Julie North
During my graduate classes all my professors talked about self –care. It was a term I had not heard before. I would sit in class and think “who needs self-care? It sounds like something for people who are weak in mind, who can’t handle what is put in front of them.” I also thought “I won’t need self-care I can handle my clients.” Well that line of thinking came back to bite me in the butt.
Amy Johnson
Horses have been used therapeutically with those who have physical, developmental and emotional limitations for more than four decades. As very social creatures, horses are often eager to please the humans in their lives. They cannot be easily forced into submission, but rather respond positively to slow, deliberate actions evoking trust.
Steve Bryson
I just returned from some much appreciated time off. I went into the backcountry of Montana for a week and then went to a conference: “Motivational Interviewing to Competence”. Being refreshed and renewed, I found the conference enlightening, instructive and intriguing. As a “seasoned” counselor, I have observed over the decades many new perspectives on the counseliing process. Many of them have made important contributions to a field that some would say is nebulous and indefinable, more akin to art than science. While I adamantly disagree with the view that what we do is fluff, there have been times when the art of counseling took the limelight while the science sat in the background.
Pat Myers
It is the day after the horrific shootings at Fort Hood. Once again we find ourselves frightened by the violent events that seem to make no sense and for which we have no context to find meaning. The news stations and websites are filled with details, endless speculations, and ongoing analysis. As I scanned these headlines I saw an article on one of the heroes of this tragedy, a female police officer who is credited with stopping the assault while she herself was seriously wounded. Sgt. Kimberly Munley risks her life daily as a police officer. An article on MSNBC states that Sgt. Munley’s Twitter account shows the following quote: “I live a good life. … a hard one, but I go to sleep peacefully @ night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone’s life.” That single statement resonates with me although I cannot say that I have ever had the opportunity or the courage to save any lives.
Marianela Medrano-Marra
As psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it, creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. It is “a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is about.” Everything in our surroundings is the result of inventiveness, of creativity. Csikszentmihalyi’s idea is that the creative process emerges in five steps: preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation and elaboration.
Pat Myers
My husband and I recently made the heartbreaking decision to euthanize our eleven year old beloved dog Lucy. As we have grieved her loss the counselor part of me has been trying to make some sense of both the process of grief as well as psychological importance of the loss of a pet. I know all the research about how pets enhance our well-being. At this moment of loss the scales seem horribly tipped in favor of never experiencing this pain again.
Kevin Stoltz
By now, if you have been keeping up with my blogs, you realize that I focus much of my work into career counseling. But, as I have argued in the past, I advocate for no division between mental health and career counseling. Given this position, it would follow that I would write a blog about the usefulness of the Holland coding system in understanding clients from more than a strictly career perspective. My experiences as an employee assistance (EAP) counselor really helped me to understand that Holland (1992) intended these typologies to represent more than interests and a career personality. I have found that the types help me understand the persons’ approach to life.
Amy Johnson
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
-Maya Angelou, poet (1928- )
As humans, I believe we often give ourselves a little too much credit, believing that only we, the superior species, can be helpful to others. Though anecdotally were hearing more and more stories about pets stepping up and offering a paw and consequently, research is backing this up. It seems we can accept a dogs service for sniffing out bombs or drugs, but thats where the service line is drawn.
The views expressed here are solely those of the blog authors; they are not necessarily the views of the American Counseling Association.