Growing up is a process of uncovering the truth of life and facing it, which involves countless questioning and struggles that break and reshape one’s mind. Self-healing is a lifelong process for everyone, and as a woman growing up in East Asian culture, we are taught to stay strong but also ashamed of being vulnerable, to take care of others’ feelings but also to weaken our own. In the whirlpool of emotions, we often struggle to figure out how to face them and fall into the abyss of nihilism. We always crave a panacea in life, hoping to achieve a perfect life with external help. However, it is not until we come across psychological counseling that we realize that the only one who can truly heal us is ourselves.

In contemporary China, psychological counseling is not as widely accepted as in Western societies. During my years living in the United States, I gradually tried to accept psychological counseling and realized that it is a highly professional and effective way of healing. Psychological counseling aims to create a safe private space for all visitors and uses a series of therapies to help and guide them to find solutions to their own lives. Through graphic design, I hope to introduce ways of psychological healing to audiences who feel helpless in their struggles, just like me, and guide them to find their own solutions.

PART I
VALIDATING EMOTIONS

The validation of emotion is the first step in psychological therapy because all emotions must have a reason behind and they are worth being recognized and validated. Embrace your dark side, negative emotions, and vulnerability to accept your complete self, because the good and the bad are both part of human nature in real life. Freely expressing your true self without embellishing it is therapeutic.


People tend to avoid the dark side of humanity: greed, arrogance, jealousy, delusion, doubt, narcissism... However, these negative parts, just like the positive ones, are rooted in us. Therefore, I designed this project. Each pair of adjectives contains a positive and a negative one, but both have similar meanings. I’m hoping that through this project, my audience can realize that sometimes the positive and negative feelings are the same but in a different range and it entirely depends on how you perceive and control it. It is okay to experience negative feelings and moments in our life because that is how life goes.

PART II
ENCOURAGING
SELF-EXPRESSIONS

For Chinese people, self-expression is particularly difficult. Due to long-term social norms and cultural background, Chinese people tend to be conservative and restrained in communication and are not very used to direct expressions of emotions, especially negative ones. This has led to fierce conflicts in a non-communicative way. Self-expression is very important in psychological therapy, too. And it truly helps people to feel relieved in very severe controversies.

In this chapter, I have researched and summarized some of the controversial topics in contemporary Chinese society, and encouraged both sides of the debate to express their opinions through interviews. These different voices on the same topic are presented in a booklet format. I have decided on the book covers to represent the controversy for each topic.