Diana Pitaru

This year the ACA conference brought with it some wonderful news I wanted to share with everyone on the blog. The ACA Governing Council passed a motion according to which, starting with next year, the Graduate Student Representative will have the right to vote. I learned about this change during our ACA Graduate Student Committee meeting, when the ACA president- elect, Dr. Bradley Erford stopped by to thank the Committee for their hard work in designing and implementing the Mentoring Program –with whom most of you are familiar by now.

Some of you might remember the posts I have written about the need for a mentoring program within the ACA. I remember my frustration trying to email and call various divisions within the ACA in my desperate attempts to find a way to connect with a mentor. I learned in time that while the need for a mentoring program for our grad students was great, I was not alone in my search or willingness to get something started. It just so happened that I attended a presentation on graduate student concerns at the Texas Counseling Association conference which provided me with an opportunity to share my thoughts and frustrations about the lack of mentoring with none other but Dr. Heather Trepal, the head of the ACA Graduate Student Committee.

Death is a reality of life; we will all experience the death of a friend, family member, neighbor, or even a pet during our lifetime. And while death is a reality, it is also a topic that many find uncomfortable, unbearable to talk about, even tabu particularly when it is not our own loss, but someone else’s. In working with bereaved individuals, I come across horrific stories of ways in which friends and even family of those who have suffered the death of a close one have turned their back or entirely abandoned the relationship because the “death was too much to handle”. After a short three months after her teen’s son funeral, a grieving mother mentioned how her friends told her to get over it; the family of a grieving spouse and mother of two cut off any communication, and numerous others have abandoned their grieving friends simply because they did not know how to approach them or the situation. These are just a few examples of how the “support system” reacted in front of someone else’s tragedy.

This blog post is an encouragement for those students in non-traditional programs everywhere. This blog will hopefully help you gain the confidence of leaving anonymity behind and recognizing that regardless of your school format, what you have to say is relevant and important –be it via email- to continuing building a great counselor community.

Because I recently wrote an article about the importance of allowing ESL clients to express themselves in the course of therapy in their own language, I started thinking more about how the issue of language is so central to most forms of counseling, and even more so in couples and family counseling. I am not talking about couples of different linguistic background, but couples and families who speak the same language. What’s there to talk about, some might wonder!?