Natosha Monroe

Must a counselor have a spotless past and a picturesque present to effectively assist a client? Should a divorced counselor be the one to help a struggling couple stay together? Can a childless counselor give parental advice? Will a doctoral dropout be able to assist a fretful PhD student? What if a client walks into the office facing the exact same challenge as the counselor? Can and should the counselor help? Is there hypocrisy in this situation? Does the counselor risk being biased or blind to certain aspects of the client’s issue? ACA’s Friday keynote speaker, Dr. Irvine Yalom, tackled this question in his book, “The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients.”

Continuing my “thank you to Dr. Irvin Yalom” blogs leading up to his appearance at our ACA Conference this month, I decided to highlight his take on the issue of hesitancy in therapy. In his book, “The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients,” Dr. Yalom asks the question: “Why are decisions hard?” So let’s think about this, why are decisions sometimes so difficult for people (us) to make?

In celebration of Dr. Irvin D. Yalom being our keynote speaker for this month’s ACA Conference, I’ve decided to highlight some of his wisdom in my next few blogs. More so than any college course I’ve completed, any lecture I’ve heard, any workshop I’ve attended, or any article I’ve read, lessons learned from Dr. Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients influenced my therapeutic interactions the most. I wouldn’t call myself an existentialist, but his words proved to be very useful in many different contexts. One lesson I learned came from reading and then pondering this concern of Dr. Yalom’s: “I worry about psychotherapy-about how it may be deformed by economic pressures and impoverished by radically abbreviated training programs.” Is this indeed occurring?

Much research is conducted by exclusive academics or “parachute” professionals who drop into a situation or culture long enough to do a curiosity study or hand out a bunch of surveys and then leave. I think more research should be conducted by those of us actually working in the field, don’t you? However, therein lies the problem—we are working in the field! Who has time to do research? Well, I think many of us do but we just might not realize it. Due to incomplete lessons on research some of us may have received in college, many of us do not realize what we are capable of contributing to the overall body of knowledge. And guess what? There’s more to research than lab rats and statistics!

Many of you have likely heard of the tragic shooting at a Carson City, NV IHOP restaurant last week. 32-year-old Eduardo Sencion, armed with an assault rifle that belonged to his brother, shot one person on his way into the IHOP restaurant and headed straight toward the back of the restaurant where uniformed members of the Nevada National Guard were eating breakfast together. Sencion killed 3 (2 Soldiers and one non-military patron who was reportedly in the line of fire between him and the Troops) and injured 6 others before exiting to the parking lot where he shot and killed himself. Such a senseless, tragic incident inevitably elicits the question: “Why?” and for many of us in the counseling profession also, “What can I do to help?”