My daughter has been hospitalized twice in the last three weeks, at one point with her life at stake. She is not well, but now finally appears to be improving.

What I’ve found through this process is that any kind of health care can be very cold and impersonal. It’s easy to lose sight of treating the person and not the illness, whether you’re dealing with physical health or mental health. Sometimes we have to remind those “in the biz” to remember that.

The other thing I’m seeing more clearly is that we all have a story, a reason for where we’re at in the present. As you write your own story, consider how the chapters of your life could affect someone else. I can’t tell you how comforting and hopeful it is to hear that the people treating our daughter are living with the exact same illness she is currently fighting. They have come out of the woodwork, it seems.

No less than two of the nurses have told us they have ulcerative colitis and given us hints on what to ask or push for. We also discovered her teacher from last year also has it. Family members of people we see every day. Yet no one talks about it.

It’s the relational aspect that heals many wounds. Even when dealing with physical malfunctions of the body, relationships can be either healing or hurtful. Lack of relationships is inevitably hurtful.

Don’t just share your story with someone, give a piece of yourself. Go out of your way a little. You’d be surprised what it might mean to someone else.

And some day this week is National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day, according to Psych Central. Sorry I’m not more specific on that, I just saw their post this morning and it was dated yesterday.

But point of fact is that for me, every day is Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day. I am acutely aware of the seriousness of children afflicted with some type of defined mental illness. Don’t believe me? That includes the ever-growing group of kids being diagnosed with ADHD (usually wrongly, I might add).

The fact is that we are all affected by a multitude of factors that affect mental health. If you know you get a little “off” when you’re under stress, imagine a kid that hasn’t developed fully yet and how it affects them. Sure, some kids have something organic going on, but so many more are coming for treatment stressed out by their environments. We need to step back, as a society, and evaluate just what we are doing to ourselves and to our children.

So on that note, take the one day to learn something new about Children’s Mental Health, or to support a family who needs it. My hope is you’ll take more than one day or one week or one month. Keep your eyes and hearts open all the time. These families need some positive support.

I have a lot of friends who have confided in me over the years that their heart was not actively in their marriage. Some of those ended well, with the marriage taking priority and hurts being healed. Others didn’t turn out so well, with the wandering heart thinking the grass is greener. Sometimes it was. Other times it was astroturf — it looked good but lacked substance.

In light of all that, here’s a link to a really great article at Psych Central on how to get over an emotional affair. It’s good stuff and very practical.  I hope some day I get the time and energy back to start writing on that level.

For all intents and purposes, I am now employed as a therapist.

I wish I could express more excitement about this, but all I really can say is “it’s about time.”

I figure if I’ve heard the title of this book come up four different times in the last few weeks then it might be something I should read soon. Coupled with the book for therapists working with explosive children, I have my work cut out for me.

I agree with the general premise, but I haven’t gotten much further than that into the reading.

The idea, now called Collaborative Problem Solving, rejects diagnoses for explosive children and instead asks people to look at these children as having learning defecits. Some children are developmentally delayed in learning to cognitively adjust… or changing trains of thought/concentration.

We’ve all seen it, kids who blow up in frustration when things don’t go exactly as planned, or if they’re mentally involved in a video game and get called to dinner.  Sure, you could view them as undisciplined and I suppose some might be.  But that doesn’t explain the truly explosive children that are capable of doing major damage.

This is a bare bones explanation and I hope to revisit this topic later, after I’ve had more opportunity to finish the book.  I’d like to do so quickly but with school demands it’s going far slower than I’d hoped.

Days to graduation: 78

Hours to finish internship: 67

Being done with school, possibly forever: Priceless.

One of Carl Rogers’ tenants of counseling is unconditional positive regard. In a word: respect.  If you don’t respect the people you’re working with, they know it. And your “therapeutic relationship” is non-existent.  If you have disdain for the people you work with, it’s even worse. Why should they bother to show up for that? And there you develop non-compliance.

You may not agree with people and how they live their lives, but they ARE people first and foremost. That alone entitles them to a level of respect that I’m finding some people don’t give. Heck, I’m finding coworkers who don’t even allow that for colleagues, let alone the individuals they do therapy with.

And that is absolutely vile and wrong. It’s bigoted and it has no place in a therapy office.

Shame on you if you’re guilty of it.

When the economy is as bad as it is, it is definitely not the time to start reducing mental health funding.

Mental health agencies struggle financially enough as it is.  In the one I’m working at we are grossly understaffed and the demand for services is more than we can keep up with. And I work with children.

I hope they pad the funding for children’s protective services. Because when the economy goes bad and people can’t handle it, child abuse statistics go up. I suspect we’ll see even more people wanting services. What then?

Thank you, Governor Strickland, for making a monumental error in judgment.

You’ve heard the jokes about medical students diagnosing themselves with every rare disease known to mankind once they read about it, right?

Don’t laugh so hard, it’s true for most students.  I distinctly remember being in my first psychology class once I went back to school to get my undergraduate degree and having people start asking for advice. Why? Because Psych majors know everything, apparently.  Meet a few more psychology majors and your opinion changes, trust me.

Anyway, the further along I got, the more I heard things like “you’re the psych major, fix me.”  Yeah, because it really works like that.  We’re too busy diagnosing ourselves with OCD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder,  Bipolar, and any other thing you want to pick out of the textbook.  Get to the graduate level and it gets comical.  Now we just laugh about it, probably because it’s true.

So far I have wondered if I have Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, mild Asperger’s, Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar II, Social Phobia, Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia (that one I did have once upon a time), Intermittent Explosive Disorder (the kids think I have this one).  You also start to see pathology in people you know. If you’re working with kids, the stakes are raised for your own.  It’s enough to drive you crazy, pun intended. It’s really difficult to turn off the analysis switch.

So if we’re together, please don’t ask me if I’m analyzing you. The answer is probably yes.

For the most part, I love what I’m doing. I often question if I’m in a place in my life where I should be working with kids, but at the end of every day there is nothing else I can really imagine. It’s like a call on my life so strong it’s inescapable. As I said, most days I’m fine with that. Every now and then it gets to me and I wish I could just ignore it. Yesterday was one of those days.

One of the things they warn us about in class after class is secondary trauma. Therapists see and hear things that make people cringe and say, “I don’t know how you do what you do.” The truth of the matter is that it does take its toll on you and it is vital to take care of yourself in every dimension: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

As much as I still want to believe that every parent out there has their kids’ best interests at heart, the truth is not all do. A lot of the kids I see are very troubled precisely because of their family life.  Others, like a kid yesterday, have serious disorders. I’ve heard a lot of horrific things already doing this job. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was have police intervention in my office.  We are trained to create a safe place for people and to be forced into violating that with police intervention made me sick at my stomach.  It was necessary and it was absolutely the right thing to do in this instance (protecting the child from him/herself).

Regardless of knowing it’s right, it still haunts me. I fully understand the meaning of secondary trauma now. People’s problems can plague you. At the end of the day, I ask God to watch over all of them and just give me enough wisdom to point them in the direction of healing.

Today President-Elect Obama made a statement that perfectly summarizes why I refused to vote for him and, honestly, think he’s an idiot despite his reputation for being erudite.

“Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy — where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending,” said Obama during his economic address at George Mason University — a stunning rejection of then President Bill Clinton’s 1996 declaration in his State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.”

I realize I’ve already lost a few of you, but bear with me.

Aside from my strongly held view that big government is both unnecessary and dangerous, I see this as a perfect metaphor for what goes on in therapy. Which also leads to my complete confusion as to why the field is so largely liberal. Let’s look at multiple scenarios:

• You’re seeing a client who suffers from what some would call a gambling addiction. He’s racked up debts to credit cards and crooked bookies. He becomes convinced that the best way to fix the problem is to hit the craps tables and win his way out. What does the outcome look like?
• You have a client who is what pop-culture calls co-dependent. She (for the ease of writing) is dependent on a boyfriend who is a spendthrift who spends money on video games, going out with the boys, and customizing his “classic car” instead of buying groceries, paying the rent, or clothing the five kids he’s fathered with your client. He’s mismanaged things so poorly they are facing eviction and children’s services are investigating for neglect. She thinks she needs to make more money so he has more to work with in the budget. Good or bad idea?

I could go on, but here is my overall point:  people come to therapy and the general goal of most therapy is to take an active role in your own life and take responsibility for your well-being. You cannot control anything but your own thoughts and behavior, so you can’t rely on others to change nor can you change others.

So I want someone to tell me what the heck I’m supposed to tell clients once government becomes the big caretaker and no one has to take responsibility for their choices anymore. No problem! Uncle Sam will take care of me. And learning from mistakes? Why bother?! Because doing more of what caused the problems in the first place is exactly what the doctor (or therapist) ordered!

If doing something caused a problem, is it ever logical to think that doing more of the same will do anything different? Of course not! Which is precisely why this country is in for rough times — because it elected someone who doesn’t learn from history’s mistakes.

I think the next time my car breaks down, I’m going to take it to the mechanic that couldn’t fix it the last time. Because, ya know, that’s what Obama would do.

January is National Mentoring Month.

I highly encourage responsible adults to make a positive difference in the life of a young person. I’ve seen first hand the tremendous difference having someone care can make.

So what are you waiting for?

I had my first discharge today and let me tell you it felt GOOD!

If you’re not going to show up for appointments, don’t get pissy if I set your bags at the curb and call the cab for you. You don’t want to help your kid, you want your kid to shut up, sit down, and leave you alone. I’m afraid that’s not my job.

In a counseling internship in Ohio, a student must complete 600 hours of internship. That roughly works out to 16 weeks of 40 hour work weeks.

I am technically supposed to be part time, yet I average about 30 hours a week. I can’t complain because I was hoping to get tons of hours in and have a nice window of space before finishing. I do not want to be scrambling at the last minute to complete this internship.

So far, I’ve done pretty well in all areas except one. Of that 600 hours, 240 of it needs to be in direct services. Because my supervisor wanted to ease me into things, I am currently at only 61 hours of direct service. That means I have a LOT to do yet. Problem #2: I really can’t take on a bunch of new clients without firm knowledge of where I will be post-graduation. I’ve been offered a choice of positions where I’m at but am not sold on any of them just yet.

But those hours are nagging at me. In order to complete them I really need to do more assessments. Which makes me beholden to whomever will ask and that makes life very difficult.

All to finish this stupid internship. My schedule is pretty packed and no clue where I’d fit them in at this point. And of course, it’s not like I could just schedule them in advance. I get asked on New Year’s Eve what my schedule is for the upcoming week.

I thought we abolished slave labor? Oh no — we just changed it’s name to “intern.”

The number one frustration in doing therapy with kids is knowing that the majority of it is helping them cope with their home life. More specifically it’s trying to overcome a lack of parenting. Does one hour a week really impact that child’s life if they go home to chaos, inconsistency, and lack of structure?

God bless those people who go into homes and do the work of correcting that. It needs to be done, but that’s more front line work than even I care to take on.