Dimitris Karagiannis: “Does man change?” – psycho-graphs

“Does man change?” interview by Dimitris Karagiannis, Psychiatrist - Psychotherapist, with Demosthenes Gaveas and Psycho-graphs.

How much pain and equivalent courage does it take to say I will change? Is hope ultimately a blessing? How many dead ends do you have to find yourself in to seek change? How many times have you said "today I change" and you remain the same or almost the same? How many fruitless attempts and how many failures can someone endure? How many times will you say "let's start again from the beginning"? And all the stages of your life? They are so easily erased? Those who were crushed by our mistakes? What will you say to them? "Sorry, but have I changed?". All this accumulated memory? All these promises? Those that we believed and those that we made others believe? What to change in a society and a place where not only does nothing change, but the "work" becomes worse? The illness of a friend, a parent, loss? Those that have been and those that will come? Changes that we didn't ask for, but knocked on our door and that I feel are lurking in some corner? Will life take the initiative for change, as it has been doing for centuries now? If so, then where am I? Do I have a say in all this?

With these thoughts I had already arrived at my appointment. The look of the children and their parents waiting to see the mental health specialists "burned" me inside. Right after the good morning with him Child Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Director of the Child Psychiatric Clinic Center, Mr. Dimitris Karagiannis, I expressed my dismay at what I had just witnessed.

"Indeed, but you don't know what wonderful things are happening with these children!" he replied, his gaze lighting up. He had already set the tone for the "torrent" interview that would follow, on the occasion of the publication of his new book entitled "Does man change?"» from Armos publications.

Coming to meet you, I observed the apartment buildings with cage-like apartments, the dingy city, and I thought of Aris Konstantinidis, who called houses containers of life. If architecture is the identity of the city, then by extension it is also our identity. What change can we achieve in such an environment of ugliness?

Ugliness is a fact, just as it is a fact that it comes to destroy. The problem is not that there is no beautiful aesthetic, it is not that something is produced that we may not like, but there is something that comes and destroys the beauty that actually exists in the city. There is decay, you see its touch everywhere and all this refers to a more general abandonment. It is there that people look for an alibi and in the end everyone finds their alibi in order not only not to create something good, but to ruin whatever good there may be.

But we must admit that there is also health, which resists and within these cages of apartment buildings, as you characterized them, there is also life. So we cannot speak only in terms of external aesthetics. We must also talk about the beauty that can exist in a family that lives in a small house. I can see the beauty on the balcony of this family where the woman will have spread her clothes on it in a very beautiful way.

What I want to say is that we must also take into account the microclimate that is created in the city, and every person, every family, every couple, has the right and obligation to create this microclimate, which will then become the structure on which they will build their lives.

Therefore, whether it is external ugliness, or the economic hardship that invades and makes it difficult for all of us, or the questioning of some value systems, which comes through globalization or through the internet, we must understand that it is not the destruction of the world, on the contrary it can be the possibility of producing something good. So instead of complaining and protesting about the graffiti in the city, let's try to create beauty in our lives.

Speaking about the relationship between structure and man, you say in your book that permanent structure implies rigidity, permanent flow chaos. Where is man in an era where everything is deconstructed and flow is the dominant factor to the point where we don't have time to follow any developments?

This limitless flow is precisely the point where everyone tries to escape into the moment, thus losing sight of long-term goals. That is why we suffer on a social level. We have learned to look ahead to the next election, if not sooner.

On a personal level, if we simply look for moments, then we end up not having a continuity that will set us up and the structure that in turn will allow the new to exist. This hunt for moments hides the denial of death, the fear of death, as when the goal, the meaning is lost, then we are in a panic and do not know where to start and that is when we become consumers of situations, people, relationships and we lose the concept of the creator.

Because if I set a goal I can defend creativity, which cannot be stagnant, cannot be rigid. Rigidity is the opposite of creation. This is how we escape from the chaotic, which also nullifies the concept of creation.

Change as a slogan and Santa Claus

For years now, Greeks have been hearing about change. It is the favorite word of our politicians and yet it seems to change nothing, but we are in a constant state of regression. Are we incapable of change? Where do you find the ankylosis or fixations?

Change as a political slogan sells and often sells for the same people who treat it as a promise and reuse it as a disentanglement with the previous situation, that is, again as change. When people ask for change to be given to them by others, they are in a childish attitude since they do not take personal responsibility.

Although I must say that Santa Claus is real. Of course, this means that some adults will have to go buy gifts, find the money for them and then take care to create the appropriate festive atmosphere. Then yes, there is Santa Claus. But if we think like little children and expect every politician to be this Santa Claus, who will bring us gifts, then at some point we will wake up and admit that he does not exist. Only taking responsibility in our personal lives can bring changes and slogans about political change, without the corresponding taking of responsibility on the part of citizens, are nothing more than an empty shirt.

Do we as Greeks need psychology to change? Since we have philosophy. Our ancient ancestors had as a guide, among other things, "those who philosophize correctly study until they die." Couldn't this be a guide today?

Indeed, our ancient ancestors called it the study of death, the Church Fathers called it the memory of death. It was an important parameter in life. However, today in Western societies the great taboo is death and not sex, in any form, as some believe. Dealing with death becomes something prohibitive. Let me just point out that in the recent revision of the DSM, the diagnostic criteria of the American Psychiatric Association, mourning was removed from the normal states and included with depression. This means that even mental health experts refuse to talk about death and see it as a normal function of life.

Of course, whoever denies death, lives constantly with death. However, whoever knows how to read death well begins to wonder what the important meaning of life is, tries to give his own personal answer, which will allow him to think about what is important, what is truly worthwhile. Of course, this specific question causes difficulties, but it also does something else, it moves you forward. Answers can and do occur that are liberating and then surprises may arise that can get us out of the binds we have when we see our present as if there is no future or when we live only in the present.

This is what is very important about death and that is why in our therapeutic approach (the existential systemic approach) we ask the question “where are you going?” “what do you want to become?” Even to older adults we will ask the same or we ask “how do you want us to see the problem you are bringing to me? How do you want us to deal with it?” In other words, we return again to the concept of responsibility, to define things yourself and not let any problems define you.

I must say, regarding the concept of death, that if Western societies incriminate it, traditional societies risked suspending life in the name of death. If for some Westerners there is no life after death, in traditional societies you risked the logic that this life has no value and only the afterlife is important and true. It is exactly the same logic that places death as more important than life, while in our case death gives meaning to life.

From the salons of Vienna...

Since you mentioned the West, how did psychotherapy from the salons of Vienna, which concerned a certain class of people, become dominant in a society like ours, which until a few years ago was rural? Does the simple, everyday working person have the psycho-intellectual tools to grasp the various concepts? Is this just another fad?

If I cannot “meet” a family of any economic and educational class and talk essentially about their lives then I have lost it and psychotherapy that cannot touch them is a denial of psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is a pretentious language, a glossary among some closed groups that delight in a word-mania then we are on a dangerous path. Genuine psychotherapy is exactly the opposite. To meet the other and to serve him. Because therapy is always this concept of serving.

Woe to the glossary if it is the same in different cases, but woe also if the meanings you have to share, if the positions you have to give do not have the same solid foundation. So we are talking about the same life issues, which are universal and we have to shape them into the ways of being of each one.

Secondly, if psychotherapy is a fashion, then it is a dangerous fashion. These American things like the seven-step formula to change your life are of the same logic as the political slogan about change. We are again dealing with a scientific populism and I must emphasize that the people who go to these "experts" are also responsible and complicit, because they essentially do not want to see themselves, to try to gain a substantial self-knowledge.

So there is indeed superficial psychology that is harmful because it asks people to adapt to life, but we dare and differentiate ourselves. In England, insurance companies are currently asking for four to five sessions to finish, they don't care if the other person is an alcoholic, what they are primarily interested in is that the other person is functional and that they are at work on Monday. Therefore, if we are talking about such psychotherapy that can make them obedient organs so that they can be produced in the machine, then it is certainly not a good thing when we on the other hand ask such questions.

Relationships and healing

How did people in the past manage to cope with very difficult situations and bring about change without the help of a specialist?

Every genuine and honest relationship is therapeutic. The same goes for psychotherapy that takes place in offices. There can be no healing if there is no genuine relationship. The friend who will push you in a difficult moment instead of having your back can be therapeutic. The relationships, the looks that we can receive throughout our lives, in difficult moments, from people who will not feel sorry for us, who will not make remarks to us, who will not give us advice, but will surround us and tell us, “go ahead, you have it”, knowing the difficulties and not hiding them, all of this is therapeutic. People who struggle with their lives themselves can act as role models for all of us and be therapeutic just by existing and living! This is also an honest way for anyone who does not sell their ideas, but lives honestly with what they defend. These are the life models that give you courage and can help us make changes.

So the genuine relationships, the community structures that existed in the past, became therapeutic structures. In mourning, for example, there was the community, the extended family, but today these have shrunk, what are we going to do? So we have the responsibility as adults to create such structures. Now they will not be given structures, they will not belong to the extended family, but to the friends we choose, to the relationships we create so that they are authentic and can not only be for the difficult moment, but can also be for the beautiful things that we can share. The beautiful things that can motivate us and give us the opportunity to think creatively, to be inspired to do something more.

Modernization of tradition

The family and communities are shrinking, the Greek finds himself in a division with himself, those around him, with his history and his tradition. If you don't love and accept what defines you, how will there be change?

We have a responsibility to read tradition in a way that corresponds to today. Not to be a memorial for tradition, but to make it a functional tool in the now. When we talk about tradition, in art, civilization, in our culture, we cannot speak in terms of a previous period because that is too shortsighted. Otherwise, why not take the tradition all the way back to the Neanderthals? And they are not part of our tradition? So why should we stay only in the previous 100 years and not in the depths of centuries?

So again, what is tradition? Tradition, if we want to be honest, is functionality. To make functional use of what is available around you. Look at the traditional houses that do not have the same roofs everywhere. If we put a Pelion roof in the Cyclades, then the house will be dysfunctional and certainly not traditional, since in the Cyclades there is the terrace that is designed to collect rainwater. If the logic of the Cycladic terrace were applied to Pelion, then in winter it would collapse from the snow. So the traditional is the functional, what corresponds and that you make use of in the place and time you are in. They are the tools that you have and you use them to find functional solutions.

To be more clear, traditional is not just some elements of the agricultural period of our country, but it is the way of thinking, the way of being, that produced these. Traditional is not embroidery, flokati, traditional is where there was a need for a blanket, for some heating, they made it but pay attention, not only at the level of need but they added desire and beauty. They had the ability to beautify the necessary and did not remain in deprivation based only on the materials they had.

If we want to be traditional nowadays, we have to be very inventive. We have to do a thousand crazy things, to make use of everything digital. At the same time, and I point this out, we have to be careful not to become someone else's tools. That is, to keep the concept of the personal that existed within the traditional. Not everything was the same. Even from place to place, neighboring villages differentiated and applied a different technique to the same subjects. That is where the beauty lies, in the personal. They avoided the flat, the uniform. We have to keep this as traditional today.

Let's negotiate our difficulties

In your book you “play” with the concept of time. You argue that change is directly interdependent on time. The time of decision to change. You propose a journey that goes directly into the future in order to radically overturn the data of the past, using the personal responsibility that the “traveler” must assume. But what if a series of unfortunate events has preceded it and the evil is not due to our own fault?

At times in our lives we feel difficulty in the face of the issues we have to deal with, and many mental health experts experience this as well. So people treat difficulty as something bad. The subjective feeling of discomfort, sadness, fear, pain, a sense of helplessness, a sense of impasse, anxiety, tension, they record it as something only negative, as a dysfunction. They then begin to wonder “what was wrong”, “where was I wrong?”, “who is to blame?”, “is it someone else’s fault… is it my fault?” A situation is created where all these negative feelings are recorded as failure. But let’s look at it as it really corresponds. Too many issues that make our lives difficult are not issues of dysfunction but purely developmental.

To put it simply: a 2.5 – 3.5 year old child is certain to change shoes before they wear out, and this is not because the shoes or the child’s foot are problematic, but because the child’s foot grows faster. So here there is a difficulty as we have to pay to buy new shoes as the child grows. But here we have a blessing! So these are the developmental problems.

In every phase of development we also go through a phase of destabilization. In destabilization, the emotions that arise are not pleasant and we risk recording them as negative, when they are not. What we should think about in similar cases is: “if I am struggling right now, it is not because something bad has happened, but because I am going and aiming for something better to go somewhere different.”

The student who takes the national exams and aims for a more demanding school will have much more difficulty than the one who will not take the exams or who is not interested in the exams, will feel burdened, but has to look to the future and think about why he is struggling. The same applies to relationships between couples, which sometimes have difficulty, not necessarily because someone is to blame, but because they are moving on to the next stage of development. People who give up on their relationships when they are faced with a difficulty are exactly at that point where they will be recycled, where they will experience something similar again with the next partner. That is how far they will get. On the contrary, those who can withstand negotiating the difficulty will be able to find themselves at a higher level of functionality.

When unpleasant things "knock" at your door

You write in your book: “In difficult times, borrow from your future!” And what if the future looks like a thriller?

What we are about to experience is not a thriller. As the years go by and we go along with them, I hope we will experience even more difficult situations than the ones we are facing now.

If the wishes of the people who wish us on our birthdays "to make it a hundred years", what does this mean? It means that they wish us to be weak, to lose a lot of strength, to have gone through many illnesses, to have mourned many of our own people. Isn't that what they wish for us? This is not a thriller, it is something that is sure to happen... it makes the track difficult in the development of our lives. So I repeat that this is something developmental, you lose some strength but you can become richer in wisdom, if of course this thought process has started much earlier and not at the last moment, because then evil and misery are added. A thriller lives as an end, the one who makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Should we go back to the student or the couple and see them a few years in the future? I feel like we are ignoring that in the journey of life, many traumas, failures, disappointments accumulate, the list can be long.

Again we are talking in childish terms, in terms like, "I will play when I finish my lessons". Students often say: "when I enter the university I will finally live". Then what will happen is that they will sink, as is often the case today with students. It's like they've been burned in the previous phase and then let go and sink. This is helped by both the professors, many of whom do not care, and the university institutions with their lack of care.

A childish attitude is also the student's thought that after university all jobs will be open to him. Of course, in such anticipation, disappointment is a given. What we must know from the first moment is that we will always fight battles. Therefore, in both personal and professional life, the obvious thing is to produce, to solve problems, to face difficulties. This is the obvious thing, this is the exciting game of life.

Yes, but what would you say to the middle-aged unemployed person in Greece today, or to the cancer patient who knows he has a few months to live?

The second one is easier for me to answer. I have a hard time every time I have to be with people who are in this phase because their time is precious and concentrated and there is no room for misery, self-pity and false consolations. I have lived with them very difficult, unbearably difficult moments, but at the same time very rich and very meaningful ones. That's why I told you that it is easy for me to answer.

Anyone who wants to speak in terms of self-pity in such cases is already dead, and not only that. It's as if they want to drag everyone around them to die too, or they feel guilty because they will live.

Those who have decided to stand differently are wonderful and are living many lives during these months, and this is not a figure of speech, it is something I have experienced.

As for the unemployed middle-aged man, I don't like it as an identity. That is, as if he is going to define himself with a term that, if he accepts it, will become an element of his identity. When I ask people what they do and they tell me they are retired, I ask them again and comment to them "I didn't ask you what you don't do, I asked you what you do."

"Unemployed" cannot be an element of our identity, it can be a phase we live through. So the one who will find himself in this phase should look at what he can use from his previous course, ask himself about many issues and find solutions.

I can't feel sorry for him, I haven't felt sorry for any person so far in my life, why should I feel sorry for a middle-aged man who, if he is healthy, can find solutions. What I am saying may seem harsh, but I am not a politician to feel guilty. However, I have to make sure that people don't sink, that they wake up and develop the strengths they have. While it seems that what I am saying is harsh and it seems that I don't understand, in essence it is exactly the opposite, I care. If I feel sorry for the middle-aged unemployed man, what should I do with the young couple who gave birth to an autistic child or whose child has myopathy and will never walk, will be in bed and his mind will be working, while he will need constant help and be at risk of any infection?

Really, what will you tell them? What change will they make in their lives when change has come knocking on their door?

The first thing I have to say honestly and clearly is that I wouldn't want anything to happen to me. If we don't talk like that then we're making fun of them and these people will have the right to get angry and either openly or when you're not present, to wish you well in yours. So I'm very cautious and careful to say easy consolations and advice that would indicate that in essence I don't share them at all.

But at the same time that something very difficult has happened to them, my concern is that they will not self-destruct, that life will prevail, and much more that they will be the ones who will lead their child or derive joy from it despite all the difficulty.

From experience over the years, I can tell you that not everyone, but very many, in such moments, after the first shock, when they have decided in their lives to stand face to face, then they face it and gain much joy.

People who have a severely retarded child, with autism, have much more joy if they truly stand in life. The joy of their child who did not speak saying a word can be greater than having a child who would enter university and that because there have been many efforts, because they have fought. In other words, they can have such life celebrations that are not false. The condition is that they do not sink and sacrifice themselves with their child, but that they move forward in their own lives and that in the progress of life, the child with any difficulty is also included.

Differentiate yourself

At this point I would like you to define for me how you understand change. What is change?

For me, genuine change is differentiation. It is a continuous development, an evolution, which is not always continuous, it is not always step by step. It can also look like discontinuities, like leaps. Although they may seem to happen instantaneously, there has been an internal process before. We are talking about authentic changes, where the processing existed throughout this period and at some point there was also the driving factor that allowed their appearance. Change is a continuous evolution that is not quantitative, that is not necessarily measurable. The change as I wish for it is that we become more and more ourselves.

In the era of Political Correctness

Stable values that were in effect are under attack. Political correctness dominates, which can silence or marginalize. Differentiation can mean resisting what dominates as right and the consequences can be devastating. You previously expressed your opposition to the psychiatry of grief by the American Psychiatric Association, how do you operate in this new context?

I am actually reacting because if mourning is psychiatrically treated then it means that antidepressants should be sold to all those who mourn. They also put pre-menopausal tension in the same category, that is, the week before menstruation when women see things the darkest, the most difficult. Think of 25% of the world's population taking antidepressants for a week, you understand what a turnover of billions we are talking about. So the psychiatrist who will not diagnose mourning as depression risks being denounced at least as graphic, unscientific, and therefore being thrown out.

It is true that there are dangers. Political correctness dominates. For example, the hesitation in America to wish Merry Christmas. So the answer in the globalized era, in the genuine community of peoples and individuals, is for the Muslim to say Merry Christmas to the Christian and the Christian to say Merry Ramadan to the Muslim. Not for both to be lost. We can insist on this and achieve it, not to be afraid.

I think we are in danger of marginalizing ourselves, not necessarily by the system. Marginalization happens when we become defeated, when we lose our intelligence, our ingenuity, when we lose our magic, our determination to lead things differently.

We, for example, are preparing a campaign using all the means and all the scientific powers we can muster to overturn the decision of the American Psychiatric Association, and I hope that after a few years we will be able to be proud of this.

We must not lose our heroism and I do not mean it as self-destruction. Heroism does not mean that I have to sacrifice my life for something good to happen, but I give meaning to my life by transcending my individuality. In new situations, let us not focus on the risk of marginalization, but let us talk about smarter solutions that correspond to today.

Person and Person

You use metaphysical and even theological words and terms, such as, for example, you propose the concept of person over individual.

We cannot speak of a spirituality that has no reflection in reality because then it is not genuine spirituality. If spirituality concerns some closed spaces, some closed groups, then it is not spirituality but a peculiar ideologisation that produces closed lobbies. Genuine spirituality can have a response to all people because the values will either be universal or they will not be true.

Regarding the concept of the person in relation to the individual. It is not an abstract concept that comes only from certain areas. When we do therapies in families, we emphasize that the problem is not individual to the child, but has to do with the relationship. We reframe the problem and thus the relationship automatically has the need for the existence of the person and not the closed individuality that various diagnoses place on it. The systemic view automatically requires the concept of the person, so it has spirituality, but spirituality also has materiality, if it wants to be true.

Will the Cyborgs do psychotherapy?

What kind of change are we talking about when, as you say, the laboratory offers the change. When we have a mix of biological and digital material? When intervention in the brain is the goal and the transhuman is just around the corner? When the majority of citizens are ready for this change? Look at the example of the Swedes, how willing they are to implant a chip in their bodies. Will Cyborgs understand psychoanalysis? Or will we have the psychiatry of society with pills and spectacle?

Both are real prospects if we let ourselves be robotized.

Robots are not something of the future. There are now fully integrated digital programs that learn and become autonomous from their creators. In humans the chips are already being introduced, we have seen, as you commented, the positive reception from the Swedes. So these are situations that exist today and the creators of these digital situations are no longer talking about virtual reality, but about augmented reality. On the other hand, if we deny all the new elements, we have been thrown out. Those who demonize the new tools, those who deny them are ultimately the ones who succumb.

So we have to know them, handle them, be participants in the new reality and be able to put spirituality into it too. The answer to all of this is, not complaints, not being trapped in closed situations, which are deadly. To open ourselves up to life.

What kind of mental immune system should we develop and how does a family prepare its children for a world of insecurity and rapid change?

As for parents. They cannot deny the digital world to their children because either their children will be thrown out or the parents themselves will be thrown out of their children's world. What is the most important thing that parents can bring to their children? Will they be able to give them life experiences? If the real world of the family has joy, is the child at risk of internet addiction? No, is the answer. If the parent loses his joy, sees only dangers and threats, brings only sadness and denounces this whole new situation, what will he do? He will essentially advertise this situation to his child and just as he himself will be addicted to misery, so his child will also become addicted to something that promises to make him escape from it. Of course it will be another addiction.

What language do teenagers speak?

How does the nihilism of today's teenagers translate? Do they want to say something and don't know how to articulate it? Is there a language to translate it for them?

And of course there is! When they feel the essential absence of the parent, when he is closed in his inadequacies, in his anxieties, in his fears, in his difficulties, in individual pursuits or in individual pleasures, which function as a means to escape from the difficult situation he is in, then they will have to find some other spaces in which to feel a presence and to take on an identity. They will join some groups and it will not matter which identity they take on. The important thing is that they will feel that they belong somewhere and this is what I had written in a previous book of mine: “make the destruction of your joy, the joy of destruction”. This is the motto. That is, where they have despaired and have felt that they cannot be happy, by destroying they do an acting out, a dramatization of their inner world.

Dictatorship of DNA. Truth or myth?

Can we talk about psychotherapy today when we can intervene in the brain? There is even talk of removing unpleasant memories. Does heredity play a role? How much does chronic entrapment in a vicious cycle of life allow us to make any change?

I argue, first of all, that this linearity applies to anyone who does not release their freedom.

When I have a person in front of me in the first 20 minutes I know how his life will go in the future and unfortunately I fall into it. I assure you that it is not something magical. After taking some information about his past, I then take information about his present, combine them and extend them into the future. According to the experience I have, the chances of how his life will go are predictable to me. Based on his data and if he decides to go on autopilot, we know that there will inevitably be a predictability.

On the other hand, when I have a client and we have been together for a long time, I lose the ability to predict, because that is where their freedom is activated. I have seen amazing changes when people decided to take their lives into their own hands and moved forward very dynamically. But I have also seen others return to the same when at some point they were left to fate and stopped defending their changes. If freedom is activated, things cease to be predictable.

Yes, certain elements characteristically follow us throughout our lives. Some issues even of our physical existence, our height, our weight, our characteristics, also affect psychological elements, which do not change. But I can choose who I decide to be, as long as I choose.

Again, are we truly free to decide to change when we are bound by our DNA and our brain?

There is DNA that gives us hereditary factors, there are the first 5 years of our lives, which shape a great deal of information about our personality and character, but there is also the blessing of the digital age that gives us new data and I'm not talking about theories, in my book it is the only chapter where I have an infinite bibliography.

In the last 15 years, we have had two Nobel Prizes in medicine that went to American biologists who refer to epigenetics. That is, where the given DNA is modified. Where it is proven that our lifestyle can and does affect our given DNA. These are not theories, we are talking about findings.

Those who talk about the dictatorship of DNA are old-fashioned and have limited scientific knowledge. I admit that its potential exists, its truth exists, but it is not only that. We also have revolutionary data that governs the field of neurology and overturns all these traditions, which wanted our brain to be the "black box", the "closed box", from which all decisions emanate.

The beliefs that we are simply executive organs of a brain that is only biological data that has existed in our lives and that each of us was endowed with, and thus we are bound to follow them, are being overturned.

It was overturned that we are the neuroreceptors, dopamine, serotonin that determine our lives, that is, whether we will be depressed or psychotic. At this moment we have Nobel Prizes in medicine again, from the last decade, that talk about neuroplasticity, where the brain is no longer given areas on which our lives depend, but are circuits, electronic circuits, which can be developed, modified and shaped even by our decisions.

That is, when I decide to determine my life, to change my life and I insist on it, then I also influence my brain and shape new elements with which I can now move forward. Of course, there is what we call brain economy, that is, our brain reads new events through its givens so as not to waste energy, and everything new goes to read it in the old way it knew. So we risk saying "man does not change" and this being confirmed, when we do not decide to change or we are left on autopilot. The brain changes! Man changes, and it is now digitally proven that it can happen through the conscious decisions we make.

What is not freedom?

Hopeful and liberating. But you mentioned the phrase "to liberate our freedom." Freedom from what?

It is not “from what.” If we talk about “freedom from…” then it is a liberation that differs from genuine freedom.

Liberation is to escape from a given situation that I don't like either on a personal level or on a social level. When we try to escape from something we don't like, that's a good thing, it can be a driving force, but it can't be the end, because those who go to escape from certain situations simply don't realize that they are in a new situation, possibly worse than the previous one.

Look at the history of our people. After the liberation struggles we had at all levels, from antiquity to the present, what followed were civil wars. What did we want to escape from? From a conqueror, from an unpleasant situation, but we didn't know where we wanted to go. We hadn't worked out the model we would go to next, so liberation then led to a state of internal war.

The same is true in our lives. So this is where one must see that freedom is not just about escaping, it is not a “freedom from”, but genuine freedom is “freedom to…” That is why we talk about giving meaning to life, that is why we talk about personal meaning, that is why we talk about the future helping you make decisions for today, because that is what liberates genuine freedom.

*Source: huffingtonpost.gr