What is empowerment, and how does it differ from positive self-esteem?
Simply put, empowerment is a persons ability to maintain positive self-esteem during the course of our life cycles. Throughout the course of our lives, we all experience losses that are not only stressful, but can lead to emotional symptoms and problems. These losses fall into two types: necessary losses and traumatic losses. Necessary losses are the unavoidable losses that we experience while growing up, from infancy all the way up to our senior years. While it is obvious that we lose things when we are growing up, we can also gain things. When we pass into the adolescent years from childhood, we may lose the magical beliefs of our childhood, but we become stronger and are able to learn more things to accomplish new skills, such as driving a car. When we pass from adulthood into the senior years, we may not be able to get around as quickly as we could in earlier years, but we could possibly become wiser about what is really important in life. Traumatic losses are losses that happen as
