Discover the power of how K-Dramas can improve your wellbeing and provide a sense of belonging
Love K-Dramas and want more permission to binge watch them? In How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Jeanie Y. Chang explores what K-Dramas can teach us about our own well-being and how we can use the lessons they teach us to live better and more meaningful lives. She also touches upon the powerful interrelationship between K-dramas, mental health, and belongingness. Topics covered include:
- Using K-Dramas as a roadmap to life, showing you how to navigate speed bumps, roadblocks, twists, turns, and dead ends
- Building cross-cultural relationships that you otherwise may not have without being a K-Drama fan
- Processing grief from the loss of a loved one to a loss of anything - a job, your physical safety, a relationship, or something else
- Harnessing the idea of Jeong, which is innate in Korean society and refers to the emotional sentiment of affinity, affection, kinship, and connection which is the thread throughout Jeanie's community
- Working the author’s trademarked mental health framework, Cultural Confidence®, to build up your mental health, identity, mindfulness, and resilience
For K-Drama fans and enthusiasts and anyone curious about the influence of pop culture, How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life is an entertaining and educational must-read on how this enormously popular global phenomenon can help us become the best versions of ourselves.
Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Introduction xi
Part I The Powerful Intersectionality of K-Dramas and Mental Health 1
Chapter 1 The Global Appeal of K-Dramas 3
Chapter 2 K-Dramas Are for Self-Care 15
Chapter 3 K-Dramas and Processing Grief 35
Chapter 4 K-Dramas and Korean Han 47
Chapter 5 K-Dramas and Healing Our Traumas 57
Chapter 6 K-Dramas and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 71
Chapter 7 K-Dramas and Suicide Awareness 81
Chapter 8 K-Dramas and Coping with Depression 91
Chapter 9 K-Dramas and Managing Anxiety 105
Part II The Powerful Intersectionality of K-Dramas and Identity 117
Chapter 10 K-Dramas and Life Stages 119
Chapter 11 K-Dramas and Cultural Identity 133
Chapter 12 K-Dramas and Neurodiversity 151
Part III The Powerful Intersectionality of K-Dramas and Resilience 159
Chapter 13 K-Dramas and the Workplace 161
Chapter 14 K-Dramas = Belongingness + Jeong 169
Resource List 181
References 183
Acknowledgments 187
About the Author 189
Index 191
