Natosha Monroe

Have you ever wanted or wondered how to become a more actively-involved member of ACA? Maybe you’ve been a member for years and would now like to collaborate more with other members. Or how about voicing your opinion on an issue near and dear to your heart? Or contributing to an effort that will directly impact national policy? There are many ways to get involved and to have a voice in our field, but one way is to join an ACA Interest Network. I am actually forming an ACA Interest Network for military members as we speak and would love to share this experience and opportunity!

Must a counselor have a spotless past and a picturesque present to effectively assist a client? Should a divorced counselor be the one to help a struggling couple stay together? Can a childless counselor give parental advice? Will a doctoral dropout be able to assist a fretful PhD student? What if a client walks into the office facing the exact same challenge as the counselor? Can and should the counselor help? Is there hypocrisy in this situation? Does the counselor risk being biased or blind to certain aspects of the client’s issue? ACA’s Friday keynote speaker, Dr. Irvine Yalom, tackled this question in his book, “The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients.”

Continuing my “thank you to Dr. Irvin Yalom” blogs leading up to his appearance at our ACA Conference this month, I decided to highlight his take on the issue of hesitancy in therapy. In his book, “The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients,” Dr. Yalom asks the question: “Why are decisions hard?” So let’s think about this, why are decisions sometimes so difficult for people (us) to make?

In celebration of Dr. Irvin D. Yalom being our keynote speaker for this month’s ACA Conference, I’ve decided to highlight some of his wisdom in my next few blogs. More so than any college course I’ve completed, any lecture I’ve heard, any workshop I’ve attended, or any article I’ve read, lessons learned from Dr. Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients influenced my therapeutic interactions the most. I wouldn’t call myself an existentialist, but his words proved to be very useful in many different contexts. One lesson I learned came from reading and then pondering this concern of Dr. Yalom’s: “I worry about psychotherapy-about how it may be deformed by economic pressures and impoverished by radically abbreviated training programs.” Is this indeed occurring?

Much research is conducted by exclusive academics or “parachute” professionals who drop into a situation or culture long enough to do a curiosity study or hand out a bunch of surveys and then leave. I think more research should be conducted by those of us actually working in the field, don’t you? However, therein lies the problem—we are working in the field! Who has time to do research? Well, I think many of us do but we just might not realize it. Due to incomplete lessons on research some of us may have received in college, many of us do not realize what we are capable of contributing to the overall body of knowledge. And guess what? There’s more to research than lab rats and statistics!