Gioia and Rebecca often joke that despite the fact that they share the exact same profile on the Myers-Briggs–they are both heavily weighed on the scale of extroverted, feeling, and intuitive perceivers–they are opposites in their natural dispositions. Gioia is generally light, energetic, and buoyant while Rebecca is more frequently anxious, moody, and easily fatigued. Because they are both such exaggerated feelers, it’s self-evident that Gioia would want to maintain her positivity and Rebecca would want to increase hers.

One of our clients recently added a nuance to our approach to managing stress and developing resilience. She identified that she parses her “toolbox” of coping strategies into two categories–techniques she uses “in the moment” when she’s faced with something really difficult or traumatic, and ongoing routines that she employs preventively to keep herself stable and well.

We often talk about how important meaning-making is to happiness. At its simplest this is to say that what we believe about what is happening to and around us dramatically affects our happiness.

The other day, Gioia was asked to run a ” Vision Board” workshop and thought, “I’ve never led one but they sound like a very art therapy-ish kind of thing!”

John Bradshaw, author of the seminal book Healing the Shame that Binds You, was one of the first people to introduce into modern vernacular the notion that we are Human BE-ings not Human DO-ings. This catchy expression has particular relevance to those of us who get so busy performing activities “out in the world” that we begin to determine our worth through external measures at the expense of pausing, grounding, and having faith in our inherent value as living beings.

Last month, Gioia hosted a Health Fair wellness booth at Prince George’s County Community College where she counsels young college students.  Being an art therapist, she wanted to do something interactive with art materials but she knew that most of the people stopping by the booth wouldn’t have a lot of time.  She came up with an idea to do an Affirmation Wall–asking the students to copy affirmations or make up their own on on bright squares of paper and post them for others to see and be inspired. 

Rebecca’s husband once said “When I was growing up, my mother always told me I could do anything I wanted but she didn’t tell me I couldn’t do everything that I wanted”.

Recently, a buddy of ours, Eric, who we could rightfully call an experience junky said his friend Caroline had gone to a transformational retreat in which she spent the week naked.  We’re always tuned in to innovative workshops, but this one was pretty far out of our comfort zone.

Summer is over and so ends our youth series. We thank Tabitha, Gioia’s 18 year old daughter, for reminding us how easy it is to not only take the people that we care about for granted but to sometimes not treat them as well as they deserve. We also thank Annabel, Gioia’s 16 year-old daughter, for revealing her struggles with having unreasonably high academic expectations of herself and being very self-critical. And we also thank her for allowing us to celebrate her natural gratitude.

Continuing with our summer “Youth Series” we asked Annabel, Gioia’s 16 year-old daughter, to do artwork in response to some of the directives we often give to our clients. We wanted a teenager’s perspective on those themes.  She chose “Attending to the Good/Negativity Bias”, an exercise designed to address the natural tendency for negative experiences and perceptions to command our attention more than positive ones.

Gioia and Rebecca have enlisted Gioia’s daughters to do a “Youth Series” for our newsletters this summer so you will be hearing more from them. This month Tabitha, Gioia’s oldest daughter, wrote about her relationship with her little sister Annabel.

We often focus on identifying and building on strengths in our newsletters; however, usually it is related to our work with adults. This newsletter will launch our summer series of newsletters on working with children, teens and young adults. This month we’ve asked a youth consultant to review a free assessment of strengths called the Values in Action Survey for Youth (click here to access it). Tabitha, age 17, agreed (after some pleading on our part) to complete and review the assessment for us. Below she recounts her experience.

When we are working with people who are trying to experience more positivity and wellbeing, we often ask them to imagine what their lives would be like if things were the best that they could be.  Where would they be?  Who would they be with?  What would they be doing?  How would they be feeling? 

Barbara Fredrickson, one of our favorite psychologists and author of Love 2.0, provocatively asks “What if everything we know about love is wrong?”