Stephanie Adams

The subject I’m about to write on has been under much debate lately for many reasons, but as a practitioner of mental health care, I have significant concerns about how it will affect a certain group of clients. We all should. I’m talking about the new TSA security guidelines. We’ve all heard the horror stories. One that struck me in particular was about a breast cancer survivor (and flight attendant, no less) who was forced to remove her breast prosthesis in public after a thorough pat-down. She ended up having to do the physical search because she was afraid to expose herself to the radiation of the other new security method: full body scans.

To say it’s been a stressful week would be an understatement. My husband had three tests in his master’s of medical science program (any B could mean he does not get admitted to medical school). I’m an emotional absorber around people I’m personally connected to, so every pore in my body was soaking in the nervousness and weariness coming from my hardworking husband. He’s been working towards this goal against tremendous odds for seven years, and I know how much it matters to him. Because I love him, that matters to me, too.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Crisis Intervention. Disaster preparedness training. They all say the same thing. Attend to primary needs first. Maslow depicts them as the following: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion. Not as an attractive a goal, perhaps, as self-esteem or friendship, but without the base of the pyramid a person cannot focus on that which is of higher importance, including and leading up to self-actualization. Sometimes I think in counseling practice, we forget this. We jump to the tip of the pyramid first, and forget to think about the basics.

A lot of our clients want to be our friends. But are we good friends to those people that aren’t our clients? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I’ve been working a lot more than usual and therefore have much less energy to interact with my friends and family. I owe an email to my friend Brittany, who faithfully reads my blogs and always brightens my day. My college roommate’s birthday was in April and I still haven’t sent her a card or present. I really would like to catch up with my brother who’s thinking about switching schools, and my brother who’s about to graduate college and is going on tons of job interviews, and my third brother is about to have a major band performance next week…(Why’d my parents have to have all these kids?)

Hopefully we have a pretty secure self-image of how we do in counseling sessions. Every workday we practice how to be the best counselor we can be. But sometimes that can backfire, and being the counselor can seem more attractive than being a normal person. The counselor, after all, seems to have all the answers. The counselor can hide what’s inside because it’s not “about them”. The counselor is confident, competent and self-assured. They always have something optimistic to say. They wrap up life in neat little 50-minute segments and tie them with a bow.