ACA Blog

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’.

As we all know, life can sting. People come to us with all sorts of hurts and challenges in their lives, seeking to heal but just don’t know how. There is no shortage of reasons and ways people feel broken, and besides support and having a safe place to “unload,” they need new tools to move forward. In an earlier ACA blog post, I wrote about use of metaphors and how they can help in the healing process. Metaphors help unlock old habits of thinking and coping, and encourage flexibility in learning new ways to tackle old problems. When methods of coping no longer work, even if it had worked or at least seem to have worked in the past, the role of the therapist as teacher of a “new language” is vital for therapeutic success.

[caption id="attachment_4859" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Jennifer Bingaman"][/caption] When I tell people (mostly non-counselors) I work at a men’s residential drug treatment facility, I invariably get two responses.