Mental Survival Guide. From the general crisis to the personal crisis
Author: Mioara Țârulescu
Publication year: 2021
Area/field: Personal development
Publishing house: Edu Plus
Number of pages: 240
Version: 
Description
Mental Survival Guide. From the general crisis to the personal crisis is the book that aims to fortify the reader with the weapons necessary to defeat any crisis that dares to provoke him/her in a moment of his/her existence. It involves a practical approach to the phenomena triggered by any crisis, namely fear, dread, anxiety, frustration, as well as the personal resources available to the reader to face it. The strategies presented, detached from integrative psychotherapy, are certain remedies for restoring personal balance, harmony with oneself and the world, reconciliation with the past, in the present, for the future.
The book is sprinkled with psychological tests, guided projection exercises, awareness exercises, which supports its practical character and turns it into a genuine therapeutic tool. The fluidity of the content and the accessible language allow the access to any reader, creating the impression that this book was written especially for him/her to help him/her solve the problems, fears, stormy moods that overwhelm him/her.
"If you want to understand exactly what is happening to you, now, when you feel the blows of the crisis in your stomach, when it haunts your sleep, when it disturbs your mind, when it affects your daily life, when you feel that you cannot take it no more and you have the tendency to desert and say to yourself "Happen what may, I hope it ends!", to understand "Why?" and so that you can answer to "How am I doing?", then this book will be of real help to you. "
Table of contents
Part I – Crisis weapons
Chapter 1 - Fear and management of reactions: The impact of fear. Stop the fear! The saving role of intuition. Conclusions.
Chapter 2 - Dread and its management: When there is no fear, there is dread! Emotional and cognitive. Who is the internal saboteur? The awareness of hostility. The balance of the emotional struggle. Dread and creation of scenarios. Blocking the rational. Conclusions.
Chapter 3 - Anxiety - the fight with the unknown: Anxiety - a different fear. The drama triangle. Guiding the reality. How can you help an anxious person? Conclusions.
Chapter 4 - Frustration: Let's understand the frustration. Frustration: if you have no cause, you have no effect!
Anger and aggression. Conclusions.
Part II – Our weapons
Chapter 5 - Self-knowledge: Self-knowledge. Self-image. Self-esteem.
Chapter 6 - The Real Self: The body self. The crystallized body self. The body self and the crisis. The cognitive self. The effectively crystallized cognitive self. The distorted cognitive self. The social self. The spiritual self.
Chapter 7 - Projection selves: The future self. The ideal self.
Part III – Facing the crisis
Chapter 8 - Crisis: Crisis - general framework. Crisis and normality.
Chapter 9 - Strategies to succeed: Live what you feel! You are not what you live! Change without changing yourself! Actor in your crisis, not a spectator in someone else's crisis! Free yourself from the Tyranny of Must! Where there is your attention, there is your reality! Self-fulfilling predictions!
Fragments from the book
”I wrote these lines inspired by the COVID 19 crisis and the apocalyptic crises that it prepares to trigger as a chain reaction. But it is not a book dedicated to this crisis. No matter how great it is now promoted worldwide, it does not deserve the role of star in my book. The crisis is generally the main character. The crisis of the child who enters a group for the first time and has the impression that he/she has been abandoned by his/her parents, of the child who is humiliated by his/her colleagues at school, of the teenager who fights for his/her freedom, of the abandoned girlfriend or disappointed boyfriend, of the young mother and new father surprised by the responsibility of the new role, of the neglected or abused wife, of the loss of a loved one. All these crises, without explicitly naming them, are the subject of this book.”
”If you had not experienced fear several times in your life, now you were just a memory in the minds of those who instinctively understood that fear is the guarantor of life. Beyond the drama behind these words lies the pure reality, fear being the emotion that activates our survival instinct.”
”The fear that fuels anxiety is placed in a life scenario. We are afraid “because ...” and from here each person builds his/her film in which chained actions and a disastrous outcome are projected because otherwise, we would not talk about anxiety. Actions are performed by people or situations to which roles are assigned. The drama triangle is a psychotherapeutic concept used in the transactional analysis that explains how people remain captive in situations that visibly harm them.”
”Self-knowledge is the essence of mental health. Without being able to answer the questions "Who am I?" and “What can I do?", we cannot build effectively in ourselves, around us. We exist but we do not live!”
”Let's associate "What can I do !?" with "What do I want to do!?". It is the main concern when we look to the future. The fulfilled life involves using the past to live in the present, for the future. Nothing we have lived seems justified, nothing we live seems valuable if it does not lead to what we will live. We must let life flow until death, each episode ending with "To be continued!"”
Mioara Țârulescu
Psychopedagogue, professor, author
The crisis is an episodic presence in the life of each of us! When it becomes noisy and domineering, it is vital to take control and silence it. The strategies presented in this paper, the exercises of self-knowledge and awareness are meant to help us become the masters of our lives, to rewrite the present and redesign the future.
”Balm for the soul and mind! A therapeutic book that offers simple and effective solutions for the most complex and deep crises that a person goes through throughout his/her life. A prompt and adapted response to the person’s needs caught in the rage of a hostile world that tries to annihilate him/her, to reduce him/her to silence.”
PhD Emilia STANA - Psychologist, Professor
”An innovative paper that introduces the reader to the easiest strategies to extinguish the fear, dread, frustration, anxiety that can dominate him/her when the crisis takes over his/her life regardless of its nature.”
IACPS - International Association of Communication Psychol