The existential landscape of personality life-designing after trauma
Abstract
A new concept of the personal life-designing landscape as an area of life with certain functional-dynamic characteristics and specific semantic configuration is included in the thesaurus of psychological concepts. The attention is paid to the differences between the concept of the personal lifedesigning landscape and the traditional concept of life path, which lies in the more local scale of the landscape, and is set by actual life tasks statement and finding updated value-semantic landmarks. The following types of landscapes with functional unity are defined: pragmatic, hedonistic, consumeristic, subserviencive and existential. It is shown that the existential landscape accumulates the experience of the post-traumatic stage of life as a special one and the awareness of different meaningful content of the new life route. It is found the basic functionality of the existential landscape, which is to create the conditions for reflection, reinterpretation, and integration of traumatic experiences that a person acquires in a borderline situation, in dramatic or tragic circumstances. The existential landscape is viewed as the shortest path for the individual to recover and improve his/her psychological health. It is revealed the dependence of the duration of a person’s stay in the context of the existential landscape on the trauma’s strength (peculiarities of losses, the intensity of painful memories) and the hardiness resource. There are suggested the options for the existential landscape directing: (a) to a search for professional self-realization, that requires strengthening of the self-identification mode; (b) to a search for cooperation, that requires strengthening of the dialogue regime; (c) to a distancing from certain people, that requires strengthening of the autonomy regime; (d) to a search for stable forms of everyday life, that requires strengthening of the practicing regime
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