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to heal relationships and experience peace of mind.
7 The core assumption of the program is that it's not actually other people or uncontrollable circumstances that cause our life's stress, but rather our own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about people and events. |
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Jampolsky and his colleagues founded the first Center for Attitudinal Healing in California in 1975, to provide peer support groups to children with life-threatening illnesses.8 Attitudinal Healing teaches that the source of our peace or distress is within us, and that while we can't change events or other people, we do have control over how we perceive them, and how we allow them to affect us. Attitudinal Healing became so meaningful to people from all around the world that an international network was founded to help people deal not only with their own illnesses and fears, but also with community conflicts.9 Its concepts are now taught in more than 100 different independent programs throughout seventeen countries. |
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Attitudinal Healing concepts have been applied to a variety of sociological problems in communities involving conflict, grief, and violence. The ideas have been taught by volunteers to help children and adults break the cycles of fear, attack, and resentment in racially diverse school districts and neighborhoods, and to help war refugees in Croatia and Bosnia, cancer patients in Russia, and people experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome in places such as Oklahoma City after the catastrophic bombing that occurred there in 1995. |
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This system for changing one's mind incorporates the Twelve Principles of Attitudinal Healing, which were developed by Jampolsky to help people address their painful emotional issues and assist them in making health-promoting changes in their lives. The essence of these principles is that "To change your life, you first change your mind."10 Dr. Susan Trout, founder of the Washington, D.C. Center, and author of To See Differently, says Attitudinal Healing is about being of service to others as an extension of one's own healing.11 It is related to love, as defined by author Scott Peck, who says love is "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."12 An act of giving creates an opening to receive love. |
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