ACA Blog

When I ran, screaming, from corporate America nine years ago, I swore that there were things I’d never want to see or do again. I wanted no part of organizational management- away with the flowcharts, spreadsheets, and silly buzzwords that we euphemistically used: “push-back” to refer to a major system of conflict between two people, for example. I envisioned becoming invested in the transgender liberation struggle as a counselor, working with clients to tackle significant problems in living directly.

The DSM-5 proposes to significantly lower the diagnostic threshold for ADHD in adults. In the DSM-IV, adults must have 6 of 9 "inattentive" behaviors or 6 of 9 "hyperactive/impulsive" behaviors to receive a diagnosis. The DSM-5 has proposed that as few as 4 of 9 "inattention" or 4 of 13 "hyperactivity and impulsivity" symptoms will qualify an adult for diagnosis.

Well, now that I have all the English majors grabbing their ears after having read the title of this blog which is taken from an old song, let’s see where this is headed, shall we? I write this as I review several discarded attempts at blog writing. In the old days my floor would be littered with crumpled up paper and perhaps a good amount of “flop sweat” that is the result of continued failure. Today we are able to save a few trees, and with the advent of air conditioning, flop sweat has been greatly reduced.

Last time, I wrote about an experience I’d had running into an old client and what I took away from that experience. I often see my clients out and about but having a face-to-face encounter with a former client just doesn’t happen very often. So, I was quite surprised when, the same week, I again experienced a “blast from the past”. I opened the mail to find a wedding invitation. Yes! I love weddings! However, this invitation came with a twist. It was from a former client who I had seen several years ago. He had completed counseling and went on to achieve a great deal of personal and professional success. Now he was getting married and he had invited me to attend.

I have been an avid singer for most of my life. Now, avid does not mean good, as friends and family who have heard me sing can attest to. But I do love singing! I am especially skilled at memorizing lyrics, which I am sure comes from my strong desire to sing along to my favorite songs.

While my blogs typically focus on military-related topics, ACA has invited me to write on another area of relevance to many ACA members: research and dissertation development. So while I will continue to write on military-related topics, my blogs will also include a peek into the life of a doctoral student’s final year and a half. In particular, I will share different aspects of my dissertation journey: Initial development, literature review, methodology, specific development of the qualitative study of 15 individuals (design, data collection, data analysis, etc.), and the actual writing of the dissertation. I hope the contents of my blogs will be helpful to members of ACA who may be pursuing graduate studies or who are beginning to develop ideas for research that will further enrich the body of literature in our field and ultimately benefit humanity through better understandings of one another.

Two pioneers of positive psychology are psychologists Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from Claremont Graduate University. They began to communicate their definition of positive psychology around 1998. From their view, since World War II, psychology had become a science largely about healing mental disorders. It concentrated on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning. In contrast, the aim of positive psychology is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worse things in life to also building positive qualities. Their prediction is that positive psychology in this century will allow psychologists to understand and build those factors that allow individuals, families, and communities to flourish, not just endure and survive. As a side effect of studying positive human traits, science will learn how to buffer against and better prevent mental, as well as some physical, illnesses. For the purpose of this blog entry, I will quickly review the concept of well-being theory that is proposed by positive psychology which can be used as another useful tool for the counselor’s toolbox.

Some of you may know that I am a fairly new immigrant to this country. I picked up English when I was quite young and although my English classes taught me well –in the sense that I was able to speak it with some fluency- it was not until I moved to the US that I started going through some stages I was unaware even existed. I came to this realization when one of my professors was doing a mock counseling exercise with another immigrant classmate. The “client” seemed unresponsive to some of those well known counseling skills but when our teacher asked her to share her feelings regarding a certain situation in her own language, things rapidly shifted. I must say that I did not speak nor understand her language but in spite of this drawback, I was able to feel her emotions, her love.

I was feeling overwhelmed with the amount of concerns my client shared with me. She shared worries she had towards friends, family, transportation, finding a good paying job, finding a good treatment provider, and her energy level. I felt all of these topics were important and I didn’t know which one my client and I should tackle first. Perhaps family might be important to focus on because isn’t a good home foundation important? Or perhaps I should focus on her lack of transportation and creating a job search action plan because Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has basic needs as the foundation of self actualization. Or perhaps still, none of these concerns were actually what brought my client to see me in the first place. I looked forward to supervision at my university for guidance.

Evidence-Based (EB) and Cognitive-Behavioral (CB) are two terms that have wormed their way into contemporary counseling jargon. Their major motivation is to help put counseling on a more firm=scientific base. They do have their merit. But they are completely incompatible with spirituality as I define it: spirituality essentially refers to that which is ultimately beyond—especially beyond evidence and cannot be captured with rational thinking. That, I believe, is the heart of the challenge we counselors face when want to include a spiritual dimension into our practice. And it faces all counselors when they counsel a client for whom spirituality is an important part of their lives.