is it possible??

when i was young girl whenever i thought about what i wanted to do with my life when i got older it always consisted of one of two things: being a singer or becoming a counselor. i'm going to just concentrate on the latter and post another site about the desire to sing another time... but i knew at a pretty young age that i wanted to help people and the natural fit for me was to be a therapist. so when i got older and when i was in college i began to really pursue this passion of mine.

upon graduating from central i went on to study for my master's in counseling psychology at marshill graduate school. it was a great experience for me and i was affirmed in this setting that i was on the right vocational track through the voices of my instructors, fellow classmates, how i simply excelled in the program, how my love for people grew and my desire to help deepened. my vocational future seemed pretty clear cut and i was working towards making that dream a reality which included this whole idea about private practice and therapy. the model of therapy was pitched to us in a particular manner and although not every student went onto become a professional therapists-- if you were on that track it inevitably meant private practice and doing therapy in a particular setting and way which also meant a particular population that the therapist would be sitting across from.

upon graduating from marshill i had to figure out how to take all this newly acquired knowledge and my dreams and put things into motion. it was really tough at first. i finished my last class in august just a few weeks before september 11th occurred. when i had finally completed everything there was no work available, i didn't have the means to start a business as a private practitioner and i needed to eat. i ended up having to take a job just to pay bills as a sales associate at urban outfitters which proved to be probably the most depressing time of my life and i remember seeing fellow graduates come into the store while i ducked behind and in between clothing racks to avoid being seen out of sheer embarrassment. but then there was a break-- i applied for a position as a case manager to go on working with homeless and parenting young women (ages ranged from 17 to 23). i got the job! i was excited i finally was going to put all this theory into practice. this job was like vocational boot camp for me. as you may know already, the world of case management is very different from the therapy i was trained to administer and the whole experience-- setting, population, everything didn't fit the model i'd been accustomed to, but none-the-less i had the chance to 'be' in these young women and their children's lives. my case management experience included helping the young mothers set goals, get to appointments for housing, health care & other important meetings, as well as a whole lot of babysitting. it wasn't what i envisioned vocationally but there was a need and i was trying to stay faithful even in the fire with my clients. and god knows, these girls made me run an obstacle course. these girls were not interested in any theoretical BS. if you didn't live hope then you were a fraud. i was only there for a year but it was the beginning of a new kind of path, the beginning of different dreams and the start of my very long courtship with the homeless.

i went from friends of youth to working with homeless adults at the church council of greater seattle and then to quest community development where we began developing an outreach program for homeless people in need of basic resources and someone to point them to resources like housing, shelter and so on... basically my point is that the experience i had at friends of youth started me on a path of advocacy for the homeless. it started me asking questions: like how can we devleop more opportunities? what does the barrier look like for someone who is trying to leave homelessness permanently? what are the root reasons for homelessness from a societal perspective to personal story and individual choice? and on some level i feel plagued because i realize that the mental and emotional health care that so many are able to receive in the US is unaccessible to a great many who need it desperately. how can we as practitioners make our services accessible among the low-income and homeless men, women and children in our communities? i know there are many great organizations that provide case management and there are public mental health centers but that still leaves people out who are in need of specialized services and support.

as a practitioner myself i don't feel it would be in good conscience for me to just set up a practice only targeting middle class americans and abandon the needs of so many that need this service in order to leave the cycle and roots of homelessness or poverty that they are living in. it is an essential part of the process of providing holistic care for people. we can help men, women and children in transitioning out of transitional housing or shelter to get into programs for permanent housing and stable jobs but how will they keep those things if they are still living with pasts that bear memories of abuse or addiction or mental health problems. i worked with a woman for years who lived in our transitional housing program through Self-Managed Housing and she kept finding herself back in the same cycle of homelessness to a short bout of housing to back to being homeless. at one point when i was working with her she was experiencing such great depression and anxiety that she locked herself in her room for days without ever coming out. other women in the house were concerned and drew my attention to it. i started meeting with her weekly and the thing i found as the primary barrier to her being able to maintain a job or a home was this great level of depression, anxiety and paranoia. the roots of this depression, anxiety and paranoia was the memory of sexual abuse that she had experienced in her family which led her to run a way and live on the streets a way from the abuse of her home. she was in desperate need of therapy, yet she couldn't afford it. she was weary of public mental health because she'd been dragged through a system that she was only allowed to be a part of as long as she could prove her instability through psych evaluations. it because a vicious cycle which only led her back to homelessness, despair and desperation.

it is stories like these that haunt me and compel me to ask the counseling community what more can be done? sliding scales are a start but what more can be done in order to help people in need who are great candidates for therapy and who do not have the means to pay?

having just started a private practice myself i am very aware of the traditional model. however, i am working on a dream and vision to hopefully bridge a gap in the way that we practice and to broaden the gap to incorporate a broader population in our work. i am hoping to start a network where counselors can be working together to provide services as an act of justice and compassion in our communities. through this network we could be creating a model that i like to call: community exchange. in a nutshell, services would be provided in exchange for an agreed upon fee arrangement or pro-bono for community service. in other words, clients in positions where they do not have the financial means to pay a therapist the regular fee would commit to donating their time and resources to an organization of their choice, volunteering their time back into the community. i think this is a wonderful therapeutic model-- not only is the therapist giving service to the client sitting across from them but the client is giving back to the community, re-engaging with the community and finding new vigor in their passions-- this is therapy. our jobs as counselors are to be to help people re-engage with themselves and with others in healthier, life-giving ways.