Benjamin Hearn

In South Carolina where I practice, over 11.1% of children are currently diagnosed with ADHD and 13.1% have received the diagnosis at some point. The rural area in which I practice is also fraught with poverty – families often struggle to meet basic needs, high school students are unable to find jobs, etcetera.

Have you ever had the (further) infuriating experience of dealing with an intense experience and someone has told you “You just need to calm down”, as if ‘calming down’ were some button to be pushed? Many of our clients, and us as people, often find difficulty in regulating intense emotions.

Take a moment to consider some of the influential names in counseling. People who have guided our field through creating theories, techniques, and approaches. I would imagine that you of course considered Carl Rogers, maybe Ellis, Glasser, or Bandura and perhaps some figures from psychology such as Erikson, Jung, or Freud. However, it is unlikely that the names of Heraclitus, Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre, or Kierkegaard arose for you.

During my time in grad school, I was fortunate enough to engineer my program time so that it allowed me to work as a ‘Field Instructor’ a summer in wilderness therapy. Wilderness therapy is a subset of a rather large umbrella term “Adventure Therapy”.

I had long entertained the prospect of becoming a therapist before entering graduate school. I had many of the same concerns that many recently graduated students with Bachelor’s degrees do: Am I competitive enough? Will I be able to handle the work? Is this really what I want to do? What if I try and I’m wrong? What if I don’t try and I was right? What if I’m too much of a ‘case’ myself to be a good therapist?