WEEK 15

 I will continue to grow because I am in an arena where I will be counseling students on a daily basis, some counseling is more advising but most of my sessions are dealing with anything from students loosing their homes to fire all the way to anxiety over midterms.  The obstacles that students are faced with and what it takes to help them over come them are what I get to do daily. It is exhausting and rewarding, I realize I cannot save them all but also realize that I make a difference in so many of their lives. I will continue to grow through exposure and because I choose to always seek out additional resources and will continue to seek out education in my field of work, to always look inside myself and keep my personal thoughts, feelings and worldviews from interfering how I see my clients and just as important, how my clients see me.    
 The progression of my counseling skills have come a long way in the past several months, prior to this class I worked as an instructional specialist III and taught medical microbiology at a local community and technical college and had a case load of 15 developmental students to advise.  I have since changed careers and now am a full time counselor with a case load of 80 students who have academic advisors, I actually get to counsel. I feel that this coupled with taking theories and techniques and then the practicum back to back has made a huge difference in my confidence.  I feel that my weakest point is still having the patience to allow that client arrive at the answers or goals instead of somewhat jumping the gun and rushing things.  I will always think that I talk too much, and will continue to work on that as well. 

        Growth has been exponential in the last several years as stated in my earlier blog post today,  The metamorphosis of cultural and self-identity investigation caused a huge change in how I see myself, validating some things and rejecting a few that I have always told myself about how I see the world. Learning that the views I had were many times views instilled by family and not how I truly felt at all.  These are just a few of the things that have cultivated growth in myself and therefore growth as a counselor.  As a counselor I am compassionate, empathetic, attentive, and most of all genuine. I think I have traits that are indicative of a good counselor but caring isn’t enough to make me an excellent counselor. I have set a goal of attending at least one online webinar or podcast per quarter as well as taping sessions and reviewing them, myself and with my peers as a step to always cultivate growth as a counselor.  My thinking over the course of time to work through this degree is probably 180 degrees from where I was when I began.  Personal growth and understanding of self are two things I would not have achieved at this stage in my life and perhaps never would if I had not taken the classes in this program. I am grateful to all of the instructors who took part in my metamorphosis. 

Blog of Chioce; Personal Growth

The progression of my counseling skills have come a long way in the past several months, prior to this class I worked as an instructional specialist III and taught medical microbiology at a local community and technical college and had a case load of 15 developmental students to advise.  I have since changed careers and now am a full time counselor with a case load of 80 students who have academic advisors, I actually get to counsel. I feel that this coupled with taking theories and techniques and then the practicum back to back has made a huge difference in my confidence.  I feel that my weakest point is still having the patience to allow that client arrive at the answers or goals instead of somewhat jumping the gun and rushing things.  I will always think that I talk too much, and will continue to work on that as well. 

Growth has been exponential in the last several years as stated in my earlier blog post today,  The metamorphosis of cultural and self-identity investigation caused a huge change in how I see myself, validating some things and rejecting a few that I have always told myself about how I see the world. Learning that the views I had were many times views instilled by family and not how I truly felt at all.  These are just a few of the things that have cultivated growth in myself and therefore growth as a counselor.  As a counselor I am compassionate, empathetic, attentive, and most of all genuine. I think I have traits that are indicative of a good counselor but caring isn’t enough to make me an excellent counselor. I have set a goal of attending at least one online webinar or podcast per quarter as well as taping sessions and reviewing them, myself and with my peers as a step to always cultivate growth as a counselor.  My thinking over the course of time to work through this degree is probably 180 degrees from where I was when I began.  Personal growth and understanding of self are two things I would not have achieved at this stage in my life and perhaps never would if I had not taken the classes in this program. I am grateful to all of the instructors who took part in my metamorphosis.  

Week 14

First, Let me say happy Thanksgiving to all of my colleagues and Dr. Shaver, I hope you all have a fantastic holiday and spend it with the ones you love. 

 I think that this practicum is the beginning of what I would call the road to authenticity for myself as a counselor. By that I mean that I have had all of these counseling classes and done an amazing amount of time watching the famous counselors of our era on HULU and YOUTUBE, done internships with peer guidance, in classroom exercises, but now with my degree coming to an end I’m aware that just because you graduate with a degree in something doesn’t mean that you are that; the instant you are handed a degree there is no Glenda the good witch standing over you with a magic wand to say “poof” you’re a counselor. You must become authenticated through perseverance, guidance, and by falling on your face quite a few times. I know that for me at least that’s what it is taking. I tape sessions and listen to them and think “why in the hell did I say that? I should have said blah blah blah” it’s a process, I think we help one another by realizing that even as long as we have been a counselor, or not done it at all, I believe that by doing it and finding that we are doing good and making a difference and empowering or clients that we actually feel like counselors. 

I have grown so much over the past several years of this counseling program, I’ll start with the self-awareness that was so far buried in the make-believe perfect world and religion. Growing up as a Baptist minister’s son and grandson, I believed that my homosexual tendencies were a curse, and that the devil had a grip on me, hearing all the while that prayer could fix all; so I sat about on a journey of finding the me that was attracted to women,  I soon was dating and within three years or so married, the tendencies toward homosexuality never left and I never stopped praying. No matter how much I prayed, I was still miserable, years into my marriage and three kids later it was more than I could take, I had to change something. I am a spiritual person, I tend to stay away from organized religion, I believe in creation and lean more toward the American Indian view that we are a part of something bigger, all tied together with the earth being central, that God is perfect, does not make mistakes and therefore, I am exactly how I am supposed to be. I’m not slamming God or religion, I learned a lot growing up in church that is good, I just like Gandhi’s view “I love your Christ, but not your Christians” I think too many times people feel that being Christ like allows them to judge, in essence to hate.

I struggled with my sexuality for some years, and then a chance happening,  I ran into a friend from my high-school years, he had lived next door to a place I worked fresh out of high school.  He told me that he had come out and was partnered to a man, they had both finished college and were living in Huntington and doing great. He asked if I’d like to have dinner sometime and I agreed that I would. In the meantime I was taking some of the first counseling classes in this program and it all began to sink in, I could be happy and be gay openly, the ground had not opened up and swallowed my friend or his partner, as I began learning about my identity of self, and my cultural identity, I was challenged to look deep inside myself and see who” I” really was and more importantly why.

 I found out through much searching that I love myself just as I am, that society does not dictate who I am and what is right or wrong when it comes to my sexual identity as homosexual. One of the biggest surprises that I learned about myself is when I learned of my lack of knowledge on so many levels of race, culture, and ethnicity. I learned what unconditional positive regard, empathy, ethics and compassion truly means and the knowledge of all of these things allowed me to know who I was, why I could be seen as so many different things by so many different people. I was white, tall, attractive, and could not see the unearned privileges that being as such I had. I had to learn to look at myself under a microscope and make myself aware of all of these things.  This program has taught me to first focus on myself, to know what my belief system is so that I am aware of the places that I need to work on and where I could possibly hurt a client if I was not aware of how I see the world differently and just as important, how to see the world through the clients eyes, regardless of my beliefs.

Having grown so much over that last four years, I have come into my own and learned what oppression feels like, how it feels to be empowered by knowledge and confidence this education has given me, I’ve learned to break myself down and look inside at the amazing person I have become and how to use all of the knowledge I have gained from my life and how I have developed into helping others overcome obstacles of their own. I know it can be done because I have done it myself, it’s like when Harry Potter conjured his patronus for the first time, he realized he could do it because he had done it before. Knowledge is power, I have knowledge that power now, it is mine; I earned it through hard work and long hours, through sacrifice and too many life changes to mention in the last four years and no one can take that away from me. What I love about all of this is, that I have just begun, I have so much more to learn and so much more to experience, it’s a great feeling to have hit forty and five years into my forties I am happier than I have ever been and love myself just exactly how I am, I believe this program has helped me realize many things about where I have been where I am, and where I am going and that this journey to authenticity will be filled with new knowledge gained only because I choose to learn, to continually grow, this class has taught me that as well.   

WEEK 12

When I was in grade school I always wanted to become a veterinarian, I loved all creatures great and small and had a knack for animal husbandry. This came in very helpful as we lived on a farm with lots of livestock that fed us and put food on the table. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on perspective I was a horrible student; while my big brother made A’s and B’s without so much as looking at a book while I studied and still got C’s, D’s, and F’s. There were no ADHD or ADD’s mentioned in the era that I grew up and went to elementary school. I was punished every nine weeks when grades came out and continued the trend all the way through high school. It was not until later in life that I had developed the coping mechanisms and skill sets needed to actually learn. Basic combat training in the Army while being 34 years old taught me about hands on, visual, written, and lectured information and how my brain could retain information given to me in many different ways. I learned that I was actually very smart. After that, I started my first semester as a college freshman at 36. My major was natural science with an emphasis in biology and a minor in theater. While obtaining my degree I began working in adult and higher education at the university that I was attending. After obtaining my degree I began to advise students and found that I had a passion for helping students who were developmental and had to start out in classes that were remedial, I understood their lack of pride and was always mindful that I too had to take those classes and how it made me feel that I was inferior in some way. Watching the fresh out of high school students pressing buttons on their Texas instruments TA four trillion what ever it was, and then hearing them exclaim "Look, it makes a graph!! I was wondering how to turn the stupid thing on!  I was an adult and felt that I would never get it. Algebra was not a requirement in high school when I went, I had barely learned my times tables, now they wanted me to solve for Y?  It gave me a passion for helping these students by encouraging them, having empathy for them and a bit of understanding the things that they are telling themselves.  I grew up thinking that I was mentally handicapped and at any moment that the school counselor would walk into a classroom and ask me to go to the special education classroom.
  I think that these experiences set in motion an ability to see the need for more than just academic advising, I believe that it is what made me decide to get my master's degree in counseling.  Anyone can look at a degree audit and tell a student what they need to take next, most beginning freshmen need far more than that, especially if they require developmental classes.  If anyone would have told me when I was 20 that I would be taking my last class in a master’s degree in anything at this stage in my life I would have thought them insane.  I still love my critters and have a knack for caring for them but gain far more satisfaction by knowing that I was able to encourage and inspire from a level of understanding that many counselors my not have. It doesn’t make me any better at it, it just gives me a different perspective.  I will never forget the first time I was told that I was stupid, I also will never forget the first time I was told that I was smart, nor will I forget the college professor who said it.  I want to see the light come on, I want to empower students on all levels of ability, but have a passion for those who were left behind in their K-12 years. I would have thought that things would be different by now, and in many schools they are far better, but I still have college students who cannot do simple math, or punctuation in a paragraph (not that I am stellar at either myself) but I do not write “I wood like to go back to the test sinter to try agin” as one student did last week.  They are still slipping through the cracks in our region and not all will succeed at obtaining a college degree, but those who really want a degree will have every opportunity and all of the help that our program offers.

WEEK 12

Wikipedia states that “a metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and simile”.

We use metaphors every day but never stop to think how they are used to mean entire phrases when telling a story, they are also, in many cases cultural and not universally understood by everyone. Statements like “it’s a cake walk” are understood to say “the task at which you are about to attempt will be very easy.” If the hearer is familiar to the metaphor it is understood as semantic links to other words or phrases.  I use this example because my colleague who is from Ethiopia tells his students how easy a test will be by saying “it’s a walk on a cake” It cracks me up every time.  There again, I just used the metaphor “it cracks me up.” My colleague clearly knows that the phrase means that something is easy but never would have used that phrase in his homeland and had to learn what it meant, I’m sure the first time he heard it he didn’t think someone was going to walk on a cake.  A metaphor I commonly use is “you can’t see the forest for the trees” This means you need to take on what many counselors would call the helicopter view, meaning to see the bigger picture. If the client is so focused on the problem then I use this metaphor to help them understand that they need to look at the situation and see it on a larger scale to fully gain the perspective of the issue.

We use these in counseling every day and our clients use them to explain the situation or event to us in a manner that we can understand how they are seeing the world. I had a client say to me yesterday that the instructor had “ripped his butt” I knew this to mean that the instructor had admonished the student for something, leading me to ask the question “tell me what you did to deserve that?” The student then began telling a “Story” story telling is as old as speech its self, it’s how we learn and how we teach; all the way back to Aristotle there are stories of teaching to help mankind gain wisdom. They are structured retelling of an event or fictional event, they many times contain such things as goals, themes, plans, expectations, solutions and explanations. These are the same things that we as counselors hope to understand from our client as well as convey or instill. All I would have to say to anyone from my generation “remember the ant and the grasshopper” and they would instantly realize that perhaps I perceive that they are being lazy or wasting their time on folly and were going to find their self in a tight situation. 

ICEBREAKER

My icebreaker activity consisted of passing around a roll of toilet tissue,  each person taking part in the activity is instructed to take as many or as few sheets of the tissue that they wished.  After each person has taken their sheets, they are instructed to tell one thing about themselves for each sheet of toilet tissue that they have. This activity gives everyone in the class an opportunity to share something about themselves and to learn things about their classmates that they otherwise would most likely would not have learned in the classroom.