Tara Overzat

10th Annual Southeastern Conference on Cross-Cultural Issues in Counseling and Education I have just returned from another fantastic counseling conference, this time hosted by Georgia Southern University and held in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. The conference began Friday morning at the Coastal Georgia Center with Keynote speaker Lee Mun Wah, a master diversity trainer from Berkeley, California. Lee’s work includes the documentaries The Color of Fear and Last Chance for Eden wherein he challenges diverse groups to truly communicate about racial and cultural experiences. He started the keynote at the conference by asking all of us to get our things together and get up from our seats. He next asked us to look around the room and find someone who “different” from us and without talking, to make eye contact and go to that person so that we would have a partner to sit with. Now, it felt a little too awkward to stay completely silent, though we tried. Throughout the remainder of the presentation, Lee would have us turn to our partner to discuss questions of race and identity. My heart was touched by the stories my partner shared with me, and we both hoped that our children’s generation would not have to go through the same difficulties.

Carl Rogers espoused the idea of “unconditional positive regard” – accepting clients without critical judgment of their self-value. While this sounds like a very basic building block of counseling, it may be more difficult in practice than in theory. What if a client admits to a behavior that you find distasteful, but is not illegal and maybe not even be unethical? Or perhaps a client does something that you find particularly unethical due to your personal or spiritual beliefs, but that others may deem acceptable?

Last week I attended the Georgia College Counseling Association’s 18th Annual Conference in St. Simons Island, Georgia. The event’s theme was “Chart Your Course for Success” which was quite apropos with the conference being right on the water!

It wasn’t long ago when people wouldn’t speak of counseling. If someone was severely depressed or suicidal, they might “go away” for a while and return “fixed.” People were institutionalized, sometimes unjustly, to receive treatment for their problems far away from “normal” people. Now, self-help books take up whole sections of bookstores and top the bestseller lists. You can catch “Dr. Phil” every weekday. A & E has several weekly shows dealing with mental health issues – “Intervention,” “Obsessed,” and “Heavy.” Shows like “Oprah” and “Dr. Oz” regularly talk about the symptoms of mental health issues like post-partum depression and spread awareness about diagnosis and treatment.

“Make sure you to stop to see Susan on your way out and make a follow up appointment,” my dentist says to me without fail at the end of every check-up. Every six months, like clockwork, I am lying in his examination chair getting a kindly lecture about keeping up with my flossing.