ACA Blog

[caption id="attachment_4859" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Jennifer Bingaman"][/caption] I started out at my internship counseling a batch of men who had little experience with detox, rehab, or counseling. At first, that revelation was scary. I was going to be the first counselor they’ve ever had. I would be their first experience with a real attempt at sobriety. It turned from a fear into a feeling of purpose. As my clients’ first counselor, I had the ability to influence how the client sees therapy for themselves now and in the future. I found I really enjoyed treating this population.

Don’t we all have those days when we feel overwhelmed by paperwork! Consumers need assistance whether in jail or having just re-entered the community and we are bogged down by paperwork. Sometimes it even feels like nobody cares how well the consumer is functioning; they just care how well we document the records.

Many of us define ourselves by our output. I use the word “output” to encompass a number of things: our ability to give and receive, our ability to hold up our end of the bargain, our ability to make some positive difference, our ability to do our work efficiently. I am in no way trying to dehumanize our efforts but I’d like to bring attention to the correlation between how we perceive the quality of our output and the use of our time.

Happiness is a popular topic of debate in recent years: what defines it, how to measure it, whether people are born with a particular set point.

First, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Megan. I’m a newer counselor and in the beginning stages of building up my practice in the Atlanta area. During my time in graduate school, I was intentional about trying to diversify my experiences while remaining under the protective covering and label of “student”. I have chaplaincy and clinical counseling experience in a hospice, a women’s prison, a crisis center, an adolescent unit at a psych hospital, and an extensive outpatient eating disorder program.

There is perhaps nothing as frustrating as not being able to fall asleep or stay asleep. I can personally attest to that! Sleep is essential for our bodies to rejuvenate and heal and when disturbed, can lead to many health issues including weight gain, migraines and headaches as well as difficulty concentrating and irritability. It is a problem that affects more than 75 million Americans according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. I see many clients affected by chronic sleep disturbance and in my experience, find it is most often related to anxiety, unmediated stress and poor sleep habits.

I do a lot of social consciousness lectures and presentations in my work as a consultant. One of the things I’ve continually stressed is the need to learn from and engage in each other’s civil rights efforts because these are essentially our own. This seems to puzzle many people, so I use examples of some of the more successful civil rights outcomes of the 1960s. Many groups, such as the Black Panther Party, understood that their sociopolitical agenda was in fact part of a larger global effort for all persons of color to actively overcome the racially oppressive and imperialist contexts in which they lived. Even while the settings and players were different, as the BLP and other organizations understood, the system of oppression and the pain of loss it caused were shared by all. The shared value was of dismantling that system.

[caption id="attachment_4859" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Jennifer Bingaman"][/caption] Call it destiny. Call it coincidence. Call it happenstance. Call it luck. I choose to call it serendipity.

We are born, every one of us with the proverbial “Clean Slate” or fresh start. We grow and we change in so many ways. We can argue Nature vs. Nuture as much as we like and we can all have our opinions on what qualities are which. However, I think we would be hard pressed to deny that every life is valuable and irreplaceable, at least to someone.

I am not sure what your approach is but I personally take very few interns. When I do take one, typically because they pester me to death for an interview and then show a certain spark, a kindred spirit and a fire that engulfs me, I take them in and they become part of the therapeutic family. Like having a child you watch them go through the stages of development. They are uncertain at first, taking each step very cautiously not wanting to let their clients down, not wanting to let them fall. You praise them as much as you can, help guide them into the professional that you know they are capable of becoming and providing constructive feedback as nurturing as possible; typically this feedback surrounds the quality of paperwork. Counselors unlike their social work counterparts typically hate paperwork. Don’t ask me why.