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.