by Andrés Cabezas Corcione | April, 2015 | Community
Positive Psychology in Latin America Positive Psychology may be considered a discipline that has had the most rapid proliferation in the last 15 years. This is not only because of its innovative proposal to include emotions, characteristics and positive institutions in its field of study, but also because in the last 5 years the benefits of including unpleasant or negative emotions in the human development and individual wellbeing have become apparent as it has been proposed by Biswas-Diener and Kashdan (2014). This has led to a full integration of everything that is inherent to human beings and related to suffering and growth, making it a super-paradigm of well-being, more than a single discipline (Cabezas, 2014) taking valid, empirically-based-knowledge of human beings based on function and availability. These are not the only reasons that have allowed an agile and viral advance but also the use of technologies that provide information and the large amount of investigations coming out of countries with high scientific production standards in positive psychology like the United States, England, Canada, Spain, China and India. Similarly in Latin America and the Caribbean, systematic efforts have been made for the advancement of positive psychology in specific sociopolitical contexts, to name a few: the investigations made in Colombia on human strengths and resilience in forcibly-displaced-Colombians, as well as character strengths in South American immigrate couples in Europe (Torres, 2015). In Venezuela a complete characterization is being made on the strengths of Venezuelans, as well as studies that allow the comprehension of well-being and hope as a product of their current sociopolitical situation (Garassini and Camilli, 2014). In Brazil the...
by Lesley Lyle | April, 2015 | Community, EMAPP Portugal
The Wednesday Tea And if a group of 43 very old women became integrated and useful to their community…? Often we hear that it is “normal” that old people are alone… that they “do not care about loneliness”… We also hear some old people say that from time to time they do receive a visit… a quick visit. Loneliness and isolation are often observed at an older age (1). The stereotypes associated with ageing are striking, and the old women are the main victims of these phenomena (2). Is this irreversible reality? In this brief reflection we will focus on the importance of close relationships along our lifetime (3). In this article we intend to share the Wednesday Tea (WT) an initiative of the Conference of St. Vincent of Paul. The WT was created to meet the social needs of multi-challenged, although autonomous (living in their homes) older women. These women seemed lonely. WT program aims to fight loneliness while promoting the integration of women in the community. The WT has about 43 very old women, with an average age of 80 years old. The oldest participant is 97. The group gathers weekly every Wednesday, the meetings are ritualized (welcome/ dialogue and activities /pray the rosary and tea time), the admission is free and it can be done at any time during the year. The program has been running for 5 years (since 2010) in Portugal, namely Alentejo, where population ageing and desertification are a serious social problem. St. Vincent of Paul Conference sees in loneliness a kind of poverty. Some of these women were visited once a week...
by Lesley Lyle | March, 2015 | Community
Communities and families are an entwined part of a person’s well-being; each thread is meaningful unto itself while being important to the other threads it connects with. Similarly is the case with families; the threads that bind can strengthen through care and attention, or disintegrate from neglect. How to provide that care and attention is not always as difficult and time consuming as one might think. Years ago, a young stressed father came to me concerned about how he would maintain a solid relationship with his daughter after the divorce. The idea that he might only have glimpses into her life on a daily basis while awaiting the weekend visits prompted me to look at the bigger picture. What do kids need to grow in a positive direction, and what can care providers in any capacity provide that will help perpetuate growth? The first hurdle is to address and overcome “all or nothing” thinking. Many parents and care providers can’t be there one hundred percent of the time for a number of different reasons, and will never physically or mentally be able to live up to the myth of you can have it all. In the words of Tal Ben Shahar during one of his Foundations of Positive Psychology lectures, he talked about this exact phenomenon; condemning one’s self to failure for not meeting impossible standards. He went on to talk about the more realistic look at how we can have a lot but we can’t have it all. Dr. Ben-Shahar identifies this type of thinking as maladaptive perfectionism thinking. The maladaptive perfectionist view leads to the outcome of...
