The vast majority of the issues on this blog are going to focus on the things I learn that I want to share with any readers who happen to stumble across my page. But to set the stage, so to speak, I want to first address who I am and how I came to do what I do.
When I was seven years old, my friend Elise’s parents got divorced. This affected Elise in a number of ways, so her parents made a mutual decision to send her to a therapist.
My friendship with Elise was not one of deep confidence. It was, instead, a friendship that involved playing the kinds of games typical to young girls – games that involved swing sets, Barbie dolls, and brightly-boxed board games. Elise would choose the activity, set the parameters, and we would play accordingly. Thus, you may not find it surprising that Elise did not confide deeply to me about her sessions with her therapist.
One day, however, I had a play date with Elise that coincided with her therapy appointment. I went to the office with her and her mother, and was told to sit in the waiting room. For about half an hour, I sat there, playing with toys and thumbing through old issues of Highlights Magazine. Then Elise’s therapist came to the waiting room and asked if I would like to join them for the second half of the session. I shrugged and obliged.
Once in the therapy office, we were given art supplies and encouraged to draw, play, and engage with each other and the therapist. After a few minutes, the therapist asked us who made the rules in our friendship, and we quickly agreed that Elise did. “What if,” the therapist suggested, “Jennifer got to make the rules one time?”
An electricity ran through me at the suggestion. This was a whole new perspective I had never considered! That night, I went home and told my mother that I wanted to see a therapist. For the next several years, I insisted on this. At about age 12, the request, no longer made to my mother, but rather to myself, shifted: “I want to become a therapist.”
This planted the seed, and as I grew older, I found that I was the kind of person people felt they could talk to. I was decidedly nonjudgmental about the things people shared with me, and very good at remaining neutral and making people feel safe. Because of this, I had a lot of very one-sided friendships. People would talk to me, tell me their problems, and I would offer an ear, a lack of judgment, and, on occasion if solicited, advice or feedback.
This became addicting – this being needed in that way – but much of the time, it wasn’t reciprocated. If I needed someone to talk to, I often found I had nowhere to turn.
When my family suggested I see a therapist to deal with some of the “I’m an angsty adolescent and I’m a little bit maladjusted and need someone to talk to because I’m hormonal and crazy and everything makes me angry and I don’t know why” issues I was dealing with, I was strongly resistant. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t need to talk to anyone.
But I loved my therapist. I loved that I could talk to her, and she wouldn’t judge me and she wouldn’t criticize me. Once we got to know each other, she would occasionally challenge me. But it seemed there were no bounds to what I could share with her. I could tell her about my fears, my concerns, my feelings. If I wanted to bring in a photo album and show her my friends, “sure, no problem.” If I wanted to bring in my guitar and play her the new song I’d written, “absolutely, I’d love to hear it.”
It wasn’t about receiving advice. It wasn’t about quipping in the other 6 days and 23 hours of my week, “my therapist suggested I try…” It was about having a safe space and unconditional positive regard.
Around the time I started seeing my therapist, I got a call from one of my fair-weather friends, Joel. He lived across the country, in Florida, and he was a deeply troubled person. When I answered the phone, Joel told me that he was planning to tie a plastic bag over his head before he went to sleep and commit suicide by asphyxiation. I asked if he’d spoken to his parents about this, and he said he had and they didn’t care. He said he just wanted to let me know he was planning to do this, and to say goodbye.
I paced back and forth. I hyperventilated. Finally, I confided in my mother. She told me – no argument allowed – that I needed to call a suicide hotline and tell them what Joel had just told me.
“But what if he’s angry?” I asked. “What if he hates me for it?”
“You have to do it,” she said. She was very rarely this insistent about anything. “If you do, he might hate you. But if you don’t, he might kill himself.”
I called the hotline. They sent a psychiatric intervention team to Joel’s home. In California, they call it a 5150. In Massachusetts, they call it a Section 12. I have no idea what they call it in Florida, but I do know that Joel was involuntarily hospitalized for 72 hours. His parents were furious, and they called threatening me and my parents.
Two weeks later, Joel called and thanked me. He sounded humbled and tired, and maybe a little bit medicated. But he was alive, and he was grateful.
I relay this story not because I think I did anything particularly heroic, but because it was my first taste of a number of things – of helping someone in a serious, long-lasting way; of the idea that just because someone wants something doesn’t mean it’s what’s right for them; of how one person really can make a difference in another person’s life, just by caring enough to be attentive and proactive.
When I finished college, I said I was sick of school, that I was never going back. But something in me needed to be a therapist. I needed to follow this dream and this helping instinct that I’d had ever since being dragged into Elise’s session. So I applied to graduate school and was admitted to California State University, Northridge’s school of Educational Psychology and Counseling with an emphasis on Marriage and Family Therapy.
So that’s the story of how and why I became a therapist. But it doesn’t explain how I became strength-based and so focused on empowerment. It doesn’t explain why I’m the kind of therapist I am.
My graduate school advisor and thesis chair, Stan Charnofsky, had this theory that we become the kind of therapist that reflects our childhood. Often, sitting in my classes and listening to the other therapists-to-be telling the tales of their broken families, their tragic childhoods, I had the impression that I was not “broken” enough to become a therapist.
But I sat in my classes, and I listened to what my classmates had to say.
“I grew up around gang violence, so I really want to work with an underprivileged population to empower the youth in those neighborhoods to have bright futures.”
“I was 7 when my mother died. It’s hard growing up with just one parent. I want to reach out to grief-afflicted clients.”
“When my brother had his first manic episode, none of us knew what it was. I always looked up to him, and suddenly he was erratic and wild and unpredictable. When his mania ended in his hospitalization, our family learned a lot about bipolar disorder. So I want to help families afflicted by severe mental illness.”
I had no trauma. I grew up in a functional nuclear upper-middle-class family with a mother and father who loved each other. I had one younger sister. We both went to private school. Neither of us really wanted for anything.
Sure, my adolescence was an angsty one, and I had some social problems, but my upbringing was right out of a right-wing “save the traditional family” ad. (Not that I believe in the “traditional” family. I absolutely don’t. Did you know that only 25% of households with children under 18 consist of a woman, a man, and their biological child or children? So much for that being the “norm”! But I digress.)
I tell you this not to garner sympathy of the “oh, poor Jennie, she had a great childhood” variety, but to explain where I come from in my work and in my writing. I believe in empowerment because my parents taught me to believe in myself. I believe that no matter where people come from, they’re worth something, because my family taught me about the inherent “goodness” in me, even if I made choices that were not the best. I believe in focusing on a client’s positive qualities, because I learned, as my family pressed me to make the most of my strengths, that that’s where positive change comes from.
It’s like Dr. Charnofsky said: I’m the therapist I am due largely to the kind of upbringing I had. I like it because it’s positive, and because I think it works.
I hope that now you have a better understanding of how I got here and where my ideas and philosophies come from throughout the rest of this blog.
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