Helping the Poor in Heart, featuring Victoria Chicurel and Silvina Carla Bucci One of my favorite New Testament quotations comes from the “Sermon on the Mount” by Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in heart, for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8. I’m not 100% sure what this means, exactly, but it seems to me to suggest the values of compassion and humility, as opposed to self-aggrandizement. I once had the chance to speak to a Catholic priest with a PhD in philosophy who had just returned from several years working with the indigenous people in Paraguay. He said that although the people were poor, and sometimes experiencing the effects of repression from the government, he said they were mostly happy and supported one another. He also said that when he flew into Miami and walked through the airport, he was shocked to see so many overweight and visually unappealing people, after living for many years in Paraguay among the “poor.” Who, really, is “poor,” and who, in contrast, is “wealthy?” That’s kind of the meaning I attribute to the Biblical quotation from the book of Matthew. I looked him up on Google, and apparently he worked as a tax collector in Copernicium prior to becoming a preacher in Judea. At any rate, today’s podcast features two women who are working with the poor in Mexico and in the Pomona Valley in Southern California. Victoria Chicurel and Silvina Carla Bucci and working to promote TEAM-CBT in Mexico and Victoria is working with a group of Mexican women immigrants, some un-documented, most with limited English-language skills in the Pomona Valley teaching them a simplified version of TEAM-CBT.  Victoria calls these women, Promotoras. In a pilot study sponsored by an organization called Common Good, Victoria has trained a group of approximately ten women in the ten cognitive distortions as well as the Five Secrets of Effective Communication and other simple cognitive therapy techniques, so they can teach these skills, called “psychological first-aid,” as coaches, to women without access to mental health care. These lay coaches trained are paid $15 per hour by Common Good, and the clients are treated for free. They were very enthusiastic about the results of their informal study. (The director of Common Good is Nancy Minte, the sister of one of our esteemed colleagues, Daniel Minte, LCSW.) Victoria described a shame attacking contest organized by Daniel Minte, a Level 5 TEAM therapist. Shame-Attacking Exercises were developed by the late Dr. Albert Ellis from New York City, one of the founders of cognitive therapy,. Shame-Attacking Exercises are designed to help people with social anxiety get over their fears of looking foolish in front of others. You intentionally do something bizarre in public so you can discover that the world doesn’t come to an end when you make a fool of yourself. . The goal of the contest was to do the most weird and courageous Shame Attacking Exercise. The winner was a woman who was one of the promotoras working with Victoria who suffered from severe social anxiety and who was greatly helped by a “Shame Attacking Exercise.” In one of her English classes, she stood and announced she was going to do something ridiculous to overcome her fear of making a fool of herself in public, and warned them that she had a terribly singing voice. She then burst into song, singing the national anthem of Mexico, and received enthusiastic cheers from her classmates at the end. This experience changed her life! Prior to her experience, she had been so shy that she was afraid to express her opinions in public. After the exercise, her shyness instantly become a memory and she won first place in the competition! Many others have been helped, too. I mentioned the experience of Sunny Choi who worked for years with Asian immigrants in the SF Bay area. He said that these patients did not expect long term treatment, and often responded in just four or five sessions, even if they were struggling with very severe problems. Vi