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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.
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"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 13th, 2018
Barcelona. It rains.

 

       Today I want to talk to you about an intervention I carried out the other day. My intention is to be the most concrete as possible, so that you can see how my work moves towards Peace and Good, and young people’s empowerment, since this is the purpose of this diary […]

I present the case. He is 27 years old. He studied and currently works in the audiovisual field. He complains about his working conditions, but at least it’s “not McDonalds or Mediamarkt” (I will introduce his remarks in quotation marks). […] He was feeling “down in the dumps” for a while now. 

He was seeing a psychologist twice a month, but he felt he needed to learn how to manage his emotions, and that’s why he came.

When I get a young person assigned to me, as I do with all my patients, I give him the Hartman Test. Let’s say this test is to me like the navigational chart is to a sailor. The test gives me information concerning the person’s current situation at the moment they take the test, and the parts I can work with and the ones that are blocked.

 When I gave him the test, I got results about the relationship he has with the external world (everything that’s around him: people, things, and systems) and about the inner world, the relationship he has with himself.

Well, the outlook from the test was quite heartbreaking. After giving him the test, I had conversations about his life, his family, his relationship with his parents, with his siblings, some parts of his childhood, as a teenager, his friends, his studies, etc. […]

However, and this is key with him, he was concerned to know “the truth.” He literally said: “I don’t like hypocrisy, I don’t like to be lied to, I value honesty a lot.” When I started seeing this attitude from him, I felt that could be a string I could pull to help him get out of that hole he is and lives in. […] He has conceived this idea within himself that goes something like this: “Ok, life seems to be shit, society is shit, the system we live in is a failure and an absolute lie, and I’m shit in this system.

Nothing makes sense, but even so, is there anything else? Is there something behind all of this? Is it true that there is no better than this?” 

He sees this very clearly, although he keeps adding “buts” and obstacles. One of his classic “buts” is money: “I want to leave the place I’m living in, but I don’t have enough money.”

Regarding this, in my therapeutic work I have to take into account the financial and social circumstances of the person. It is not an abstract work, but a work that is carried out within some specific cultural and socioeconomic circumstances. These circumstances and conditions are ingredients to have in mind, but are NEVER a decisive factor, rather a condition.

Finally, I offered him a deal: since he doesn’t have the dough to look for another flat, let’s start with his job, on the vocation side, and since he works in the audiovisual world and likes anthropology (he told me that on one of our previous sessions), why not make an ethnographic documentary?

We pursued two objectives with regards to this documentary:

A/ Work on vocation: What do I want to do with my career, considering my interests and likes?

B/ Work on personal development using the process of making the documentary. In this process, he will have to face his fears, his laziness, his “I can’t”, “I don’t want”, “I don’t allow myself;” he will have to break his usual family system,

take on different roles that are not the ones he is used to (“cranky”, “defeated”, “abandoned”) and stimulate other more proactive roles, that think positively, that have the courage to do what he is not used to do.

I have to tell you that, at a methodology level, I strongly believe and follow learning through experience and action, and in that sense, I take a lot from coaching and progessive pedagogy.

I don’t like taking too much time with the young patient talking constantly about his childhood and adolescence traumas. We have to take care of them, but to put them at the service of useful action, so that they can build new inner and external spaces in the life of this kid. My therapeutic style has a marked

educational signature, since it’s from the field I come from.                                

I know this process will have its ups and downs, that it could even fail, but whatever happens will allow him to observe himself, through action, and to be aware of the machine he lives in, the machine of automatized process formed by three components: Body, mind, and emotions; and this process is developed in two levels: The conscious (which make a 10%) and the subconscious (which makes the rest 90%). 

My function is to be with him encouraging and giving resources. In the last term and from a deep respect for his life (even if it hurts), the decision of what to do depends on him, and here it is where empowerment resides. 

He decides which attitude he will live his life and the world around him.

 

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#autonomy #bond #economic_resources #mentorship #rafa #self_esteem