Personal Growth Tips

End of life is the only certainty we have and, in the same time, the subject we are frequently avoiding to discuss. We bravely try to “beat” death doing all kind of activities which give us satisfaction, fulfillment and the feeling of being in control of our own life.

Even the feeling of losing the love ones exists, it is “berried” deep inside us and we say to ourselves that they will not die in time to come or it can’t happen to them. In fact, we are refusing to face the reality acting as this “problem” will not affect me if I’m not thinking about it.

We come back to the cruel reality when a close person is taking away from us. When it really happens, we ask over and over again “why him” no matter how old he/ she was. It doesn’t hurt less if the person is older. That’s the moment when we realize that we aren’t ready to deal with love one’s death as well as the fact that the feeling of self-control is an illusion.

So what it has to be done to be more ready to accept the death of someone close? The most important thing it will be to learn to talk open about it. It is known the effect of a spoken word. More we express our interior thoughts and fears more we will be able to accept the inevitable. Further more, by talking we can get rid of all the tensions inside us.

I think that the phenomenon of death psychology should be approached more seriously. A greater attention to what is going throw a person facing a love one’s death it can be an answer to the main question of this editorial. This means that each one of us must learn to live every moment of life to its full intensity being aware that he can’t control and deny death. We can only enjoy the time spend with love ones.

The effect of someone’s death on us and the ability to accept his death depends a lot on this previous self-preparation. I could say that if we” take care” of our soul before by being honest and realistic, then we can convert the overwhelming pain into priceless memories.

Don’t ask yourself if you are ready to deal with a love one’s death and then hide inside YOU, make it real because it will only help you when the time will come! – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

The concept of abnormality is not only relative but it’s often mixed up with being different. Every one of us needs to be accepted in a social group and, many times, we are willing to do major compromises to reach this goal. A frequent one is the tendency of constantly showing a similar behavior to the majority’s one to avoid the risk of being isolated.

The predisposition for compromise appears when there is an enormous discrepancy between appearance and reality. This means that we are thinking/ acting differently from the group but we assume our partners’ thoughts/ actions as there are our own. In time, this self-censorship not only brings us a lot of frustration but it also ”help” us to slip in the extreme of a faked behavior.

Taking into account that we are generally tempted to choose the easy way of getting something immediately, it’s explainable our “strategy” which save us the effort of self-describing. The so-called “guilt” of being different is also hidden deep inside our mind, for a short period I would say. In fact, we trick ourselves thinking that it will be easy to act like this for a long time without having to make special efforts. Let’s not forget that self-censorship always involves a huge psychical pressure.

It’s important to know for those who are “afraid” of being them that wanting to be the same as others doesn’t imply any advantage. Have you ever heard the expression “to make a difference”? For making this happen we must accept and let others to find out about our interior structure. If we decide to hide it we only give others the power to control us.

If you have the courage to be different it means you are a strong and independent personality, in control of who you are or you want to be, open mind to challenges. Further more, you must be conscious that you can’t be close friend of everybody, maybe only superficially. You can’t be liked by all and it’s not even recommended to be. It’s more efficient for your self-esteem to be accepted for who/ what you are than for some qualities you simulate to have.

Life means taking all kind of risks and being enough responsible for any action. I believe that he decision to behave like others could be considered a risk as well- the risk of losing our identity inside the group. So it’s desirable to be remarked for acting differently than being “one” more in a social crowd. – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

A minimum desire and tendency to control the actions and the persons around us exists in every one of us. This purpose becomes more difficult when it comes to control our mind. Human mind still remains a partially controlled “area”. I believe that more important than control is to permanently develop those essential cognitive skills for an efficient adjustment in the future.

I’ve recently also found this approach of the mind in the book “Five minds for the future” wrote by the well-known psychologist H. Gardner. Based on the concept of “minds”, his point of view outlines that the key for the human’s evolution is to achieve five types of mind.

1. A disciplinary mind prevents us to become “slaves” of passive information learning. The idea is not to exclude the learning process but to do it understanding every discipline. We should be able to think from at least a couple of disciplines’ perspective (science, mathematics, history and an art discipline) and to educate our teenagers not by the past standards but for the future.

2. A synthesizing mind needs abilities to organize the overwhelming “wave” of information and to integrate ideas from different disciplines. By being a synthetic structure we can easily take correct decisions for every problem.

3. A creating mind could be expressively described by the legendary dictum of Descartes “I think, so I exist” transformed into “I create, so I exist”. A creative person is always looking for the challenges. This kind of individual analyzes a situation from more than one perspective trying to clarify any questions or phenomenon. Generally, every person wants to be creative and to realize something new in life.

4. A respectful mind creates a cause-effect relation between persons: the ones disrespectful don’t deserve the other one’s respect. Thinking respectfully means to live one next to other without wanting to produce any harm and to promote tolerance between people. Respect signifies to appreciate the human diversity. The poet W.H.Auden drastically expressed the reality by saying: “we must love each other or die”.

5. An ethical mind is set to warn us about the non-ethical persons and the ones refusing to assume any responsibility. Once we interiorize the ethical perspective we think about the welfare of all the people not only about ours. A notorious religious chief priest said that when all that’s important can be sold and bought, when going to shopping is seen like a salvation or when the publicity commercials are considered as prayers, values are destroyed.

Achieving this five minds isn’t very easy because of obstacles as conservatory attitudes, resistance to everything is new, hidden risks or the lack of proper methods and ways. Further more, it’s also needed a people’s reorientation from the technology evolution to human values and personalities. We have to be more preoccupied for our cognitive and spiritual wellbeing than the material one.

If we want to make the world a better place in the future, we must start from changing our mind’s concepts and choosing the ones that can help us to grow as unique personalities. – Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc

“Human rights” is a concept promoted for a long time in many international documents. The national and international conflicts, political attitudes and human behaviors are drawing a tough reality for us to realize that we respect human rights only on paper. Theoretically speaking we all seem to know and to talk about human rights. We even feel offended by certain remarks regarding our questionable behavior.

The humanity is stepping into a ridiculous circle by talking with an incredible credibility about respecting human rights to cover the reality behind it:

• intolerance regarding human diversity;
• cognitive stereotypes and social labels used to appreciate a person;
• discriminative behavior;

Taking into account the difference between reality (who we are) and appearance (how we present ourselves), I ask a few minutes of your spare time to think about the case called “European Train”.

“You took the train Dear Valley Express for a hall trip from Lisbon to Moscow. You are traveling in a couchette that you must share with three other persons. With whom would you prefer to share it from the next passengers?”

1. a Serbian solder from Bosnia;
2. a Swiss overweight broker;
3. a D.J. that seems to have a lot of money;
4. a young artist with AIDS;
5. a gipsy from Hungary recently released from jail;
6. a Basque nationalist constantly traveling in Russia;
7. an Ukrainian student who doesn’t want to go home;
8. a blind accordionist from Austria;
9. a 40 years old Romanian woman with no visa and carrying a 1 year child;
10. an impulsive and misogynist German;
11. a bald-headed Swede apparently drunk;
12. a professional fighter from Belfast which goes to a football game;
13. a Polish prostitute from Berlin;
14. a French farmer speaking only French and with a basket full of cheese;
15. a Kurd refugee living in Germany and going back in Libya;

This conscience exercise must be seriously approach by choosing three desirable persons and three undesirable ones to travel with. It’s a hard thing to do when the persons on the list are extremely different and they could have a hidden agenda considering their description. Every choice has to be explained so you can become aware of the reasons behind your decisions.

The paradox is that no matter who we choose, we’ll still discriminate someone. So you’ll wonder what’s the point if there will be at least one person discriminated. The purpose is to determine more people to realize we are the “slaves” of an intolerant attitude and a stereotypical thinking. Further more everyone could and must learn from this situation that we must have and keep an open mind. - Psychologist, Nicoleta Cramaruc