ACA Blog

Some of you might remember the posts I have written about the need for a mentoring program within the ACA. I remember my frustration trying to email and call various divisions within the ACA in my desperate attempts to find a way to connect with a mentor. I learned in time that while the need for a mentoring program for our grad students was great, I was not alone in my search or willingness to get something started. It just so happened that I attended a presentation on graduate student concerns at the Texas Counseling Association conference which provided me with an opportunity to share my thoughts and frustrations about the lack of mentoring with none other but Dr. Heather Trepal, the head of the ACA Graduate Student Committee.

The first woman I met, who worked as a street prostitute, was during my counseling practicum inside the Kansas City, Missouri city jail. (Regional Correctional Center, RCC). I remember her sad eyes, her beautiful but aged face, more importantly her dreams of a satisfying life and future for her and her children. She was a beautiful person, wanting the good life for her family and herself. Her words are as loud today as then when she told me “You don’t understand. The very worst has already happened to me. My father raped me. It does not matter what I do now.”

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?

The U.S. has a greater percentage of its population locked up than any other country in the world. In the coming weeks we will look at why we think this is and how we, as counselors, can have an impact on our prison population. Here are some other startling facts about America’s prisons. - In 2009 there were 7.2 million people in prison and under official supervision like probation -- a larger population than the state of Washington. - According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics; Pew Public Safety Performance Project the national prison population tripled between 1987 and 2007. - Pew Center on the States reports that 4 in 10 prisoners return to state prisons within 3 years of release. - Pew Center on the States report that up to 1 in 30 men between 20 and 34 years is behind bars – up to 1 in 13 in one state.

One way, as counsleors, we can inspire, motivate, and reduce so-called "resistance" to change is to employ the principles of Motivational Interviewing (MI). My last blog post introduced MI. This post continues my discussion of that approach by detailing some of it's principles.

I often talk about the benefits of starting a private practice. However, owning your own business isn’t for everyone, and working for a counseling agency is not an inferior alternative. Listed below are 4 reasons to not start a private practice. If any one of the following applies to you, starting a practice may be a bad fit. 1) I need money now!

First, let me apologize for my lengthy hiatus from the blogosphere. I’m back, and in the words of George Thorogood, b-b-b-b-bad to the bone. Just kidding. What prompted me to return is to share an experience I had with a friend whom I’ll call “Carol” over lunch recently. Carol and I were counseling interns together a few years ago. We went separate directions- she built a private practice and I headed for the ivory tower of academe.

I recently ran across Newton's laws and felt like I was reading a short concise statement of what happens in a lot of marital therapy. So bear with me.... The First Law states that objects at rest tend to remain at rest, and objects in motion tend to remain in motion, unless they are acted upon by an external force; the Second Law states that an applied force on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum with time; and the Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

As you all know, the ACA annual conference is just around the corner and is in San Francisco! Now being a small town boy at heart I have never been to the west coast, in fact I believe the last time I flew it was to visit a dying relative in Arizona about a decade or more ago. I prefer staying in my comfort zone which is in my office helping others or on the farm doing the same but with the addition of “tractor therapy” for me whenever possible. This does not mean to convey that I never wanted to go to the west coast, just that I have never had the reason to do so until now.

One thing I find so refreshing about reading these ACA blogs is the use of pronouns. The most prominent pronouns used are the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘we’ referring to us as counselors. This makes sense because as counselors, our major subject is relationships and pronouns are the ‘bones’ of those relationships. Pronouns not only express relationships, they create them and hold them in place. For a person to change, they must ‘change their pronouns’.