| Abstract: | School psychologists' need for coping strategies to deal with increasing job stress is widely acknowledged. Interventions, however, fail to adequately consider inner emotional and spiritual experiences. We believe that without exploring these dimensions of experience we are neglecting and ignoring the fastest route to improved mental health. We focus specifically on creativity and aloneness, viewing these basic human phenomena as promising avenues for exploration. Creativity is viewed as an innate quality that can be accessed via a person's opportunity to experience states of reflective, calm solitude. Aloneness, conceptualized here as “alonetime,” is considered a critical developmental need that originates in infancy and persists throughout the human life cycle (Buchholz & Chinlund, 1994). We suggest creativity and alonetime are presently untapped inborn resources representing flexible and viable coping tools with important potential implications for mental health. In this model lack of creativity and alonetime provide warning to the school psychologist, who upon sensing danger is able to implement required interventions. Even though the school setting seems an unlikely place we suggest the individual as well as the system make alonetime a top priority, leading to less stressed, more “self-actualized” practitioners. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
