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The Secular Therapy Project (STP) committee in Australia is excited to announce a new series of presentations/workshops run online by the Australian team called Mental Health Sundays- a series put on either by members of the STP or professionals of our choosing.

Each of these presentations/workshops will go from between 1 and 2 hours and focus on a particular theme relating to mental health. Each will be either run by a qualified psychologist or counsellor, or have the content reviewed by a qualified psychologist or counsellor beforehand. The aim is to provide professional-grade information about mental health and psychological wellbeing that is also highly secular.

In this pilot workshop, Shawn Powrie will be presenting on the topic of How to interpret your emotions post religion:

Coming out of religion many of us struggle with mental health. We also realise that we've not been given good tools to interpret or regulate our emotions, or worse, we've been taught highly superstitious interpretations of our emotions that are damaging: like for example that high degrees of anxiety come from being 'possessed'.

A fundamental way to improve our mental health is to better understand and navigate our emotions, or to grow our emotional intelligence. As the name implies, emotional intelligence is about employing our intellect (thoughts, logic, reason) to better understand our emotions (feelings, impulses). Emotions are powerful forces in our lives; it's not an exaggeration to say they play a deterministic role in shaping how our lives pan out, yet we seldom take time to think about them in very explicit and direct terms. This presentation offers an opportunity to do so in light of various ways of thinking about emotions.

Synthesising a huge body of work from psychology, psychiatry and therapy broadly, including formal courses, books, multiple modalities and personal experience, Shawn has put together a framework called 9 Schools of Emotional Thought. This ~1.5 hour presentation is a crash course in basically all flavours of emotional interpretation offered by both psychology and psychiatry at a very high level. It is not highly technical, and doesn't get bogged down in details. It's designed to be highly accessible, intuitive and simple. It focuses on a "1000 feet above ground" introduction to emotional intelligence, choosing a birds-eye view that encompasses many different approaches into one large framework.

This presentation has already been delivered in Perth about a year ago, and will now be delivered more broadly to the online audience.

Feel free to come along with your notebook, and look forward to an enjoyable presentation and lively discussion afterwards.

-Shawn

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