Date: July 30, 2022

Time: 3 hrs (180 mins)

Audience: Mental Health Professionals

Venue: Chaminade University, Honolulu HI

Title: Wholeness-Based Eudaimonia: To Go There, You Have to Know There.

Topic: WE promotes sustainable wholeness for adults with childhood challenges (ACCs) by training mental healthcare providers to become congruent, interdependent, and authentic in their caregiving responsibilities. The workshop is informational and transformational through experiential learning from a diverse perspective.

Zora Neale Hurston said to go there, you have to know there—there is a metaphor for becoming whole in adulthood following childhood challenges. But as mental health providers, have we gone there? If we have not, are we ready? Wholeness-Based Eudaimonia (W.E.) is a practice-based model that lifts the veil of illusion on dichotomies, pedagogies of pathology, and evidence-based practices. Behind the veil is an invitation that is sine qua non for sustainably mitigating unintentional harm in mental healthcare. In response to the childhood challenges epidemic and iatrogenesis, the workshop introduces information from a recent qualitative research study and offers experiential practices as a way of facilitating professional development that is congruent, interdependent, and authentic. In the upcoming worksop, W.E. invites mental health professionals to (a) explore the needs of a diverse community of adults with childhood challenges, (b) examine one’s own childhood challenges and their implications, and (c) engage in actualizing one’s eudaimonia potential as a working professional.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Deepa Ram-Souza is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist at Elemental Guidance, LLC.

She was born in Guyana, raised in Minnesota (USA), and currently lives on the Big Island of Hawai’i. She is an East Indian descendant of indentured laborers who were transported from India to Guyana in the 1860s to work on sugar plantations for the British Empire. This diaspora inspired education, integrity, and service to community as her ancestral legacies. These legacies were fervently pursued through her undergraduate degrees in biological sciences and psychology, a graduate degree in relational therapy, and a doctoral degree in transpersonal studies. Dr. Ram-Souza has dedicated her career to supporting individuals and families who have experienced childhood challenges. Her work is based on insights collected from her dissertation research on Wholeness-Based Eudaimonia ®. She promotes that all humans have an innate capacity to actualize the eudaimonic potential—to live well and unconditionally serve the greater good as an end, not a means to an end, especially because of their childhood challenges.