Kristen Eckhardt

I took last Tuesday evening off. Really, I should have been in one of two places--either working with a client or at my husband’s wind ensemble concert--but since my last client of the evening cancelled, I decided to come home for an evening for myself and do not feel too bad about it.

I think most counseling students alternately feel like experts one moment and complete frauds the next. I know that describes my own experience pretty well. The field is so wide and varied that at the moment I think I’ve really mastered something, I realize that I’ve actually mastered about 4% of whatever it is and still have to learn the other 96% of it.

Each week, about fifteen of my classmates and I log onto Blackboard every Monday night for our weekly internship supervision class. Coming from a music history background, internship class is unlike any other class I’ve ever taken--we meet in a virtual classroom and the materials differ each week depending on the case studies presented.

I walked into the first day of my internship back in August and thought, “How am I going to relate to the residents?” How was I going to build that all-important relationship? The residents in the living room that day looked at me kind of skeptically, and I don’t blame them. Most of the residents come from very different backgrounds and have lived very different lives than me. They are White American, African American, Southern, facing serious mental disorders, legal issues, estrangement from families, and rebuilding their lives from the ground up. They aren’t over-eager White East Coast counseling students by way of Nebraska that moved to Louisiana six weeks ago. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to relate to the staff.

I realize last week’s post sounded pretty down, and in truth, that’s absolutely how I felt. Sometimes, life feels like one step forward and one step back. If you read my post anyway, thank you--maybe you’ve been there before or are going through something similar. But there’s a much, much happier ending to this week!