The Positive Mind

Many people are talking about how difficult 2020 is turning out to be. The challenges of Pandemic, Protests, Elections, Hurricanes, and Wildfires are testing our personal and community resilience. In this episode Kevin and Niseema explore way some people are resilient and some are not, how to increase your own resilience and how to create it in your community. Resilience is how we will come through the multiple traumas of 2020 and become better for the journey.

Meet our guest this week Richard D. Smith: he's gone from childhood trauma, imprisonment and school drop-out to national motivational speaker, social activist and trauma specialist. He has a degree in Africana studies from SUNY Albany, is the national director of healing works at Common Justice, a college professor at LIU New York and a workshop presenter. Richard joins Kevin and Niseema discussing techniques to address systemic and personal trauma in all areas from home, prison, education and society sparking an awakening both in the self and the community at large. Part 2 of a 2.

Join us for our interview of Richard D. Smith, national speaker for the African American Community on mental health issues and intergenerational trauma. Asking "what happened to you?" as opposed to "what's wrong with you?" is the beginning of understanding and diffusing aggressive behaviors, all of which are rooted in trauma response. When you stop and ask this question it can be an awakening to self-awareness. As a speaker, professor, community advocate and childhood trauma survivor Richard teaches us about the revolutionary act of self love.

In the second part of a 2 part series, hosts discuss Learned Optimism. The first show looked at Learned Helplessness, and this show covers information based on Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Hosts highlight useful techniques that help stop depreciating and self-defeating thoughts, moving you toward developing your full potential and durable happiness in this time of COVID and beyond.

In Part 1 of a 2 part series, Hosts discuss learned helplessness, a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness. It can arise from traumatic events or consistent failure. Its considered an underlying cause of depression. Kevin and Niseema help untangle potential connections with pandemic fallout such as job loss and blaming oneself for being a bad employee. This usually happens very fast. Most people don't catch it until the feeling of anxiety is present. Do you attribute external events to some personal shortcoming and what is your explanatory style?

Hosts speak with Scarlett Lewis, the mother of Jesse Lewis who was one of the 20 children killed during the Sandy Hook School shootings. She has since founded The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation in honor of Jesse and to spread a message he left on their kitchen chalkboard shortly before he died, Nurturing Healing Love, the formula for choosing love, and to promote social and emotional education in schools as well as a consistent message of compassion in our communities.

Kevin and Niseema discuss the effects of cognitive dissonance on human psychology in the context of conflicting information related to treatments and guidelines during the pandemic. Hosts talk about examples of early childhood cognitive dissonance and how that applies to the larger more politically based episodes. Ideas for compassionate treatment and ways to process through self awareness.

Have you taken your emotional temperature lately? Are you finding spikes of anger or settling into a continuous state of feeling a "little of something" or nothing at all? Does it take you back to a time as a child when anger, frustration, sadness or fear were not allowed or dismissed?

As we start to look back at lifestyle changes and social upheavals from the last 6 months, we can see how we are operating at about 50% of our emotional level. It just seems to be the easiest place to be: flatten the curve, flatten the feelings.

Join Kevin and Niseema as guides to understanding why we blunt our inner selves and how to recharge our emotional engines this week on The Positive Mind Radio Show Podcast.

Remember when all our friends were Insta, Facebook, Tik Tok-ing " their best lives"? It seemed everyone had the perfect home/vacation/ children/pets. And feeling some Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) because you were on the outside looking in, uninvited.

Then, the pandemic lockdown: the great equalizer! Everyone was living their shared COVID lives.

Now things are starting to open up again...What/who is safe? Touch or don't touch? And therein lies Fear of Going Out (FOGO).

Kevin and Niseema discuss the phenomena of phobias: how our early experiences in childhood set a pattern for our coping mechanisms throughout life. Learn how to peel back your layers to examine deeper fears, the 5 kinds of reactions to fear/anxiety and how to find your positive center in our new world.

What is freedom to you? Is it found in the memories of a carefree summer past, or recalling a time when you felt fully present doing something you love? How about Independence? Self-reliance, making your own decisions and timetables?

These words carry a lot of weight in how we live our lives. Are we free of our past, upbringing, and inner critic? Are we independent if we are living in the shadow of our parents, our relationships or the all too familiar "codependency" with others?

Hosts Kevin O'Donoghue and Niseema Dyan Diemer expand on the concept of declaring emotional independence to gain freedom in our lives. Five tools are offered to help you take steps toward becoming mentally and emotionally independent.