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70
PPT Journal “THE GLOBAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST” Volume 3. Number 1. January 2023
Section: Transcultural reflections https://doi.org/10.52982/lkj182
ISSN 2710-1460 WAPP
MENTALITY OF KAZAKHSTANI PEOPLE
THROUGH THE EYES OF THE METHOD OF
POSITIVE AND TRANSCULTURAL
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Aizhan Adilbayeva
Basic Consultant in PPT (Atyrau, Kazakhstan)
Email: mrsadilbayevaa@gmail.com
Received 15.11.2022
Accepted for publication 30.12.2022
Published 20.01.2023
Abstract
The article provides the reflection of Kazakh culture and mentality in the context of Positive
psychotherapy. The author is a Kazakh woman who was born and grew up in a traditional Kazakh family,
is also a Basic consultant in Positive psychotherapy, lived and studied offline in Turkey, Finland, South
Korea and Russia. Positive psychotherapy is the method that is based on a transcultural view. It covers
both eastern and western cultures. The mentality of Kazakh people, values, culture, and tradition are
reflected in the article by using the Conflict model, the Balance model, primary and secondary capabilities,
and a family treatment model of Positive psychotherapy. The key conflict for most Kazakh people is in
being polite and not telling about their true feelings and thoughts. The concept that "talking a lot is bad"
is widespread among Kazakhs. An example of a general conflict model of Kazakh people is presented in
the article.
Keywords: positive and transcultural psychotherapy, Kazakh mentality, Kazakh history, Balance model,
Conflict model
Introduction
Republic of Kazakhstan originated in 1465
when Zhanibek and Kerei khans united the clans
throughout the Kazakhstan territory into one
country and called it “Kazakh khandygy”. The
Kazakh nation had a nomadic life style before the
Soviet Union came to Kazakhstan. Therefore, most
of the Kazakh traditional life depends on cattle
breeding. The Kazakh mentality is closer to the
Eastern way of thinking than to the Western.
However, globalisation is having its effect on the
youth of the country. There are no barriers
between cultures for Kazakh people. At the same
time, youth tend to be patriotic and to modernise
old Kazakh culture. Today the manner of
appearance, clothing with old Kazakh images is
trending, for example.
Positive psychotherapy is the method that is based
on a transcultural view. It covers both eastern and
western cultures of the world. As the author
Nossrat Peseschkian says himself, it is better to
use eastern wisdom and western rationalism. He
uses oriental stories in his psychotherapies as a
tool for healing patients.
As the mentality of the Kazakhstani population
comes from the eastern culture, the oriental
stories are very widely used to teach and explain
anything to everyone from children to elders. If we
look at the methods in this transcultural
psychotherapy, through the balance model,
Kazakh people tend to place greater value on the
spheres of contacts and future.
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THE GLOBAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Volume 3. Number 1. January 2023 Aizhan Adilbayeva
In the late 8th century, when the Islamic
lifestyle came to the Kazakh land, people used to
write in the Arabic alphabet and in the 13th
century the alphabet used changed into Latin
letters.From the 1940s until now the Cyrillic
alphabet has been used. During all these
changesm, it has been hard for people to master a
new type or alphabet. They tend to learn
everything by heart and pass on knowledge by
reading poems, proverbs, storytelling and singing
songs. The Kazakh nation has many writers, poets,
singers and orators. One of the main reasons why
I was impressed by this method of using oriental
stories in psychotherapy is this. We have grown up
on stories. Even whebn a Kazakh mother is trying
to explain to her child that he has done something
bad, she uses Kazakh proverbs and stories.
Methodology
The transculturality of the method also points
out the values of a person and his family. I will try
to show this for the population. This is the
reflection of Kazakh culture and mentality in the
context of positive psychotherapy. I am a Kazakh
woman who was born and grew up in a Kazakh
family with all the traditions and mentality. Also, I
am a basic consultant of positive psychotherapy
who has lived and studied offline in places such as
Turkey, Finland, South Korea and Moscow.
I will try to reflect the mentality of Kazakh
people, their values, culture, and tradition by
using the conflict model, the balance model,
primary and secondary capabilities, and the family
treatment model of the positive psychotherapy
method.
Figure 1. Actual capacities (based on Peseschkian, 2016)
Positive psychotherapy offers to consider two
main categories of capabilities of a person (Fig. 1.),
they are love and perception. If we look into how
babies are nurtured in a culture, we can see which
is more important for that nation. Babies are lying
in the cradle in a shelter in order to protect them
from other people who are not family. Because
Kazakh people have lots of guests in their homes,
here we can accentuate “Courtesy” as one of the
main factors in describing Kazakhs. But, a
newlywed mother is also limited somehow, she
cannot hold her baby every moment, because the
baby is tied in his/her cradle. The mother is raising
the child without taking him/her in her arms. The
baby is hearing everything, smelling Mom but
lying in an independent place. Kazakh children are
not physically attached to their mothers and
family, since they are independent from birth.
However, they are very patriotic and always
attached to their families in a moral way. For
example, they can easily study abroad or in
another city far from home, as they are very
adaptable, but never cut their ties with their
family, country and nation. It all starts from “the
cradle”, actually.
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THE GLOBAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Volume 3. Number 1. January 2023 Aizhan Adilbayeva
As for Kazakh parents, they see their children
as a mission and are very afraid to pamper them,
so they generally give their first children to their
own parents to raise. Thus, the first baby of the
family is generally brought up by the granmother.
That is why parents cannot easily curse the
firstborn, and the oldest child is greatly respected
in the eyes of younger ones. One of the main
values for Kazakh people is “respecting elders”,
which is comparable to the secondary capability of
“Obedience” in positive psychotherapy. The eldest
child has his own duties toward the youngest
ones, Kazakhs call them “the frontest wheels of a
carriage”, they wish each other to have a firm
“front wheels”, because rear wheels will follow
them anyway. Another capability of the method is
“Responsibility”.
Figure 2. Balance model (Peseschkian, 2016)
The Kazakh nation is more spiritual and
emotional than Western nations. (Fig. 2). The
lifestyle is more focused on contacts and meaning.
However, the Kazakh people tend to work hard,
they easily get bored or like to "ease the shore."
That’s why this people mostly call themselves lazy.
Most Kazakhstani working people are brilliant in
“thinking professions’ rather than doing,
executing. They are good ideologists. In the
context of the physical sphere of life, the lifestyle
has nomadic roots, cattle breeding rules and there
was no time or energy to tend to the needs of the
body. For example, while sheep breeding a person
is horseback riding. When one wears a Kazakh
national outfit and accessories it holds the spinal
cord straightand the belly tight. Hunters kept their
eyes, arms, and legs healthy by archery and eagle
launching. Kazakh people eat cow, sheep and
horse meat. They believe that meat improves
muscle, drinking soup helps to improve skin. For
that reason, there are many boxers and sportsmen
from Kazakhstan. We have many boxers but a very
few football players.
In the workplace, the sphere of achievement,
most Kazakh professionals do not work for money
but for power and title. Therefore, they may have
a very low salary but a high title. Being a teacher,
a doctor, a scientist, a minister is more honourable
than being a freelancer or a businessman.
Although being rational is preferable for
Kazakh people, we are an emotional nation. That
is why we have a lot of artistic professionals,
famous artists, poets, writers, dancers, singers,
and composers.
Lastly, about “Spirituality”, the Kazakh nation is
very superstitious. There are lots of traditions that
no one knows the reason for but can list thousands
of profits. One of them is “karma”, and that is the
reason for the importance of the capability of
“Justice”.
Most Kazakh people used to live exactly as their
parents and families did, so most conflicts are
between parents and children. Although conflicts
take place, most people have great difficulty with
changes in their lifestyle. Once I was lecturing a
seminar about raising a child and how to have
good communication with Kazakh teenagers. A
father of a primary-school student advocated not
telling them about foreign literature. He said: “no
one died because their father had beaten them in
childhood or none of the women sitting there as
mothers became bad persons”. Actually, we were
talking about the same thing with this father, but
in different ways. This is the story of how I started
to explain about the positive psychotherapy
method as not being foreign-based but
transcultural. A general example of the conflict
model with Kazakh people is given in Fig. 4.
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THE GLOBAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Volume 3. Number 1. January 2023 Aizhan Adilbayeva
Figure 3. Main PPT concepts and models (based on Peseschkian, 2016)
For the Fig. 4, imagine any middle-aged or even
young Kazakh man or woman. He/she may be
married or not, it doesn’t matter. In both
situations, they may have issues with their parents.
Most of them have chronic health problems,
especially those that appear when one cannot
express one's feelings and emotions verbally. This
happens because there is no place for such words
in our mentality. We love talking, we are sociable
but not about our feelings. That is not so good in
Kazakh culture. People cope with it mostly through
Sublimation. They sing songs, they draw pictures,
they write poems, novels, and books. Back in the
past, daughters could not visit their parents’
houses after marriage and could not tell them
anything, so they sewed carpets for their parents
to express their feelings. Kazakh culture is
described by only a musical instrument called
Dombra, they played ‘kuis’ on dombra, and it was
music without words,. Especially “bad news” was
expressed to people by these ‘kuis’. There is a story
about a ‘khan’ (emperor) who felt the approaching
death of his son who had gone to war. He
threatened to kill any person who would bring him
this “bad news”. The messenger passed the news
through this “kui” (music without words), of course
it sounds very dramatic, also expressing how the
emperor’s son died. This is another example of the
lack of the capability of “Sincerity” among Kazakh
people.
If they want to be sincere, it will be accepted as
being disobedient, disrespectful. So, most of the
psychosomatic cases among Kazakhs are Asthma,
Chronic coughs, Allergies, Skin problems (Lack of
sensitive Love), thyroid problems.
The Model of Conflict among Kazakhs shown
above illustrates that the Conflict in the Sphere of
Contacts affects the body through psychosomatic
expression and also goes to the Sphere of Future.
This is young people's fear of living the same life as
their parentsand they escape to the Sphere of
Achievement. They mostly become nervous,
fearful and aggressive after any actual conflict with
parents. In order to cope with this, they work hard
and mostly become successful. They fulfil their
relationship with their parents by making them
proud of being successful, rich, or famous. The
problem starts when they have to separate from
their parents, either by the parents' death or by
living far from them because their life has been
built on receiving acknowledgement from their
parents.
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THE GLOBAL PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Volume 3. Number 1. January 2023 Aizhan Adilbayeva
Figure 4. Conflict model of Kazakh people (based on Peseschkian, 2016)
Discussion
The Kazakh nation focuses on Perception
rather than Love. Their lifestyle accentuates the
/Spheres of Contacts and Spirituality. Their
conflicts happen mostly in the Sphere of Contacts
and in processing in the Emotional and Body
spheres. The capabilities in deficit are love,
fondness, trust in others, confidence in self, time
and honesty; excessive capabilities are justice,
obedience, responsibility, conscientiousness,
doubt and being a model/ example for others. The
key conflict here is being polite and not telling
one's true feelings and thoughts. Basic conflict
appears to be as “being afraid of experiencing the
same thing as your parents” or “ what you do to
parents will happen to you” in the “I” sphere,
which is built on an interaction of your parents
with you. Chances are that Kazakh people's' need
for Love is not satisfied. On the other hand, all
their success was built on satisfying needs of
Perception.
Conclusions
Although my reflection needs further study, I
have tried to analyse it by using my own culture
and my knowledge about positive psychotherapy,
also I used my experience of counselling. The
Kazakh nation is not widely known in other
countries except the bordering neighbours of
Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, China,
Turkey from Europe, and Mongolia. That is the
main reason I tried to write this reflection. I want
to help this method to be used widely in
Kazakhstan as well.
The Kazakh nation is very open to learning new
things, as there are many people who wish to
improve and develop. As I have said above, Kazakh
people are focused on a capability of perception.
They work hard, read books, do science, and study
throughout their whole lives. This is more like
escape to Achievement because of the great
deficiency of the Capability of Love. This is the
greatest need which the therapy sessions treat.
References
[1] DRAZHEVA, E. (2021). Preliminary Study of the
"Separation Anxiety" Phenomenon Through The Eyes
Of The Method Of Positive And Transcultural
Psychotherapy. The Global Psychotherapist, Vol. 1, No.
1, pp. 22-26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52982/lkj137
[2] PESESCHKIAN, N. (2016). Positive psychotherapy of
everyday life. Bloomington, USA: AuthorHouse. 326 p.
(first German edition in 1977).
[3] PESESCHKIAN H., REMMERS A. (2020). Positive
Psychotherapy: An Introduction. In: Messias E.,
Peseschkian H., Cagande C. (eds), Positive Psychiatry,
Psychotherapy and Psychology, (pp. 3-9). Springer,
Cham.