“Emotional wellness” centres on the acceptance of one’s emotions and feelings—including the ability to realistically evaluate one’s limitations and effectively cope with life’s challenges.
“Wellness” can be defined as“an interactive process of becoming aware of and practicing healthy choices to create a more successful and balanced lifestyle”, where:
- Process means that one never arrives at a point where there is no further possibility of improving;
- Aware means that one is, by nature, continuously seeking more information about how to improve;
- Choices mean that one has considered a variety of options and selected those that seem to be in one’s best interest;
- Success is determined by one to be his/her personal collection of accomplishments for his/her life.
At the core of the LifeLine Southern Africa’s “Comprehensive Emotional Wellness Programme” are the beliefs that:
- an emotionally-well individual maintains healthy and satisfying relationships with others, creating “ripples” of emotional wellness throughout groups and communities;
- healthy, affective functioning groups and communities facilitate and support emotional healing amongst individuals;
- thoughts (cognitions), feelings (emotions) and actions (behaviour) all go hand in hand – a change in one will usually lead to change in the other two: changed feelings and thoughts will follow automatically as a result of changed behaviour.
We facilitate emotional wellness for individuals, groups and communities in the SADC region. This is done through our comprehensive Emotional Wellness Programme. This Programme focuses on HIV and AIDS, abuse, gender issues, relationships, distress, trauma and suicide by providing awareness, education, emotional support and counselling.