14.1 Chapter Reading Guide
What gives your life meaning? Do you feel as if you have a purpose? It turns out that many people both ordinary and expert, see family, kinship, love, and children as primary sources of meaning in their lives. In this chapter we will circle back to the hierarchy of needs (HON) first discussed in Chapter 3, and look more deeply at Indigenous ways of creating meaning. We will learn about families who showed resilience and created meaning when facing traumatic acts of oppression. You’ll also have a chance to take a “meaning in life” questionnaire to help you think about meaning and purpose in your own life.
The reading is designed to help you meet the following chapter objectives. Preview those to have an idea of where you are headed. You may also want to preview the key terms that follow. These terms will be bolded the first time they appear in the chapter. You can read the definitions here and also in the hyperlinks.
Chapter Learning Objectives
- Examine meaning and purpose from a theoretical perspective.
- Describe the relationship between family and meaning.
- Describe how people create meaning and purpose in their family lives.
- Distinguish between westernized and Indigenous theories about what is needed in life, and what is meaningful, and how people find meaning.
- Describe how social structures limit and enable people to create meaning and social change.
- Describe the ways that loss and trauma can be linked with meaning and purpose.
- Apply concepts related to meaning and purpose to one’s own observations and experiences.
Key Terms
- Existential psychology: an approach that focuses on the “whole” person and the major concerns of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
- Forced assimilation: the process by which a religious or ethnic minority group is forced to give up their own identity by taking on the cultural characteristics of an established and generally larger community.
- Generativity: the concern for the future and one’s own contribution to the next generation.
- Genocide: the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, by a government or its agents of a racial, sexual, religious, tribal, or political minority. It can involve not only mass murder but also starvation; forced deportation; and political, economic, and biological subjugation.
- Historical trauma: cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations, including the lifespan, which emanates from massive group trauma.
- Generational trauma: trauma that moves from one generation to the next, as experiences of parents affect the biological, social, mental, or emotional development of their children and sometimes also their grandchildren (also “intergenerational trauma” or “multigenerational trauma”).
- Meaning: can include the emotional significance of an action or way of being; the intention or reason for doing something; something that we create and feel; closely linked to motivation.
- Psychosocial model: a framework that emphasizes our relationships and that society’s expectations motivate much of our behavior and the importance of conscious thought.
- Purpose: can include the aim, goal, or intention of an action; a long-term guiding principle; the impact our life has on the world.
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Reading Guide
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Reading Guide” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.