I was swimming through my thoughts the other day trying to wrap my mind around the last five months.  I’ve moved from the state I love, my home. Even though west Texas will grind on your very soul, it was still closer to the rich culture of San Antonio.  I haven’t had a decent Mexican food dish since I’ve been here (I know, its terrible).  In all seriousness, this has been one of the most trying times of my life.  It has also been wonderful but I’ve come to realize those two attributes will collide more often than I have previously expected.

We’ve faced some tough financial situations with both of us in school, watched our friends buy homes, have kids, and grow up.  In some ways, it feels like we’ve had to stand from a distance and watch as life passes us up.  We are so happy for all of our friends who are building their lives, but sometimes…we feel like we fall behind and we’re not sure whether we can make it up.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!

This place is wonderful.  The mountains draw you outside and you can’t do anything but hike them.  Its like a natural response.  But Texas is my home, and there’s no place like home.  Sometimes I’ve realized that the farther you get from home, the more you realize how much it means to you.  I’ve recently been in touch with my sister more frequently than I have for the better part of my life.  She reminds of all that was good about my father.  He was passionate and philosophical, not musically inclined, but musically fanatic.  He had a huge smile that I usually only saw when he was trying to make me laugh or when he lifted me up over his head.  Heather is kind of like that laugh, probably because she has the same one, but its refreshing because I know she’ll stick around.

I’m constantly learning very new things as I progress through my education and as I watch my brilliant wife take hers to task.  I don’t think it is any coincidence that we both have this weird professional fetish for finding hopeless situations and hopeless people because they are the ones who are usually left out of hopeful conversations and hopeful goals.  It either takes too much work or too much sacrifice.  But my hope and my faith lead me to believe that there are no hopeless situations (bring on chummy cliches), just difficult ones.

One of my favorite pieces of written word is the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley.  Nelson Mandela used this poem as a kind of mantra during his incarceration.  It’s almost gospel to me (hold on my Church of Christ friends, I said ALMOST), but when I feel like I’m running on empty, it reminds me of the state of my soul, the gift of resilience, and hope.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

I think with all of the challenges we face, its okay to pause for a moment and reflect on what we’ve been through and how we’ve gotten here. It doesn’t matter where you come from; life does not discriminate.  If you dig into your narrative, you may be surprised to find that you are more resilient than you once thought.

One of my classmates from Bogota, Colombia gave a presentation on why citizens of her country are more inclined to post-modern thoughts of therapy.  For those of you unfamiliar with post-modernity in therapy, it is a rationale that understands reality to be constructed in language with no objective truth, and thus, no expertise in therapy.  As a consequence, therapy is a collaborative effort between two or more equally capable people.

Anyway, my classmate talked about how Colombia’s history has been riddled with violence as a result of intense colonization.  It has not been until recently that the country has been able to get its hands on some measure of liberty, but the fallout of colonization has been drastic.  In the United States, we have traditionally believed that colonies were a positive thing.  Something that helps people.  We had the original thirteen colonies, for example, that preceded the unification of the states and a free nation. Colombia’s experience with colonization, however, is tyrannical and hostile.

This is the largest critique of traditional forms of therapists.  We are simply colonizers who want to create a certain kind of person.  We inject our beliefs about what life should be like into a person so that our way of living will make their problems disappear.  Do you see how this could be problematic?  This is why we are portrayed in the media as “head shrinks” who get very angry if we don’t get our way.  Very rarely do you see a positive image of a therapist.

Post-modern and feminist beliefs about therapy were largely a reaction to this idea.  Rather than create a Manchurian kind of person in therapy, why don’t we allow the local knowledge that is within the person to grow and reach its full potential until the problems disappear.  If this sounds confusing, then you’ve got a good understanding of post-modernity.

So enter my colleague, a young professional woman who has fought to bring empirical evidence to the public education system in Colombia.  The problem, however, is that the government is highly reactive to the idea of bringing in American influence to the local knowledge of the community. They are afraid of colonization.  It is for this reason that therapists in Colombia are so open to post-modern forms of thought.  There is only one problem, however, according to my classmate.  When you ONLY account for local knowledge, and when you ONLY insist on what is known here, in this culture, or here, in this reality, you tend to recycle what you know.  Let me ground this conversation in a current debate in the field.

Some people believe that being the expert or “the one who knows” strips power from the client and creates a colonized individual. Others believe that accepting payment from someone who comes to you for help automatically puts you in a position of power that makes it necessary to share your expertise.  If this argument sounds ridiculous, it is.

Here’s the truth of it: Therapy is a balance between expert knowledge and experience with client local knowledge.  The result of this blend is an informed individual or family system that works within the knowledge it possesses and gives the therapist room to input what he or she may know.  It values the expert story of the client and the expert experience of the clinician.  Post-modern and feminist forms of therapy were correct to remind the shrinks that clients are more of an expert on their own stories than a therapist will ever be.  In the same way, therapists are equipped with the skills necessary to make suggestions and create possibilities for families who may have previously had none.  Isolated, these two thoughts are colonies.  Unified, however, they are a liberated nation.

Sometimes when I consider what I was thinking as I filled out applications to come to Virginia and pursue more schooling, I feel like I am gearing up for a quest that will cost me.  To be completely honest, most of what I find here in the world of ambitious people is self-serving and vain.  I have read countless curriculum vitas (academic resume) only to feel inadequate or at least very short.  It is the closest I could come to feeling like a teenage girl looking at models in a magazine, I’ll just never measure up.  I won’t accomplish what these people have accomplished, I won’t win the greatest awards or be the first person to do so twice in a row, and I won’t be able to plaster it all over my vita like some kind of academic tattoo.

Here’s the brutal reality of it: It will honestly never happen.  Its not because I think I’m incapable, but it is because I am not interested in using my degree to become a pioneer in the field to have my name in lights.  I don’t want to be the best therapist or go to the best school or do the best research or become the best teacher (okay, maybe I want to become the best teacher) because then people will know me and I’ll be respected.

What I really want is a chance to engage in the lives of students.  To influence my students toward positive change the my professors have done for me.  What I really want is a simple university with no flashing lights, a hot cup of coffee, and a chance for good conversations and meaningful transitions.  I would like a quiet office to help people, to actually do what it is I have been trained to do.  I no longer care about having the most publications.  To be honest, I’m not even sure I completely buy into all the empirical research in social sciences (shhhhh, don’t tell anyone-that’s blasphemous and they’ll burn you at the stake!).

What I really want is the chance to share my faith through my actions, to get fired up and take it a little too far, to say the wrong thing and be okay with it, to remain a learner on most things and an expert on very little, to influence, to change, and to enjoy.

I think the next time I enter the mouth of the dragon, I’ll worry less about my sword and bring a shield.

“There are two inherent things you need to create the kind of change you want to see: power and compassion.” He responded. “For some, the two things are power and the self. If you want to see positive change, go get you some power and use it compassionately.”

Power is not inherently negative.  Some therapeutic philosophers believe power is a negative consequence of therapy because there cannot be a therapeutic context absent of power.  Consequently, these colleagues suggest, the therapist is a colonialist who creates a certain kind of person based on certain kind of research or culturally constructed outcome.  The problem, however, with this assumption is not that the power exists, but the negative critique of power.  Power exists between government and constituent, between clergy and attendee, between teacher and student, and between therapist and client.

It is impossible to create a therapy session without hierarchy or power.  It is, therefore, irresponsible to ignore this.  What if, instead of focusing on how to weed power, we focused on how to construct situations conducive to positive change.  This is why I believe in a non-pathologizing therapeutic system that suggests people are capable of overcoming problems.  Some individuals who think I am too hard on the medical model think its merely a matter of semantics.

Consider the following situation: person a comes to you complaining of months of intense sadness and lethargy.  These are both symptoms associated with the depression construct.  I tell person a that they have depression and need to behave by a certain set of behaviors and take a certain dosage of pills to get rid of the depression or at least the symptoms.  This person is immediately pathologized.  Person a is no longer person a but depressed person a.  Conversely, what if person a is given a different situation.

What if person is a given a problem they can solve? (Credit Jay Hayley) Depression is a big word with lots of big pharma research behind it.  Depression belongs to the head shrinks.  Give me depression and I will give you defeat.  Give me problems and I will you problems you can solve.

This morning, I had some extra time so I decided to revisit my old friend Al.  I flipped on the tube and turned it to a familiar channel but instead of Al’s smiling face, I regret to say I saw a new talking head share a story about one of the shooters from Columbine.  She let the millions of anxious mothers who were watching the show know that psychologists (whoever those psychologists are) now know that the shooter was clinically depressed and suicidal.

Now, this may not seem like a big deal.  We hear these terms as much as we see cereal commercials.  My problem, however, as a systemically-oriented therapist is that now every person’s child who was unfortunate enough to be labeled as a depressed person is now going to be stigmatized as potentially suicidal, or worse, on the edge of mass murder.

This is an extreme example of my problem with how the medical model of mental health pathologizes individuals into believing that DSM categories of diagnosis are prescriptive for a certain set of behaviors. In other words, because your child is bipolar, he or she will be inclined toward certain highs and lows in their behaviors. That’s just the way it is. It is out of your control.  As a result, here is a pill to correct these behaviors.

Now, before I go on, I need to say that I am not entirely against medical intervention. Some people are plagued by chemical imbalances that seem to take away any notion of personal agency.  My fight is with pharmaceutical companies, physicians, doctors, and marriage and family therapists who take advantage of this truth without due diligence.  My problem is that the medical model places people in a neat little box and removes our responsibility to confront the problems that entangle us.

Most people believe in growth.  We write stories about conflict; we get weepy at inspirational movies. When it comes to mental health, however, we want the pill.  Fix the kid.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.  Sometimes when my clients say that to me, I want to scream at them, “fix your marriage!” Most people come to me in bewilderment that their child screams obscenities at their teacher.  The couple gets in argument with each other in front of me and their child in which one calls the other a bastard while he calls her a bitch.  I then pose the question, “do you think your own use of crude language might have anything to do with your child’s expressions of aggression?” “No!” They respond.

This is all very unclear, I know.  But suffice it to say that if we took a moment to challenge each other to accept our own common sense and not believe everything Dr. Pharmacy tells us, I bet our children would look a little more creative and a little less ADHD.

So I started this blog.  In my blog I discussed the trajectory of my therapeutic experiences, discussed hopes for future endeavors, and generally experimented with the idea that I could put my most genuine self forward and not hide behind the smokescreen computer that produced my final product.  The delete key on my keyboard is very powerful.  In this experiment, I promised myself I would be consistent with the call of my assignment to exercise my ability to be completely genuine in my character.  This is because my part of this assignment is to talk about therapist genuineness as an essential part of therapy.  In this process, something amazing happened.  I began to receive comments on my blog.  People began to encourage me, challenge me, rebuke me, and believe in me.  I received both private and public encouragement through various social networking tools.  Someone would read my blog and send me a note of “thanks” for the honesty on Facebook.  I was less shocked by the amount of responses and more surprised by my own reactions to them.  It turns out I’m not as judgmental of my wife as I once thought.  It turns out, my wife does not react positively to the fact that people read her stories, but that people validate the character beyond those stories.  If this is true, and if by writing myself real on a blog, people are positively changed even for a moment, then I wonder, to what extent can genuine character promote change in therapeutic conversations?

As I approached my computer, the deathly tones of a slow-playing symphony began to creep through my ears and into my veins.  I saw the subject line, a bomb with the digital clock at five seconds left.  I had no choice.  I could hear the audience behind me screaming, begging me not to open the email.  But like the stupid girl who walks toward the darkness instead of away, I clicked on the command to open the message that would drastically change my circumstances.  Everything happened so fast.  The words pierced me letter by agonizing letter.  My professor proceeded to tell me that she had just spent the last six hours of her afternoon and evening correcting a slew of my mistakes on assignments I had worked on for the last three weeks.  This is not something you want to see in your first two weeks of a doctoral degree.  In PhD land, reputations are the foundation of success.  It is unfortunate, but these people are slaves to grant money and professional journals.  So to see my reputation turning to ash before my very eyes was like watching a car crash.  You want so desperately for it to stop, but you are absolutely powerless to do anything.

Its never a good thing when a superior makes sure they tell you just how long they spent correcting your screw-ups.  It doesn’t matter how big that smile is on their face, you know they were pissed about it and they want to make absolutely sure you know just how much of an inconvenience you are in this moment.  Its even worse when a superior takes the time to type it into an email.  I could hear the disappointment almost as loudly as I could envision how hard she pounded on the keyboard.  My first response was to write back with a ton of cuss words and dirty name-calling.  So I did that. But before I sent the email I considered my future and decided against it.

I don’t know the moral, don’t ask me.  Perhaps this is a lesson to us all not to take criticism with a grain of our soul.  I’m the same person now as I was yesterday.  I’ll be the same person after I meet with my professor and tell her how very sorry I was for consuming her afternoon and evening.

I never thought I would have the chance to build a counseling practice from the ground up.  This began as an idea and with the help of the church’s leadership, an amazing group of co-therapists, and a generous supervisor, the idea is beginning to mold into a reality.

The farther we get into the semester, the more I’m realizing this could actually be a reality.  I’m hoping that it will be functional by January when we will start our clinical rotations at the Tech Family Therapy Center, however, the speed at which it has been going so far suggests there is a possibility it may start sooner.  It is amazing how God has been shaping this idea into a tool to serve this community through mental health services.

I’ll continue to post ideas and the latest news about how this gets off the ground.  If you have any suggestions, let me know!!