Emotional Awareness
Part of the reason MBA’s model is innovative is because it begins with a radically different premise about mental health. Whereas western mental health models are very nuanced in their description of mental illness, they have less to say about what constitutes optimum mental health. MBA begins with a different definition of mental health: one that looks at mental health as the ability to be fully present in an equilibrated way with our moment-to-moment experience. This ‘mindfulness-based’ definition of mental health perceives lack of health as those behavioral, mental, and emotional habits that prevent us from being ‘in the moment’, where we have choice, and are instead involved in modes of reaction. Whether that reaction is to shoot someone, to shoot up, or just to check out, from this point of view all are ways of exiting a present moment-to-moment experience that has become untenable. Youth who grow up in an unpredictable, violent, and abusive context may understandably have a much more difficult time staying ‘in’ their experience.
Our direct organizational experience is that the things that are pushing people out of their experience are emotional, rather than cognitive phenomena. In other words, we believe that youth typically act out because they are trying to meet an un-recognized emotional need or respond to an emotional situation they do not know how to ‘be’ with. This need may be to exit an internal situation or conflict, which drives drug use or violence oriented at self or others; it may be a need to feel connected to a community, which drives gang affiliation; or it may be the need to feel fully alive, which drives extreme risk-taking behavior. Or it might be the triggers from previous trauma that create an emotional state. Our experience is that these are all emotional drivers of behavior and that what underlies them are un-recognized emotional needs.
Our intervention therefore aims to shine a light directly on these ‘invisible’ states of awareness. Our foundational orientation is toward bringing young people’s attention to these ‘invisible’ states of awareness that are behind and beneath their ordinary reactions. And when we really look at these ‘invisible’ states- they are feeling-based.
By bringing consistent attention to this previously invisible fabric, young people begin to experience directly the needs that arise prior to the actions they take, and can begin to get a sense of these as distinct. As young people hone the capacity to directly experience their own internal needs and feelings with greater steadiness and clarity they can separate these needs from actions. And here there is some freedom. They are able to gain deeply personal insight into why they act the way that they do, and to begin to understand the origins of these behaviors and emotional and mental patterns in their own histories. They begin to become understandable to themselves. Through developing confidence in this practice it becomes possible for them to begin investigating the traumas in their lives that have created the emotional patterns that they are accustomed to using in their day-to-day lives, and to begin the process of changing these patterns if they so desire. Concurrently they are learning techniques of self-care and communication so that they can better experience their own intrinsic value, and express their needs to others. This process of healing is the gradual and natural expression of their deepening self-understanding, and is, in our view, the most direct avenue to helping highly at-risk young people change their life circumstances.
