How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health

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.

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

JEANIE Y. CHANG is a global mental health speaker and executive coach. As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, she’s presented her trademarked framework Cultural Confidence^® in corporations, non-profits, and universities around the world. Jeanie’s influence as Noona’s Noonchi is the inspiration behind this book. Today, Noona’s Noonchi^® Inc, is a global wellness, tourism, and media company.