Karen Bates

I am feeling very humbled these days. I have been told two times in the past 3 months that I should become a supervisor, mentor, or other such person that provides guidance and support to those up and coming in the counseling profession. And charge a nice fee for it too! For the most part, I think that I am a capable and competent professional, but I think with my tendency to lean more on the side of self-doubt, I am frequently questioning if I will ever achieve in this area. In the spirit of brevity, I will not account for the multitudinal steps taken to find my voice, confidence, and focus on what I believe because anyone worth their counselor “weight-in-gold” appreciates the complexities of transformation, with its regression, waxes and wanes, toward the path of enlightenment.

Do people really change? Or is it more of a problem in adapting or transitioning from one developmental stage to another? I ask this question because of the recent behavior of the elderly that I have been noticing of late. Upon vacationing at my mother’s retirement home she had build 7 years ago in a well populated and popular adult community near Hilton Head, one of the discussions was the rise in sexually transmitted diseases. She is a retired public health nurse but she didn’t find this out by reading her professional publications that she still subscribes to. And NO she did not contract one. Her twin sister’s physician raised an eyebrow while making small talk when my mother and her sister (my aunt) were there for a follow-up visit for my aunt who was having some recent health problems after some exploratory procedure she had. My mother accompanies her to a lot of these as they are very close; well they are twins so that’s part of it. So back to the subject of my mother’s community now known as a “city” of ill-refute.

Have I totally gone soft as a parent? Am I expecting too much, being too judgmental? I don’t know what to make of this. I just found out that spanking your children is not against the law. The woman taking my report of suspected child abuse at children’s protective services told me this information. After my reporting the details of what I suspected was child abuse, the worker at protective services, matter-of-factly stated, “you know this is not going to be investigated don’t you?” I replied, “Oh, yes, because I said that I didn’t see any marks?” No, that wasn’t the reason. The woman at the department of human services went on to say that physical discipline is not against the law. What do you mean?

I mean, I’m not a medical doctor or anything, but sometimes the best remedies are so basic. I remember the first time I laughed during a session with my client. My client, an intelligent professional woman with two small pre-school aged children was going through a crisis in her marriage. Her husband was having emotional affairs as she found out twice. Obviously, the sessions were fairly emotionally-laden filled with anger from my client as she recounted the events that led up to her finally confronting her husband. I was seeing her a year after the discovery and his confessing and supposedly stopping the affairs.

I’ve always struggled with self-esteem issues but you wouldn’t know that unless I told you. I think we all do from time to time. It happens less and less often, thank goodness. I remember telling myself that no one would ever “take” my self-esteem from me about 15 years ago when I was working at a school-based health clinic as a crisis-intervention social worker. Back then all you needed was a bachelor’s degree and the director of the community agency that employed me had a master’s in social worker. She signed off on my social worker registration with the state and I got the job. I was also working on my master’s in counseling at the time so I thought this would be a great opportunity to help the inner city children in Detroit. Boy, I was right and wrong.