Context Is Everything: How to Navigate Life in Multiple Realities

Television, movies, news, and social media; we're living in a world where we're inundated with stories and information. Yet somehow, instead of learning about each other and coming together, our nation is more divided than ever. Despite our access to facts and information, research indicates that our distrust of others is at a record high. In everyday interactions, we deal with people who seem to be operating in an entirely different reality than us—because they are.

In Context is Everything: How to Navigate Life in Multiple Realities, author David James Bright explains how each of us is raised in our own unique context and how that context shapes our identity, narratives, beliefs, and willingness to interpret facts. Bright pulls from his extensive work as a mental health, career, and school counselor to help readers better understand how we create our own social narratives and identities.

Through personal anecdotes, real-world examples, case studies, doses of humor, and research, you'll learn how our personal biases and tendencies can affect how we interact with others, especially those with different life experiences or those of different social classes, ethnic backgrounds, sexual identities, or political affiliations.

By facilitating greater levels of personal understanding and self-reflection, Context is Everything encourages readers of all backgrounds to recognize our common thread of humanity and to come together despite our varying worldviews and perspectives.

David James Bright is an assistant professor of counselor education at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is also a mental health therapist at Infinity Mental Health Counseling in New Paltz, New York, where he assists clients in processing anxiety, depression, grief and loss, relationship challenges, trauma, and career indecision.