My wife and I are getting settled here in Las Cruces, NM. She turns 35 today, in fact, and she’s loving her new job as assistant professor. I’ve had some trouble securing gainful employment myself and, aside from a tutoring gig that’s about to come to a close, I’ve been embracing my role as house-spouse and otherwise ruminating on the next steps in my professional and creative life. Next month I will begin (yet again!) life as a part-time graduate student in the Counseling and Guidance program at New Mexico State University. I spent fifteen years or so working as a mental health professional in bachelor’s-level positions (my master’s degree in East-West Psychology is non-clinical), and it’s been a full five years now since my last mental health job. Strangely, I’m not feeling at all nervous about going back to school. At 41, I’ve been around the block a few times, and if anything my confidence level is bordering on mild arrogance. That’s what I need to look out for, I think — the (erroneous) belief that I already know everything that’s worth knowing about counseling and mental health. I’ve become somewhat set in my ways, at least in terms of a general philosophical orientation, and I need to be sure I take in the perspectives of others with an open mind. It will be interesting to see to what degree students will be encouraged to think critically about the field, and likewise how much pressure there might be to accept the status quo as gospel.
I remember how surprised I was to discover how credulous my coworkers seemed to be (at my last job) when it came to accepting information from “the experts” in the field. For instance, I never met a single person who expressed a critical thought about how diagnostic criteria were developed for psychiatric manuals, or who questioned the validity or usefulness of the disease model of addiction. There were awkward moments, many of them, when I knew in my heart of hearts that the information being presented to patients was just plain wrong, or else it was being presented without regard to appropriate context. I’ve often wondered whether or not I’d be able to thrive in a mainstream graduate program, given some of my rather iconoclastic positions about the nature of well-being and mental health. I’m about to find out!
Hopefully, my experience of the program will inspire me to write and reflect more often. Despite my tendency to be an arrogant jackass, deep down I know I have everything to learn. Working face to face with human beings who are suffering tends to humble a would-be know-it-all pretty quickly. This will undoubtedly be a challenging and transformative couple of years as I move through the program toward my (second) master’s degree and at least one counseling license. I’m ready to rock and roll!