Tag: psychology

C is for Counseling, or How I Got into this New Gig

Published on by Pam12 Comments

 

CTurns out that April is Counseling Awareness Month. Isn’t this just a serendipitous turn of events? I’m writing a blog a day, A to Z about my adventures as a graduate student in Mental Health Counseling and the American Counseling Association is making it a special month. Pretty sure I can’t take credit, but still . . . (maybe tomorrow I’ll tackle Delusional and Diagnosis).

I have a long history with counseling. I started seeing a psychologist in 1992 and have been in therapy of some sort consistently since then. For a long time, I thought of myself as having a serious character defect. I was young. I didn’t really understand how counseling worked, or could work. I had only a vague notion of Freud and his couch and Woody Allen’s neuroses.

Prozac and SSRIs hit the market about the time I began therapy* and not long after my psychologist diagnosed me with depression, she and my general practitioner agreed I would do well to try the new wonder-drug, Prozac. And, honestly, I looked forward to some relief. At 29, in 1992, I was a fairly new mom of an adopted bi-racial daughter, in a relationship with a woman 13 years my senior. I had just sold the bookstore I started, owned, and operated for three years, and I had moved back home full-time after living 90 miles away for most of each week. To complicate things, my fundamentalist Christian parents were only just beginning to adjust to my, er, lifestyle (as we called it then) and its unconventionality.

There’s more, but that’s enough. You get the idea. I was a stress monster. The crinkling of a tissue set my teeth on edge. The noise of someone actually blowing their nose sent me over the edge. The first time I swallowed one of those little green and white pills, I felt like I was taking communion. I crossed myself and sent up a prayer.rumi

After four weeks of taking that precious little capsule every morning, I no longer cared who sneezed or how loud. Irritation rolled off my back. The grey veil that separated me from the rest of the world lifted, and I started seeing in color again. Cliché, I know, but accurate. Everything sparkled. I got a good job as the bookstore manager at the local technical college with a great boss as well as health and retirement benefits. Did the little pill have anything to do with my new job? I believe happier, less-stressed, less-depressed people tend to have more self-confidence and do better in job interviews, so yes. But I digress.

I felt good, and I loved talking to my therapist. I loved paying someone to listen to me. I loved the 50 minutes of uninterrupted attention. I could do this for a living, I thought. I’d love to listen to people’s stories, to help them make sense of their feelings, to help them gain the confidence to reach for their high dreams. I had no idea that someone who went to counseling could actually ever become a counselor. I thought my diagnosis and being on meds precluded me ever being in the field.

I had never heard of Jung’s Wounded Healer. I was an English major who, stupidly and stubbornly, avoided all social science classes. The books cost too much. The classes met on Fridays. What can I say?

I wanted to get off the meds, though, yet every time I quit taking them, things in my life would head south, and the psychologist would exhort me to stay on the meds. I got stuck in a loop and never really got to the issues that were causing me to become depressed. I’d just start popping the pills again, and things would improve. Etc.

franklquoteI spent about twenty years with the psychologist before I found a new therapist, and the woman I chose to see was an LMHC (Licensed Mental Health Counselor). I didn’t know what the difference was when I made the switch, I was just seeking someone a little more flexible and spiritual, a little less dogmatic and not so pharmacologically oriented. Turns out the switch worked very well for me then. I made several changes in my life at the same time: I got a new job, I relocated, I started taking writing classes and running, and found new community with both activities.

The psychologist got me up and out of the depression and quite literally saved my life on many occasions. And the LMHC has helped me move forward from there, developing self-confidence, practicing mindfulness, introducing me to non-Western philosophies. I have learned so much about myself, about why I am the way I am, and how I can move forward.

I’ll never be done working on myself, but it turns out, I can become a counselor anyway, not in spite of my past, but because of it. Jung believed that disease of the soul could be the best possible form of training for a healer. And as Victor Frankl wrote, “What is to give light must endure burning.” By these measures, I am perfect for this job.

*for a more in-depth—but still inadequate—explanation of the differences among therapy, counseling, psychotherapy, and psychology see this previous blog

A is for Ack! It’s April Already and I am Anxious

Published on by Pam9 Comments

AI can’t believe I haven’t finished my first blog for the A to Z challenge yet. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, planning, scheming, writing it in my head, but clearly I’ve not put any words down yet. Until now. These few, uninspired, last minute words that seem so unequal to the task, so small and worthless and hurried.

A is for Apology, apparently. Abject. Abysmal. But I’m at AWP this week, a conference all about writing, and so, apology or not, abysmal or not, tired or not, write I must.

I am going to write about Anxiety. My plan for this year’s A-to-Z Challenge is thus: I want to spend this month writing about my experiences as a student in the Clinical Mental Health Counselor Program at Antioch University. I want to weave together a narrative, exploring the concepts (from A to Z) that I study as a student of mental health counseling and how my studies intersect with my life. How my coursework shows up in my day-to-day world.

I haven’t studied Anxiety, per se. I have taken many relevant classes, delved into the DSM 5 and learned how I might diagnose a client who presented with symptoms that fit the criteria for, say,  Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). I learned to write a treatment plan and theorized about which therapeutic modality I might employ to best help my client regain his or her equilibrium.

Most of what I’ve learned about Anxiety comes from first hand experience. I am not one who has been plagued with Anxiety for much of my life. No, my familiarity with this particular demon has only been recent and is one of the reasons I started running regularly a little over two years ago.

I started waking up in the mornings with a pit of dread churning in my stomach and found that if I went for a run, somewhere around mile two or three, the pit of dread loosened and eventually abated. I guess the endorphins kicked in, the oxytocin released, and the runner’s euphoria lifted the anxiety. Cured, if only temporarily, I could get on with my day. The next morning, the anxiety would return, and I’d start over. Run. Rinse. Repeat.

A nice side benefit to running off all my anxiety was that I started to lose weight. I felt healthier. My blood pressure dropped, as did my cholesterol, and my pants size. But, I digress. I still woke up most mornings feeling like something horrible was about to happen. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the axe to fall, for the bottom to drop out, for . . . well, you get the picture.

Anxiety chased me into my running clothes and out of the house each morning. But the thing about being a graduate student in a counseling program is that these sort of disruptions don’t slip by unanalyzed. While one part of me succumbed to the anxiety, another part of my tapped my forefinger thoughtfully against my chin  and asked, “How do you feel about this, Pam Sue?”

Some people have angels and demons sitting on their shoulders. I now have Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, or their modern day equivalents, Jack Cornfield and Tara Brach. I can have a panic attack and simultaneously know for certain that while what I am experiencing might feel real, it isn’t true.

It’s weird, living with this meta awareness. I had all sorts of anxiety about traveling to AWP this week–logistical stuff that I know I’m capable of handling but for whatever reason just kept spinning on: how am I going to get to Sea-Tac from Bellingham? To the airbnb from LAX? I can’t check in until 4 p.m., but I arrive at 9 in the morning. What would I do? These questions dogged me for weeks. I envisioned myself in dire circumstances, dragging my carryon around LA for hours, sad and alone and dazed.  Yet, I simultaneously knew my fears were unfounded and not based in reality. I could make a shuttle reservation, find a friend to stay with in Seattle, even one who might take me to the airport. I just couldn’t see the logical steps in the midst of my anxiety.

Something similar happened when I realized how expensive it was going to be to eat and drink here in Los Angeles. The first day I spent way too much money on so-so food and paid $8 for a mediocre beer. So, I took myself to the grocery store, but instead of going shopping at the end of the day, when the conference was over, I went in the morning on my way to the conference and so had to schlep my groceries around the conference hall, from one panel discussion to another.

I was so anxious about not having drinking water back at the airbnb that night, I bought a six pack of bottled water and stuck it in my already heavy backpack. All the while I’m hearing Jack and Tara on my shoulders, telling me not to believe the anxiety, reassuring me that all will be well, that I will be fine, that there will be water at the conference. That the universe will provide.  But, do I listen? No. I buy the water. And I vow to do better tomorrow.

 

 

 

The F Word

Published on by Pam7 Comments

On the days that writing a blog every day seems daunting—which truth be told is pretty much every day—I think about my dad and my grandfather who were journalists. Not only did they have to write every day, they had to write multiple articles that made sense from beginning to end every single day. Not only  made sense but had facts and accurate quotes. And they couldn’t call anyone names (except for once my grandfather wrote an op-ed column that said only this: Jane Fonda is an idiot. She had just gone to Hanoi to sit on the tank. I was very young at the time and had no opinion about this then).

I started my college career as a journalist—I started writing for the Western Front fall quarter of my freshman year, and for a while I found the whole experience exhilarating.  Journalism classes met in an old crickety house on the edge of campus and were taught by rumpled old men in questionable tweed jackets. One professor was the son of Lincoln Steffens, famous muckraker. There were not a lot of women in the program, not a single female professor in the time I was there (a good three years).

We only got two credits for a quarter’s stint on the campus paper, though the time commitment warranted far more than that. The paper came out twice a week and we met constantly it seemed—two nights a week to write headlines. I loved writing headlines—the section editors would give us the space and we had a formula for how many characters the headline could be. I excelled at writing headlines with active verbs and punchy nouns and that skill garnered me a little respect among the scruffy editors—male upperclassmen all. Everyone seemed to smoke and back then no one cared. Ashtrays overflowed with butts and the smoke hung low in the living-room turned newsroom.

Twice a week we had to show up at the print shop on the other end of campus to work on putting the paper together, literally. The section editors were responsible for pasting up their pages, but always needed help cutting and waxing the pages for paste up. I loved the waxing machine, and having grown up the daughter of a newspaper publisher, I knew my way around the layout tables. Exacto knives, blue pencils, the mockup sheets.

And of course we had to write stories. As much as I loved the atmosphere of the department and the headline writing and the paste up process, I wasn’t a big fan of writing the stories. I didn’t really like interviewing people. I was shy for one thing. And I didn’t really have a nose for news. I did great in classes where the local newspaper writer would give us the details and we’d pound out a story in class. I aced those, but I just didn’t seem to have a knack for sussing out the story, and I seriously lacked confidence when it came to calling people and asking for information.

I found my niche in the sports and op-ed pages, finally.  While I could give a damn about student fees and faculty senate stories, I did have a thing for the women’s basketball team (shocking, I know) and I knew my way around the gym. I made a small career out of covering the track and field team and putting together features on the women’s basketball players and coaches. Some dude had beat me out on covering the actual women’s games, a fact that chapped my ass to no end. The track coach once told me that he was impressed with my stories, surprised that I understood and wrote about the events as well as I did. I wasn’t exactly John Reed or Louise Bryant (the movie Reds came out my freshman year and I so wanted to be a journalist covering the Russian revolution), but I wrote good copy. I published humorous op-ed pieces, ala Dave Barry though not anywhere as funny (my mother often told me I’d be the next Erma Bombeck). Eventually, I became sports editor and one summer I was assistant editor. Lots of work for two credits. I suspected the real world wouldn’t treat us much better.

By the time my senior year rolled around, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to make a living as a journalist. My father had been out of the business for a few years by that time and my grandfather had died, though he had been successful as a writer, then editor and owner of a large suburban weekly. At one point I thought maybe if I could drink more and take up smoking, I’d be able to cut it in the newsroom, so I went out and bought a pack of Camel Unfiltereds and a bottle of Jim Beam. I sat on my little 8×8 foot apartment deck and smoked and drank like I’d seen the guys in the newsroom do. All I felt was sick and not long after on an election night it became clear to me when we were all (all of us Western Front reporters) were supposed to go downtown and cover the local, state, and federal elections. I just couldn’t see myself in that role—asking the pressing questions, taking notes, paying that close of attention. I froze at the thought. As much as I loved my name in the byline, I panicked under the pressure. So, I dropped that last 400 level reporting class the next day, just a few credits shy of completing my major and went to the Humanities building to switch to English, with an emphasis in writing.

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            As I think back on this choice, I realize that I didn’t then have a really clear reason for leaving journalism, but it’s becoming clearer to me now. I didn’t have any role models. There wasn’t a single female reporter, professor, mentor, or local professional to whom I could point and say, “She’s who I want to be like.” I remember only one or two other young women in the program, one a photographer and one, slightly older than me who I didn’t ever get to know. I just didn’t ever see myself reflected back to me anywhere in that world. I couldn’t imagine a future there because I couldn’t see anyone like me. So, I joined the relatively cushy ranks of the English department to finish out my college career. I found enough mentors there that I continued on to graduate school and into teaching English composition. I could see myself as an English professor, as a novel writer, as a reader of great fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction. I had role models, finally.

I’m thinking about this all now because I just finished a paper on Karen Horney (pronounced Horn-eye), the founder of Feminine Psychology. She started out as a Freudian in the early part of the 20th century but soon broke ranks with Freud in part because of his limited view of what comprises human nature (sex and aggression and penis envy). As part of this paper writing adventure, I had to find a relevant online video to review and I ended up with this one: The Changing Face of Feminist Psychology. This video traces the struggles female psychologists faced as recently as the 1980s in getting jobs, being taken seriously, being admitted to graduate school. Even though Karen Horney published her work on Feminine Psychology as early as the 1930s, it took another 50 years for women to advance in the field. And then, even as they began to make inroads as part of feminism’s second wave, the 1980s rolled around and everyone declared feminism dead or over with or moot.

But feminism is not dead. As long as we have daughters, we need to keep making sure they know that they can be whatever they want to be, that they can choose whatever career they want, and they will only know those careers are available to them if we make sure our faces are there to reflect back to them. We need to make sure we are the ones writing the editorials explaining perhaps why Jane Fonda went to Hanoi to sit on that tank. That perhaps, as one half of the world’s population, we can have a voice as well whether in the papers, online, in the classroom, the boardroom. Our daughters must see us out there to know that our voices and theirs matter.