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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 20th 2018
Holding frustration, our own and others’

Yesterday was a grey day. Particularly, I had a session I wasn’t satisfied with. The session was with a 23-year-old young man. […] In brief, he was struggling to leave his family nest where he’s comfortable but doesn’t feel accomplished. His situation is messed up because even though he feels like he wants to get out of there, in order to do that he has to make an effort that implies giving up that family system and that’s not at all easy at an emotional level. Does he have the strength to give all that up? Not yet.

In the last session, we agreed that he will dedicate one hour a day to look for a job. The result: He hasn’t put any time to

look for a job. He says there are other activities coming up, which he prioritizes, like going out with friends, running, practicing with his band, the leisure club, sleeping until late… He likes those activities, but then he feels remorse.

I feel stuck in the process with him, and that creates me frustration. I feel his “failure” as mine. I analyse this frustration and observe the limitations of my work. The main limitation that I see is that I give him the tools, but I can’t do his work, I can’t live his life.

In his case, I can’t make him leave the family nest. And that hurts. It hurts because I see someone that’s trying, but needs fuel, needs more fire to jump, to be in more need. That pain I see in him,

I see it in myself, it reflects my own limitations. And there we are the two of us, each one in a different place, but sharing the same disruptive emotion of frustration that arises from those limitations.

When I finished the session, I spent hours and hours thinking about it, analysing what hurts, why I feel dissatisfied with the work I’m doing with him. I see that there is some impatience in me, that I want things to go well in the first try. I also see my lack: I can’t know everything, I can’t do everything, and it’s this lack where I see my fragility, my limitations, my smallness, my vulnerability. I am vulnerable, I can’t meet my own inner expectation of “savior of others.” I fall down, and life tells me that it is above all my efforts and

my work. Life asks me to be humble, and to give up my “savior” role. It tells me to “relax and accept it.”

Sometimes, I get confused and I think that I’m the solution. And this is a beginner’s mistake. He is the solution. As a tool, I only make things easier, so he can move forward. And this makes me feel light and removes the excessive responsibility I feel for others.

 

I will keep you informed
on how I’m navigating
the seas of empowerment.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#autonomy #evaluation #rafa #responsibility