Mentoring Person-Centered Psychospiritual Maturation: Foundation for Individual and Social Wellbeing

Abstract Mentoring can promote individual and social wellbeing by helping emerging adults break a toxic, self-replicating pattern of intergenerational and intergroup trauma. This pattern, which is called Humanity’s Chain of Pain, acquires potency by dysregulating five dimensions of self: biobehavioral, cognitive-sociocultural, social-emotional, existential-spiritual, and integrative worldview formation. Utilizing complexity theory, wellbeing is conceptualized as the ability to encounter life’s dysregulated far-from-equilibrium conditions with confidence in life and self that enables individuals to approach them as maturational challenges. Mentoring person-centered psychospiritual maturation, using the Know Your Self curriculum, helps emerging adults learn to encounter their challenges with this positive worldview. This chapter will explain these concepts, describe the curriculum, and summarize results from an effectiveness study (quasi-experimental, mixed methods design). It concludes with case studies that illustrate this mentoring curriculum and its process-oriented approach to wellbeing.