Sense & Meaning Making - Positive Psychology & Storytelling - Module 11

 

Video : https://youtu.be/LLtW6SxwnR0 (Links to an external site.)

 

 

 

Story 11 : The Elephant and the bird - a short fable

Story Reflection Task :

What does the story mean to you?
How do you make sense of the size of the animals that have been chosen? What meaning does it bring to the story
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Knowing Meaning Making :

1. In Psychology Meaning making is the way people make sense and understand life events, relationships and self.

    According to Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (whose book Man in Search of Meaning is a must read); Meaning making is the way in which we interpret our inner world in context of the external world. He said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

   Robert Kegan in his book Evolving  Self ( 1982) states that "meaning making is a life long process". It is a process of evolution, especially concentrating on the internal process of experience and growth. 

   Crystal.L Park from the University of Connecticut proposed a the Meaning Making Model (2010) where she identifies two kinds of meaning making.:

   Global – which refers to a person’s general orienting system

   Situational – which refers to the meaning made of a specific situation.

   Global meaning making is influenced by our beliefs, goals and subjective sense of purpose,

   while Situational meaning making is influenced by our attributional (appraisal) style and the resources we have.
   

   Eg: We may know death is inevitable ( global meaning) but when we lose someone dear to us, we tend to make situational meaning of this loss, stating it is unfair and questioning why it had to happen to our loved one. Etc

   Studies done by Dr. Crystal Park, show that Global meaning making; all three of its aspects ( Beliefs, Goals and Subjective sense of Purpose have an effect on health and well being.

   The second point from this study is that when people show less disconnect between their Global meaning and Situational meaning, they are better adjusted psychologically and able to move towards well being. All of this suggests there is a strong connection between health and meaning making of individuals. 

   Global Meaning Making = Situational Meaning making = Greater Well being

   The VIA institute websites states that the character strengths closely associated with Meaning making (also put forth earlier by Dr.Viktor Frankl in his research) are

   Bravery / Courage – a simple act of everyday courage- pushing ourselves to do things we did not do before

   Appreciating Beauty, love – looking and finding meaning in the beauty around us

   Creativity and Kindness – showing kindness in words and action. 

    We also have two pathways to gaining meaning:

   Meaningful Relationships and Meaningful Occupation, out of which meaningful relationships have a greater impact our  well being.

    Ways in which we can bring meaning into our lives:

• Engage in a social project that benefits others. 
• Write your life story as a Hero’s journey – of having lived meaningful moments.
• Use reminiscence or nostalgia to connect with meaningful events , people or places from the past.
• Elders can capture their memories (also used in a therapeutic model called Reminiscence Therapy), by reflecting on objects they own or past memories.

 

Highlights of this Module:

•  Humans have an innate need for making meaning.
• Meaning making is the way we make sense of relationships, self and others
• Two kinds of Meaning Making - Global and Situational
• Two pathways that impact well being - Meaningful Relationships and Meaningful Occupation

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Topic Reflection Task :

1. What has been your most meaningful friendship? ( Post it on Discussion page)
   
2. What has been your most meaningful work? Choose one that has given you purpose in life.
   eg: The most meaningful work that I feel I have done is raising two children ( this may be cliched, but on introspection - all the other work I have done , as storyteller/ psychologist has not given me as much meaning as doing the work of a parent)
   

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Research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning-making

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.10.016 0167-2681/©2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/).138 N. Chater, G. Loewenstein / Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 126 (2016) 1

Meaning Making Model : Crystal L Parks - Vol 15 No 2 (2013) : This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.