have we happened to do it ourselves?
Ο lighthouse that no one lit constitutes the third story of the book. This story questions the role we think others play in our well-being and lays the seed to reconsider what well-being really means and what role relationships play in achieving it.
The fourth story in this book is the stone of forgiveness, a story that invites us to rethink how we see forgiveness. Positive Psychology recognizes forgiveness as a core virtue-strength of character. But do we really understand what forgiveness means or do we misunderstand its meaning?
Η bleeding of the tender is the fifth story in the book. It is a story that asks us to face with a more open eye what it means to "offer" to others and do something "for the sake of others". Are we trapped in a cycle of supply that can only be "evil" in the end, not for others, but primarily for us? How do I give meaning to my every action? Does this matter after all and not just the act itself?
And of course how do I give meaning to the "end", "death", and above all the fear of this end and death. How differently would I behave if I interpreted this fear differently? Could this different interpretation change my life? These are some of the issues raised in the story The butterfly of eternity.
Follows Odysseus' wandering through the windows of time, the seventh story of the book that invites us to give meaning differently to how we see the Purpose of our life. What am I called to do in my life? How can I see the Time? How can I use him? How critical is this to me and my well-being? Perhaps absolutely pivotal if we consider that the way we perceive the Purpose of life drives our every action on a daily level.
The book closes with a longer story, Virtue's journey into the Unknown. This story synthesizes and expands on all of the above issues by putting them into a larger context, following the heroine's story on a life journey. In this journey we see her redefining good and evil, deconstructing her definition of well-being again and again, meeting her inner child, conversing with it and going on a deep inner journey. During this trip, a lot changed, primarily the way she gave meaning to her relationship with others, but also with parts of herself. Maybe this is finally the real Unknown, which we are called to see differently, with a different and more "open" inner look.
In conclusion
The Key of Acceptance it is my attempt to communicate in my own way what it really means to revisit the events of our lives, our relationships with others and primarily with our Self and all the pieces that make it up. Through this meaning we can gradually begin to free ourselves from the automatic and mechanical perception of life's events and build a more permanent and lasting well-being that will not depend entirely on what happens externally.
We do not have the power to change what is happening around us, but we can certainly become more open to how we will give meaning to what is happening. Then we will be able to truly act and not just react. It is then that we will understand what it means to take a constructive approach and begin to see what Positive Psychology really means.
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