Stacee Reicherzer

When I ran, screaming, from corporate America nine years ago, I swore that there were things I’d never want to see or do again. I wanted no part of organizational management- away with the flowcharts, spreadsheets, and silly buzzwords that we euphemistically used: “push-back” to refer to a major system of conflict between two people, for example. I envisioned becoming invested in the transgender liberation struggle as a counselor, working with clients to tackle significant problems in living directly.

It’s interesting that academe beckoned to me, and with it, a number of new interests. As assessment coordinator for the counseling programs at Walden, I really enjoy putting processes and metrics together, and developing process flows for systemic improvement. This work resembles things to which I never thought I’d return- and the only difference I can ascertain is that it’s a meaningful use of my skills. In my previous environment, I simply felt incompatible with the goals of the organization. Counselor education, though, is a goal I can support.

Even more importantly to me is the fact that I’ve found my method for engaging the transgender liberation struggle in a manner that suits me- which interestingly, at the moment, is not clinical work. My primary professional investment is in qualitative research, something I knew nothing about when I was initially considering my career change; however, the opportunity for a level of engagement that supports my professional goals is immense.

I think the “lesson learned” (the lingo term everyone uses these days to optimistically describe getting kicked in the teeth) for me is that we often have very real and valuable skills from previous career lives. Whereas it seems desirable to throw out the baby with the bathwater at the end of an unfulfilling career, we might find that there our skills are an enduring and sometimes enjoyable function that we carry with us.

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

In the years since I entered my undergraduate studies in human services, through graduate school and into the present day, family stuff (italics added here for emphasis) has always been a fascinating thing to examine. Encountering counseling theories was like a treasure trove- “that’s so why she does that when my mother’s around!” and we won’t even talk about the riches the DSM revealed.

Having been in the profession now for some time, I’ve accepted this as fact and have moved away from the tendency I had during undergrad to whip out an “a-ha!” when a family member acted in a manner that I now had a theory to explain. As we become seasoned, we come to accept, perhaps grudgingly and quite necessarily through our own counseling, the good, the bad, and the ugly in our family histories. What was once a traumatic embroilment, later a fascinating discovery of human nature and my own existence, now tends to elicit not much more than a sigh and a shaking of the head. That’s true most of the time, anyway.

The most compelling parts of family history, though, are the older stories that pre-date me- the ones about grandparents, great uncles and aunts, and their forbearers. These are the stories of old- the legends upon which family history is built and that I’ve grown up hearing, but that I often don’t question until they pop into a present-day conversation. I grew up hearing about a great uncle who was “always such a liar,” and who told a story about seeing a snake take its fangs out before it took a drink out the river. Hearing this story again recently, I jumped to, “Did he have psychosis and believe this? Was he just lonely and trying to get approval by saying outrageous things that he thought would make him seem worldly? Did the originator of this story just not like him and therefore refused to appreciate his humor?” One of my grandmother’s older sisters was “so mean…and we never knew why.” I’ve found myself asking, whenever we talk about her, “Was she hurting and had no way to express this? Did she maybe not enjoy having nine children and a husband, and living on a farm and had resentment? Was she traumatized…?”

I may never arrive at contemporary understandings of stories about people who existed in a different time and set of circumstances, and around whom the stories that were told reflected an old-world pragmatism that is not my own; yet, the older I get, the more important these stories become to me. Equally important are the folks in my family who are still around to tell these stories .

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

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the interesting experience of sharing with both clients and research participants articles that I’d written about them. Working in LGBT counseling agencies with beautifully unique client experiences, I’ve asked a few of my clients, as we were concluding the work, how they’d feel about having a description of our work shared with other professionals via a journal article. Within this, I include a lengthy description of confidentiality and how it would be maintained, the use of an alias, etc. They have all generously agreed to this. One of the things I appreciate the most about counseling in the LGBT community is the spirit of helping others that pervades.

As it happens, I had a client email me recently to say hi and let me know things are well, and to ask if I’d finished an article I was writing in describing our work together. In fact, I had, and it was in its final stages of publication. Because we’d agreed beforehand that I would share the article with him at the time of its completion, and because it was about to become public domain, I happily emailed him back the copy of the current draft. After doing so, I immediately had some pangs of remorse- should I have asked him to make an appointment to read through it with him? What if he had questions, or was concerned about something I’d said (it was an article about EMDR in a relational-cultural model, so it was, by my estimation, non-pathological). However, when people see descriptions about themselves in written form, it can have invite a variety of responses. We have laws about this in regard to client files, but what about information we’re disseminating in the public domain that, while confidential, is nonetheless an intense story of client experience?

My concerns have been brought home to me this week as I’ve been doing final member checks with participants of case study research I’m concluding. In sharing the article write-up as part of my member check (and because including them in the review is the right thing to do), it’s been interesting to see how they’ve responded (I’ve shared with two of my three participants, so far.) The first was surprised to see her information, including a trauma history, presented factually- her specific reaction was, “Wow, girl- it’s like, ‘there it is- my life, right in front of me.’” My second participant told me that I made her sound “much better than I see myself,” which was surprising, since I was able to show her statements that linked to the logical development of the themes for her case.

All of this is to say, we really don’t know what people will experience in reading research- or practice-based articles that are about them. This leads me to believe that we really do need to consistently deliver the final write-up in person, simply because it allows us to answer questions or simply reflect on the impact the data as on the client or participant. One thing I’ve discovered is certain- there is always an impact of reading a retelling of one’s own story, regardless of the format. I think I’ll give that client I emailed the article to a call….

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 really appreciate when I have the good fortune to stumble on a professional opportunity that blows my expectations out of the water. I tend to have high expectations, a trait that has had led to inevitable disappointments in life. I think that over the years, I have learned to curb a bit of that an approach things from a perspective that I’d like to think is more Zen-like.

Last week, I had the privilege of participating as a member of the World Congress for Sexual Health in Glasgow, Scotland, where I gave a poster session of my case study research that examined resiliency factors for transsexual Mexican women. What made this conference different, and what surprised me, was how invested all of the people were in this shared area of specialization that is gender and sexuality. While many of us were experts in our various areas of sexuality in healthcare, social service, counseling, etc., the entire conference felt so participatory. It seemed to be a place that people were attending for the genuine desire to have knowledge we could all take back and apply in our clinical and/or research settings, not just a stop we made to add a line to our CVs.

I realize that what made the difference for me as a professional was, in addition to being in this really cool international scene, I’ve specialized for several years in an area in which I’ve yearned to meet other people who were doing innovative research and practice along with me. I have really sought, without knowing that I was seeking, a place for collective knowledge where we could talk broadly about the issues in which we share specialization. I guess I’m wondering how this works for other counseling professionals who specialize not just in gender and sexuality, but in any area. Do you attend conferences that feed your specialization in addition to more general counseling conferences? If so, what’s different for you in these different conference experiences?

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 have to begin this week’s blog entry by explaining that I’m a union gal of old, having become a steward with the Communication Workers of America shortly after beginning my first career in telecommunications. Through those times, as well as in my later phone company years as a manager, I came to understand and respect the give and take that came from having a collective bargaining unit (our union) in assuring that the company’s logical goals of profitability were made with account given to the rights and needs of the workers who were building that profit.

The reality is that labor unions are diminishing in size and power in the U.S. Yet, as I reflect upon this in light of the emerging needs of workers in my current career, counselor education, I find myself pondering words that one of the phone company executives told me at a time when we were closing one of our offices. She told me, “I think we’re going to see a movement back to the era of guilds, in which a profession becomes the keeper of quality and will negotiate with companies accordingly in determining what is produced, and how.”

Applying her words to the profession of counselor education, we, the counselors, are the ones who determine what our profession should look like. As counselors, we know very well that teaching and learning are significantly enhanced by smaller classes, reasonable course loads, and time and funding for faculty research, clinical practice, and professional development. CACREP accreditation standards specify quality standards on these and other important areas. This is of paramount importance at a time in which virtually all universities are making severe budget cuts. Maintaining accreditation means an uncompromising emphasis on quality in counselor education, and by that I wish to emphasize that it also means that we, the workers (counselor educators), will not be exploited in a milieu of fiscal mayhem. While labor unions may never regain the strength of the 20th century, our counseling profession must remember its part in assuring the quality of counselor training, and the educators who provide this.

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’ve been working with the LGBT community since 2003 when I began my Practicum experience during graduate school. As the resident transgender counselor, I was seen as a natural fit for all of the transgender clients who were seeking services. This was a good thing because I had a strong desire to give back. A lot of the work I ended up doing, as a result of transgender issues emerging as a specialization for me, was diagnosing Gender Identity Disorder. You see, trans people are required by their surgeons to have letters indicating their mental candidacy and readiness to undergo gender affirming surgeries and in some cases, hormone replacement therapies. What happens, then, is that people come to counseling solely for the purpose of procuring a letter, seeing it as a means to an end, or a hoop through which to jump on their way to living life fully. In honesty, this was certainly how I saw it when I underwent my own diagnostic process in 1993.

This presents quite a dilemma in that I don’t really believe I have a legitimate right to determine another person’s gender. Neither do you. Yet, transgender people have one way to obtain the medical services they need, and that is through the diagnostic process. For those of who specialize in transgender mental health services, no matter how radical our work in the transgender liberation struggle is, we invariably become diagnosticians because we’re the resident specialists in work that very few counselors are doing. Thus, making a firm commitment to strengths-based and resiliency-oriented counseling services for this marginalized community will invariably come with this paradoxical responsibility.

Over the years, I’ve grown to accept this fact, and have developed excellent relationships with many PCPs and surgeons who work with the trans community. I am well-respected for ethical decision-making in following the Standards of Care established by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, and the diagnostic guidelines established by the APA for Gender Identity Disorder (which will now be called “Gender Dysphoria” in the DSM-V). Even still, I look to the day when my trans sisters and brothers can have the freedom to choose their genders and how they wish to live them without having to ask my permission or that of anyone else.

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

A friend recently forwarded me an interesting invitation from a publishing company seeking fiction submissions “by and about transgender people and culture.” I at-first filed the email away in that folder where I store projects that sound cool but that I know, deep down, I’ll never look at again until I’m frantically deleting in an effort to free space on my hard drive. My reality is that I’m never short of writing projects; and , while whimsical and fun, this project didn’t sound particularly worthy of a time investment when the payoff would be low in academic value when compared to journal articles and textbook chapters.

The idea resurfaced for me a few days later while attending a writer’s workshop. As I was contemplating the presentation of case study research that I’m placing in book form, it occurred to me how freeing a creative writing journey could potentially be. I began having fantasies of characters who would develop, and how they would move through their stories. I realized that, as much as I love my academic research and writing of the transgender liberation struggle, I was yearning for the literary creation of something that would liberate me from purely scholarly work. For the first time since high school, I realized that I could use creative writing as its own emancipatory process.

Thus, I begin my journey into the brave new world of fiction. I’m currently weaving my protagonist’s story, which interestingly, seems to reflect subtle aspects of my own character that I’ve located on a road I didn’t choose. What’s occurred to me in launching this effort is that fiction presents an opportunity for us to fully flesh out alternate routes in our own lives, fantasies that aren’t bound by normal time and space, or even discarded or disowned parts of self. My realization has been that writing fiction is in fact a greater possibility for self-exploration in that we live in each character we create. I’m not entirely sure what this means for Tara, my transsexual protagonist, but I can’t wait to find out because she’s already fascinating me and I’ve not yet written very much!

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

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.