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."

May 24th 2019
She’s leaving

 

She is a 20-year-old young woman who came to me because she had a toxic relationship, with a lot of dependence, and she felt confused. During therapeutic support sessions, we saw how her relationship with her mother was also very toxic: her mother was overly manipulative, and was repeating the same pattern she had received from her mother.

During the sessions, it was clear to her and to me that it was necessary that she left her place and find another one for her own. She is a person with a lot of skills and she is smart, but she couldn’t develop herself because of her mother.

This way, she came to the conclusion that going abroad to do an internship on child education was a good idea. My role all the time was to support her in her decision, following her steps to find resources, while we kept going deeper into how her relationship with her mother has had an impact on other aspects of her life, like her relationship with her partner. Somehow, she has been showing emotional dependence with all her ex-partners.

I thought it was a smart strategy, and part of the process is to not make her feel guilty for doing it this way. Guilt in the relationship with parents is a common element when working with young people (it also happens with adults). This guilt comes with a feeling of infidelity towards the mother, in this

case, for doing something that it’s the opposite. Involuntarily, some parents go with the speech (verbal and non verbal) like: “I’ve done everything for you, and this is how you repay me?”

I suspect that this will cause grief for having left the family nest, that she will have hope and would want to go back. We have talked about it, she is aware of it, but her desire of leaving is stronger. We will see how she progresses, and I will be there to offer her emotional and psychological support to face anything that might come.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#autonomy #family #mentorship #rafa #responsibility