Refraction frees youthworkers from the constant need to reflect on the politically correct term for the individuals with whom they work. "Youth" - "Kids" - "Young People" - "Adolescents" - "Young Adults" - "Old Children" - "Teens" - "Teenagers" - are all part of the refractive spectrum. Your view and your insights are what count and you pick the term to describe your own prism.
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Refraction gives you a new paradigm which allows you to hold and cherish your belief that kids have incredible strengths and they are, at the same time, impossibly self-centered little creeps. A refractive world view encompasses and exacerbates these seemingly contradictory feelings.
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Refraction gives you a new developmental model of young people. Youth are inherently refractive: Love/Hate; Good/Bad; Caring/Cynical; Altruistic/Self-Centered; Dependent/Independent; Yes/No; Violent/Meek; Male/Female/?; Strong/Weak; Hero/Anti-Hero define their emerging prisms. They live and die on the slash and youthworkers can learn from this refractive schism.
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Refraction Therapy was developed by two therapists with years of experience guiding individuals toward the "prism of the soul". Refractive Therapy With Youth is the newest application of this innovative approach.
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A personal experience with Refraction
"I had a friend in college who spent the whole afternoon hunched over his drawing board copying the folds of Durer's drapery off some print and that night bit the head off a live chicken. Now granted he was drunk for one of these activities, I forget which, but the refractive point is the animal/aesthete (female counterpart is the whore/goddess?) fault line. Now as refractors we say that it's one or the other, no synthesis possible, no reconciliation. Animalslashaesthete, whoreslashgoddess, not animalaesthete,whoregoddess. Refractors live in the slash,on the faultline, the membrane, the interface where the rubber meets the road. Pushing people in the direction of their symptoms clarifies the polarity - "See, you shithead, you spilt chicken blood all over your drawing" - that's what happens when people try to reconcile instead of refract. It almost teases seriousness." |
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Refraction Therapy With Youth workshops will debut on April 1, 2001. If you have questions or to obtain information about learning opportunities in your area, click on the rainbow colored ball below to send us an email.
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