Skip

Climb up wherever you are. Your path is like a scrapbook, a handful of pages to revisit, decisions made, inadvertent high scores and lucky mistakes. What factors have brought you to where you are?

Orbital Logbooks allows you to browse through a collage of impressions that ten professionals from the field of education have collected over the course of a year in their field journals.

The journey is an infinite, circular itinerary, which we encourage you to follow as you like so that you lose yourself in the different stages that make up the landscape of empowerment.

Orbital logbooks
Empowerment is a continuous, infinite journey. The circle you will see next aims to be its representation. In it are situated, in the form of coloured circumferences, the different stages of the empowerment process that ten professionals in the field of education have defined with their thoughts and reflections. By selecting them, you will be able to see what stage they refer to and you will discover the materials made to describe it.

The different colours correspond to three types of resources:
The green circumferences contain pages from field journals.
The orange ones, audio-visual pieces on specific topics, recorded by the educators themselves.
The yellow ones contain fragments of four focus groups where participants shared experiences.

Through these materials, you will be able to delve into the meaning of a term as abstract and multifaceted as that of youth empowerment; circulating through its stages, from prior reflection to the evaluation of the results obtained.

In the menu on the top right, you can learn more about the project and also access an archive of the materials, where you can filter them by specific concepts and interests.
This page has been elaborated following the recommendations of the use of non-sexist language. Therefore, as far as possible, we have used generic expressions that include gender diversity.
SCROLL
|

"My name is Rafa Cortés. I have been working with young people since I was young, for over twenty years. I have always been linked to the field of education and associationism and, for the past 8 years, also, in the field of psychotherapy. I currently work as a therapist specializing in youth and as a teacher in the Axioma Association, of which I am a founding member, and in the leisure time education school Escola Lliure el Sol.

I have a degree in sociology from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona), I have a Master's degree in Youth and Society from the UdG (University of Girona) and training in Axiometry with Janine Rodiles, Family Constellations with Marta Albadalejo Mur, Music Therapy with Jordi Delclós and Theatre-Clowning with Pau Rosell.

Being able to accompany young people in their growth and healing processes fills me with satisfaction."

November 22nd 2018
Reencounter

 

Today I want to talk to you again about the 27-year-old man who works in the audiovisual field.

 We had agreed that he was going to work on his vocation and career with an ethnographic documentary. The homework I asked him for the next session, which happened this week, was for him to make a brief draft. […] He didn’t bring anything. […] I thought: Well, he didn’t bring anything, let’s work on that “nothing” that he brought.

We talked and, with the help of a test, we saw that he lives through his work, that is, the value of his life is on his work.

He has difficulties seeing and feeling good about himself, he even struggles to understand what it means to “be with yourself.”

Excluding his role as worker, the rest of the areas in his life have been ignored. That’s why he has problems taking on other social roles, such as son, friend or partner; the corporal neglect he is at right now (a great inattention of his physiological needs); the disconnection from his emotions and feelings (he lives with them in a confused manner); the disconnection from his vocation (he doesn’t know the profound meaning of his role in this world), etc.

What happens to him is something very common in our present society: many people live through their work and forget

that besides being workers they are also living beings with other vital dimensions.

The result: Anxiety, angst, depression, and skyrocket sales of drugs. 

Coming to this point in the analysis, we went a bit deeper, and we had a look at the possible relationship between his current situation and his relationship with his family.

To do this, we turned to the representation of his family system with Playmobils. This technique consists of picking dolls that represent him, his father, his mother, his siblings (if he has) and his four grandparents, and putting them on the table in the order he wants. From this representation, we “play” with their meaning.

I love this technique because it allows energy to come to the surface from his unconscious. The representation he creates is the inner mental image he has regarding his family, and it reveals some of the dynamics that are happening at an unconscious level.

I compare this information with the test and his testimony, and it’s surprising the level of accuracy it has. 

Conclusion: What’s happening to him at work (he sinks because he doesn’t feel acknowledged by his boss on an aspect that he considers a pillar in his life) it’s only an old pattern, that is: The search for his mother’s, and to a lesser degree his father’s, appreciation. This search is reflected on the outside, in his social interactions. 

If he’s acknowledged, he feels good; if he gets criticized, he sinks. He needs to develop his own value. How? 

We will keep working on this through a Socratic method, test analysis, representations, visualizations, etc. But, before all that, and this is key for therapeutic healing, from sharing a quality moment to listen and accept him, where he can pour all his pain, from rejection, neglect, that have left a big 

affective hole within himself. That’s the key of all healing: Being treated with love, so that we can see ourselves with love and see others with love as well.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#educational_intervention #family #job #rafa #self_esteem