Stacee Reicherzer

New PhD students talk a lot about their fears of doing research. Math anxiety seems to bleed its way into statistics and research methods courses. The consequence is that students develop a lot of self-defeating talk that centers around beliefs that the art of counseling does not marry well with scientific approaches to problem solving. Blame it on many things- that counselors do not typically score “I”s on the Holland, that counselor educators don’t do enough research and therefore do not mentor students in preparing them, that inadequate time and dollars are allocated for counselors to carrying out research projects. All of these things, indeed, hold grains of truth. However. I’ve found that a great deal of research on human experiences is best served by the skills and values that are the domain of the counseling profession. To illustrate this, I’ll share my experiences in my new case study.

I decided that I wanted to explore experiences for transsexual women of color. Not surprisingly, the topic has been under-researched. What surprised me of the studies I found was that the dominant focus was on pathology- referring often to these women’s “disorders.” There were also a few studies on depression, suicidality, and substance abuse- all focusing on aspects of risk for the population. Of note, none of these studies had been conducted by counselors.

I believe in strengths-based perspectives as a fundamental in counseling. My research, then, is a logical extension of my professional identity as a counselor. The study that I’m conducting examines resiliency in the lives of transsexual women of color. My interviews draw from counseling skills, serving as invitations for participants to reflect on personal triumphs in their histories. I found my most recent interview to be particularly moving for both the participant and me. It felt not dissimilar from a counseling session in the insight that emerged from its depth. Were I to come from a different behavioral health background, I’m not sure that I would have 1) reached the level of clarity that I sought; 2) conceptualized the entire interview as a model of strength. Yet, both of these were achieved.

My wish is to see counselors doing more of the research that informs evidence-based practice. Our profession is unique in its focus on human strength and resilience. In addition, counselors contributing to the body of research serves to legitimize our profession. It is time that we take our place in the scientific exploration of human experience.

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.

Stacee Reicherzer

Last week, a former client whom I hadn’t seen in over a year called me and asked for a session to debrief a depressive episode that had occurred over her Thanksgiving holiday. I was able to schedule her for the requested two-hour session, which allowed us the time and space we needed to not only address the issue at hand, but the time she needed to reflect on her journey. In truth, the time together was valuable for me, as well.

We had started work together when I was a graduate level intern in the winter of 2004, at which time she joined a women’s group that I was leading. She was managing a great number of personal struggles in her life in recovering from a history that included a tremendous amount of trauma from violence: violence in her family of origin, violence in gangs, and violence in her adult relationships. I’m not sure how it came to be that she came to trust me enough to do this, but she made the decision to pursue individual counseling with me. That was where the healing work really seemed to begin. We would meet weekly for the next 4 years.

Our time together was one of constant change. The trauma work itself was significant, with each milestone bringing significant changes for her life. Our setting also changed: from my internship site to my LPC supervisor’s office, and finally to my own practice (in a new city that was 70 miles from where she lived), she followed me. Over the course of our time together, I saw many of her life events unfold, knowing details about her history as it was being created.

As much as I cared for her, she reciprocated. During session that followed a fall I’d had while jogging, she noticed the bruises on my arms. She asked me if someone was “messing with me,” and nodded toward my arms. Her gaze sharpened and she looked seriously at me. I realized that she was ready to defend any violence I might have encountered. While I’m glad to say I didn’t need defending, I was humbled that she cared about the relationship in such a way that she felt protective of me.

We no longer meet regularly, now, holding session only when the need arises. As I said, I’d not seen her for over a year when we met last week, and I may go a very a long period before our next session. When we wrapped up this last time, she asked me, “How old are you now, Stacee?” Old enough to remember many beautiful memories of your development, my beloved client.

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.

Stacee Reicherzer

Recently, when supervising students, the topic of disclosure came up. As you might expect, the group was all over the place in thoughts on the value of disclosure, as well as the ethical implications that come along with it. Although I had my own thoughts on the appropriateness of vulnerability, I wanted the students to arrive at their own decisions. I gave them two instructions in this: 1) Determine their own limitations about sharing in counseling, understanding this may be a fluid boundary that is client-specific. What is safe territory from their own lives? 2) Be clear on the benefit of disclosure to clients: What would the student be doing to move counseling forward through disclosure?

The topic of disclosure is one I’ve considered a lot over the years: as a post-operative transsexual woman who was working with pre-operative transsexuals who wanted to know about my process, a suicide survivor whose own grief experience may have offered value to grieving clients, and as a hate crime survivor in work with LGBT youth, my own experiences have been invited into the room on multiple occasions.

What value are our own lived experiences as counselors? Do we occlude these in client work, believing that the introduction of heavy topics from our lives would consume the counseling session? Or do we use our experiences strategically, naming real-world elements from our own lives as a means of joining the client and moving the session into deeper connection.

I’ve adopted a both/and strategy in my use of disclosure, one that I try to impart to my students. There are indeed times in which real value can be had by allowing ourselves to be seen by our clients, particularly when our experiences hold potent elements for client direction. I reflect now on grief work that I did with a client through his mother’s debilitating illness and eventual death. I remember a particularly potent moment when, in response to the client’s direct question about whether I thought he would “get over” the death of his mother, I shared that a thing I had to learn for my own life was to “get over” getting over anything, and used my own father’s suicide to illustrate this. This was a particularly valuable experience in work with this client, as it moved our counseling through his decision that he needed to find a means to keep her living memory. As important as this work was, I realized that I would not have been able to share my experience, had this been an earlier point in my own healing, or with a client with whom I had a more tenuous connection.

At the same time, I have found that there are many examples from my own life that are simply of no value for the client. As I said earlier, many transgenders want to know about my experiences. Those who are early in their transitions tend to ask a lot of questions about how things worked with my family. Although this doesn’t feel particularly vulnerable for me to describe (my family was accepting), there is little value in sharing this information with a client, whose family experience is often very different from that of mine. In these instances, I work to explain to clients that my own family experience would not be anything like the client’s, as each coming out experience is one’s own, because she or he and I are unique.

Disclosure is a moving, fluid experience in my counseling work. The further along I that I move, the clearer I get on what I use from my own life as tools for client success. I endeavor toward counselor authenticity in my own awareness of what is/is not available from my own life to use in counseling. In this, I also endeavor to communicate clearly with the client either when using disclosure, or when making a clear and client-centered statement that explains my choice not to disclose.

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.

Stacee Reicherzer

I begin this week’s blog by revealing that I survived my father’s 1994 suicide. Since that time, I’ve also lost two clients and one student to suicide. This probably sounds overwhelming for you as a reader, but I think that the most important thing I can give you is to say that my felt sense in this discussion isn’t that of being overwhelmed, but really one of humble resolve. My resolve is in this: it’s time to de-mystify client suicide survival. In truth, counselor training does a lot of great work in sharing assessments and decision-making models for addressing suicidal clients. Yet, I think that we do little to prepare counselors for the likely fact that they will lose current or former clients to suicide. Is it that as counselors and educators, we are at a loss of how to describe the feelings that are associated with a suicide loss? Do we simply have no instruction or guidance to give because, in truth, there is no ability to feel settled with client suicide?

I’ve had some time to think about this of course. I’ve also had years of grief counseling, self-help, prayer, meditation, cleansing- you name it. Lots of work to stop the intrusive dreams, the staggering experience of loss, and perhaps most challenging of all: the guilt. What I came to realize in all of this is that my mission in trying to heal from suicide, and to finally get past it, was really defeating me.

The flaw was in my belief that I would somehow “get over” anything. When I stopped doing this, and finally came to recognize that my grief would always be a part of my life, something was radically transformed. I became open to celebrating lives past in a fundamentally different way. I came to see the dignity and gifts that each of these lives had brought mine. I also realized that making anyone’s choice to commit suicide about me was entirely my own arrogance. They didn’t commit suicide at me. They committed suicide in responses to overwhelming depression and seemingly insurmountable life odds. I wish, with all of my heart, that these decisions had not been made. Yet, I also realize that another person making such a decision did not make me a bad daughter or a bad counselor.

In my present life, I have adopted the Mexican tradition in celebrating El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), in which I and my best (living) friends come together to celebrate our dead. On our communal alter, I place my student’s paper (with the name removed) and items that commemorate my time with my clients. Next to my father’s picture, I place a beer and a pack of Camel Lights. A feast is prepared, and we spend the evening reflecting on the living presence of our dearly remembered- a presence that seems to be all around us during that night. Their deaths, although never diminishing as tragedies in my life, take on a new perspective. For this one night a year, if in no others, the living spirit of these folks in my present day life can be fully felt and celebrated. The tears come, but so do the laughs, the wisdom they gave, the love they held in their hearts as fathers, mothers, sons, husbands, wives, lovers, best friends.

My experiences, I realize, are my own. Yet, my wish is for us as counselors to unbind ourselves and our profession from the Eurocentric beliefs and fears about death. I would also wish us to liberate ourselves from the mistaken belief that grief is finite and resolvable. If basing this exclusively on the evidence of my own life, I would say that by embracing death as an extension of life, we come to understand something very different in ourselves. We come to embrace our grief in our present life- not as a thing to be resolved or gotten over, but as part of a living presence that continually informs how we can embrace life, both present and past.

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.

Stacee Reicherzer

The greatest teachable moments I have as a counselor educator are those that my students and I have together. The particular moment that I’m writing about occurred last summer in a group skills development. The group was comprised of 15 students, 10 of whom were women of African-American or of mixed African-American descent. Of the other students, one was from a Latin American country and the others were White and from the U.S (I’ll get to why this is important, later).

This valuable discussion was introduced by two students (who were taking their turn as co-leaders) who invited the discussion of group members’ foundation or “rock.” This took the topic to the importance of religion in the students’ lives, with people sharing various degrees of spiritual truth. However, two of the African-American students, whom I’ll call LaTonya and Mary, remained silent.

After the group leaders completed their period in the lead, I reconvened in the group, and asked the group to help identify who had remained silent. Mary was quick to share: “I’m mad at the church. I’m mad at people using religion to mistreat people. My sister has a gay son, and she refuses to accept him on the basis of religion. That baby needs her!” Mary was visibly very hurt by what she revealed. LaTonya then shared, “I’m not sure I believe in God or the church.”

Not wanting to miss the moment that was needed for everyone in the room, and also trusting in the love and support that the group had come to establish over its time together (this was truly an amazing group of students), I asked Mary and LaTonya how it felt to name their experiences in a room in which so many people had expressed strong faith in God and their respective churches. “Scary!” they said in unison. “Scary because it’s hard to tell this stuff to Black people,” Mary said. “Scary because people expect you to have faith, and when you don’t, people assume you must be searching,” added LaTonya.

This very powerful group was able to be visibly moved, offering very sincere respect and support for Mary’s and LaTonya’s experiences. One of the women in the group, a minister whom I’ll call Loretta, offered also to Mary that she had a gay son, and talked about how her religiosity provided her a means to express love and compassion for his gayness. This was clearly important for Mary, who hugged Loretta in response. Several members also expressed to LaTonya their desire that she lives her own truth, whatever this might be.
As important as this moment would have been on its own, the group was able to take the discussion to another level of vulnerability. We identified how religiosity and church life have been such a solid identity component for African-American people and have been a source of survival and resilience for the culture in facing centuries of adversity. To that point, we specified the tremendous challenge for Mary and LaTonya to express their respective anger and ambiguity toward religion in a room that had not only African-American women on a continuum of religiosity, but non-African-American students, also.

The importance, as summarized by Loretta, was in the “textures” of people’s lives and experiences. How valuable it was to see these textures in our room, allowing each of us, both African-American and non-African-American members, to see the complexity in a people’s experience. The importance was in recognizing an individual’s challenges of belonging to a marginalized cultural identity, and owning in a room with people both inside and outside of the culture that even the deepest of cultural components feel less real. As one student reported, “I’ve been Black my whole life, but learned a lot today about what it means to be Black.”

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.

Stacee Reicherzer

Cultural competencies- how far we’ve come! There are so many real and transforming learning experiences being shared within ACA- this is a truly amazing time in our evolution as a profession. Yet, I also wonder this- at what point do we transform multicultural training so that, outside of the multicultural counseling class that is standard in all master’s level courses, it can be something other than an end-of-chapter or end-of-book quickie? It’s as if an author is saying “Oops, before we go- let’s spend a few moments talking about (fill in the blank) theories/ethics/group counseling in work with (fill in the blank) special populations/minorities/women’s issues.” Often, these add-ins seem to be only means by which authors or editors can produce a new edition (and more money!) with minimal effort (and I do mean, minimal!)

Has anyone ever seen feminist theory receive nearly the space or placement given to psychoanalysis or CBT in a counseling theories textbook, in spite of the fact that what we know about family sexual violence is largely because of the efforts of social workers who were working with pregnant teens during the 70s? In spite of the fact that Latina/os are the fastest growing in the U.S., when do we teach about liberation psychology or any discourse on the subject of helping that has been written by authors with origins in the rest of America (the one that exists outside the U.S.)? After any coursework on LGBT issues, does any student walk away knowing the joy (and hence, the resilience factors) of being a lesbian or transgender woman, or do we only talk about incidence of LGBT depression, substance abuse, and suicide statistics- if the subject isn’t skirted altogether in search of safer waters that put the faculty member more at ease?

In spite of volumes of rich and informative work that counselors are producing about the experiences of marginalized communities, our dominant body of knowledge is still traced back to a body of knowledge that is overwhelmingly White, male, individualistic, and heterosexist.

My initial counselor training in multiculturalism had all of the teaching value of a bus on an “If This is Tuesday, This Must be Belgium” style multinational tour, navigating racial-ethnic communities of color in a quick, week-by-week discussion of some of the largest generalizations that could be made to cover the most information in the shortest amount of time possible. Such gems as, “Remember, when working with a Japanese couple, shake the man’s hand first,” were what I got for my student-loan financed education. I left class each night feeling dissatisfied, and often a little grouchy about how shallow and stupidly stereotyping our training seemed.

While we may have made advancements in working to integrate cultural competence into a body of counselor training (thankfully, we are moving away from silly all-or-nothing edicts that teach students to generalize and stereotype to the point of being completely unhelpful), we still have so far to go.

Stacee Reicherzer is a counselor, a faculty member at Walden University, and a private consultant with special interests that include: transgender issues in counseling, lateral (within-group) marginalization, and sexual abuse survival.