Working With My People

I had the best career in the world. Helping others. My job was talking and listening to others mostly about their addiction and getting rid of the drugs and alcohol.

Then, what to do in recovery, when all you know is drinking and drugging and what do you do with all the things that you drank and drugged over? I believed my job was about providing grief work in such a way that most people didn’t know that is what we were doing.

Virginia Satir (the mother of family therapy), Elizabeth Kubler Ross (who studied the dying and their families), and Ben Wolf (St. Mary’s medical center) helped me with this.

An art therapist I met in a treatment program I worked in helped me with this too. I shared an office with the best counselor I have ever worked with early in my career, and she may have been the most helpful of all.

There are things from most of the world therapies and especially from my own Native American culture that give me many helpful methods for doing this work, and I picked and chose what worked for me and my program participants.

In helping others, it is important to take good care of yourself! I told my sponsor that I shouldn’t be going into counseling as those addicts would just wrap me right around their little finger as my codependency started young.

In my family it was my dad’s drinking and lots of close relatives drinking. My mom took pills. I’m not sure everyone wasn’t taking pills back in the fifties and sixties though.

My sponsor said, “Because you are aware of that, it won’t happen. Because you are working on yourself it won’t happen.”

Then she said, “And by the way, you can’t put on the rest of the world what you grew up with. We have no way of knowing that everyone was taking diet pills and valium back then, just because our parents were, right?”

I had a discussion with someone that said that maybe counseling was really a way to just help me. It was someone I trusted that told me that almost all people going into counseling may be a bit codependent or need help themselves, as I was again concerned that I may not be going in the right career direction.

Those comments weren’t distasteful enough to change course. I thought, enough of this, I will try it and I am glad I did.

I was also a recovering addict and that should be good for something right? I was told the very best counselors were in recovery. I believed that until my counselor when I was in treatment wasn’t addicted. She was great and really helped me.

I have heard stories about how some recovering counselors started relationships with their clients and how others have relapsed. I realized that you could have a great recovering counselor or a great counselor who isn’t in recovery.

I really believed counseling would keep me sober, when, I stayed sober the same way others stay sober, by doing the work it takes to have a good solid recovery.

I have a minor in Chemical Dependency Counseling. At the time it was a degree in Community Counseling that turned into an Applied Psychology degree a few years later.

After working several years as a primary counselor in detox, in two halfway houses, and inpatient treatment, I went for a master’s degree in counseling. My focus was on couples and families.

As I finished, I discovered it was the exact wrong time to get the degree as I would have had to get almost another master’s degree, or a doctorate to get licensed.

I moved into management after working as a family therapist for about 18 months. I knew licensing was going to happen for alcohol and drug counselors, and I never had to be licensed or credentialed prior to that.

At the end of my time counseling in substance abuse, it had turned into being all about insurance. I was talking to people who appeared to have no knowledge of addiction treatment and recovery. They were to approve more time for the program participant.

It meant sending them file after file of client records. It meant getting approved for 1 to 3 days at a time. If the insurance wouldn’t cover, then it was put on the individual to cover the expense, which made treatment groups more about insurance than addiction and recovery.

Then, once in management for a few years, I started a program to get a doctorate in Education Policy and Administration.

Okay, I said, this helping another is the best career in the world. So how is it the best then? I loved working with what I considered to be “my people.” Program participants that I could relate well with and they could with me.

I know you aren’t supposed to share personal information with a client, and then I learned that you can if you already resolved the issue. I did a lot of work on myself. And I had been around recovery for six years before I was first paid to do the work.

Much later, I could influence what happened in the field at the state through my work in management in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division.

I could talk to programs and counselors about the importance of the culture in recovery, the importance of doing the trauma, grief, and loss work with our program participants. I could talk to programs that really admitted to knowing little to nothing about the American Indian.

I could participate in a Native American curriculum training that I supported to be open to Substance Abuse professionals and later Mental Health professionals. So, yes, I love my job because I can see miracles all the time.

Now, I am retired from the state and continue to be involved in the field by working as a culture consultant; teaching, training, writing and working very part-time at a mental health crisis shelter.

I facilitate a group each week there, where many of the guests are dually diagnosed with mental health and substance abuse. Many are walking miracles and I get to see that and hear about that every week! What could be better than that!!