4Sight
 
Genesis

In early 2015, I decided I wanted to launch a "self-help mental health web site for youth experiencing adversity". I’ve been a software developer since ‘94 and have always had an interest in social service projects. Having navigated my own three children through a divorce and having a keen interest in parenting, the topic was a suitable choice. I enlisted a psychologist friend of mine to advise me and off we went.

After two years, we decided that the target audience was going to be too problematic to contact. Everything from mandatory reporting if we learned of abuse to the parents objecting to our subject matter if they were responsible for the adversity, directly or indirectly, raised red flags, There was just too much liability, so we decided not to proceed.

At the same time, we had already determined what would drive the content. We learned that the single biggest way to help anyone was by improving their resilience. However, as with EQ, what that was and how you build it remained to be seen. That's where the 4Sight Model came in. Your Emotional Alignment determines your resilience.

There’s literally half-a-century of observations, experiences, skills and education that contributed to the SE/SC concept plus all the research and reading done for the site. There’s just too much to cover here. However, there were two key things that were recently learned that drove the theory which are included as they’ll be helpful in understanding the Alignment concept.

The first element came when I was looking at the mental health conditions our target audience might have. I learned that they can be broadly separated into five high-level categories. One such grouping is anxiety, depression, psychotic/schizophrenia, dementia and eating disorders. The first two are what got my attention. Taking a temporal-based approach (I won’t go into why I supposed that other than to say I have a highly-analytical and observant mind), I wondered “what if depression was an issue with looking at the past, anxiety was an issue with looking at the future, and the psychotic/personality/schizophrenia disorders had issues in both areas.”

The second contributor was the concept of cognitive distortions (CD’s). I learned that whenever a person engages in irrational behavior - they do or say something they shouldn’t, or they don’t do or don’t say something they should - that a CD can be found. That is, if you witness said behavior and ask the actor to explain it - if they choose to allow that, and there’s a whole other conversation around those that won’t cooperate - at some point you will encounter a CD, or logical fallacy. In effect, they are saying something that is not true. The impetus behind that lie would become apparent when I soft- launched the business in early 2017.

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