I Did It For Me

SOMEHOW I Deleted this Post.

😥

And it was my most brilliant post of all...  😁

The Beginning Point. The Jumping Off Point.

A few weeks ago I did a writing exercise based on a writing challenge from another blog that I found intriguing called The Prose of an Electrate Mind written by a woman named Meredith. Meredith, a student of the humanities, is no longer blogging for her own reasons, but I found her photography compelling and her writing interesting. So, tonight, I'll check out another of the writing exercise from that 2016 writing challenge:

Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.
~ Vernon Howard

• My questions would be what has give you freedom?
• Was it from letting go of something, or from jumping into something new?

Of course, this one is perfect for me right now because I am embarking on a terrifying, exciting new journey. One that will take the very best of me. And while doing this, I'm also doing other new things, new to me anyway, and just kind of reinventing myself. (I'll say more about this in a moment.) But what's weird, if you had asked me two months ago what, if anything, was I planning on changing in my life, I would have had no idea. Weird to think of it that way.
I had no plan.

So what has given me this freedom at the age of 55?
I have, of course. My husband is always, eternally encouraging. The kids have done a fair amount of encouraging... But I think, one day, after being passed over for a fairly menial job, I got bummed, then angry, then determined. I decided that it was time to take my future into my own hands and to make a huge gesture. I decided to make it happen: I made the decision to do whatever it took to get my professional license back.

I had let the license lapse back in 2004, somewhere in the midst of children, homeschooling, carpooling, creating lessons, living a very different life from today. Somewhere in there, silently, without a second of notoriety or choice, I allowed my professional license to lapse: A GRAVE ERROR. This license takes a prohibitive amount of work to reinstate at this stage of the game. In fact, I'm not at all sure that anyone else has gone back to this profession so many years later...seemed to me that the licensing board was kind of playing it by ear a bit.  

It took me several months, several hundred dollars, about two dozen leaps of faith into unknown air, and so so so much researching to get that thing back. 
WORTH IT.

I, then, set out to find a job with a new license and absolutely nothing to show on my resume. I have been out of the field for over eighteen years. EVERY SINGLE TOP REFERENCE no longer exists, some people have died, agencies have disappeared from the surface of the earth, and I've even forgotten some people's names.
I felt pretty screwed.  😄

I've now jumped in.
I'm now employed and working hard HARD to get myself current and prepared to work with clients. GRRRRL, I'm stressed. I'm in a total hurricane of new information, skills, procedures, insurance apps, organizational stuff, orienting, so so much.
Who in the world saw this coming?!!!

But that's not all!
I also started volunteering for my local public radio station, our local station of NPR. It has been a freaking delight and I absolutely look forward to more chances to do this work. If you can swing it and if you like meeting people, I highly recommend it!

And, even more!
My dear friend Anna-Marie has been kind enough to take me on as a student of her hobby: stained glass! I've been working on a project that should be finished quite soon. I'm pretty terrible at it at this point, but that's not the point. I'm doing these new things!

Not only am I freaking myself out, I'm also making myself feel something I haven't felt in a long time: Personal Pride.

Personal Pride. It's exactly why I feel freedom right now.
It's the beginning point and the jumping off point.

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My Emotions of Change

Last week I got a job.
Not just any job, but a cherry job.
And I got this job after being out of my field for over eighteen years!

So, after you congratulate me and feel happy for me, let me tell you how completely life-changing it has already been to be hired by this agency.

The first moment after getting the call offering me the job, I fell backwards onto my bed and danced around and felt overwhelmed in my head, like my brain was nothing but white light. A moment later I heard my husband get my message to him about it because he (working down stairs) swiped his door aside and climbed the stairs and ran down the hallway to me, finding me on my back on the bed kicking my feet in the air and laughing!  lol  😆


A few days later I nervously, and weirdly dreamlike, drove the twenty minutes down the highway to the office and attended a few group activities with clients (I'm a clinical social worker). I fell into the groups naturally and felt right at home with the interactions with clients around the table. I had a few initial moments of disbelief and white light in the head again, then a happy abandon at being a clinician in a nice agency.

I don't usually post
pics of myself,
but this is me
my first moments
at work.
☺️

Today, a bit over a week later, after reading and researching and accessing about two hundred pages of information and training and watching clinical videos, I'm sitting here at my desk in happy tears.

I'm genuinely grateful for this job. It has already changed me. I feel like this job is an opportunity for human growth and professional growth that I've never actually experienced before and that I hadn't expected at this point in my life. I see this agency and its practice framework as a truly effective and healing and coping framework for people who have had little hope before. And, the more I learn about it, the more thrilled I am that the owner of the agency saw something in me, something that made him want to offer me this job in spite of my many shortfalls.


I'll be learning a framework for practice called DBT*; DBT stands for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. It's a treatment approach that has been around in the counseling and mental health world for about twenty-five years. In fact, I was there, initially, when it came out and when the mental health agency that I worked for was first introduced to the concepts of DBT back in the 1993. 

We were shown Marcia Linehan's red and black book entitled Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. I remember the reception that these new concepts from Linehan's book received in that agency at that time. I remember the resistance in some of the clinicians in learning DBT and I recall a few of the clinicians sounding hopeful about learning DBT to help some of the most difficult-to-treat clients. My first observations of the agency that I worked for at that time and their response to the new DBT ideas as skeptical and kind of laughing at it.

Today, I'm sitting here learning so much about DBT and feeling so very comfortable and hopeful with it. Being the parent of a child with very strong emotions, I discover that, over the years, I have been practicing some aspects of DBT just by instinct, and some by practice. 

Mostly, I want to celebrate this moment in my life.
I feel that I'm embarking on an amazing journey.

I want to remember this moment.
At this moment I am exquisitely aware of the steep, steep learning curve that I am facing with this new job. From learning the framework, to getting registered on the insurance panels for clients, to learning all of the internal parts of the agency, to figuring out exactly how to wear make up on this way-older face, I'm actually nervous af about some of this. But I know that I can manage some of these hurdles**, and get to the good part.
I have already learned so. Darn. Much. And that's just the start.


* I will explain DBT in a different post and I will link that post here but there are tons of pages to check out online if you are curious or interested.  ☺️

** Like finding the right lipstick shade...

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Atheist and Secular Therapy

Have you ever gone to see a counselor or therapist and found that you could not stomach the religion or religious-slant of the therapy and that the therapist couldn't keep their religion to themselves? And how about the clinicians that, somehow, manage to inject their New Age woo into a session... 
It's happened to me, for sure.

For many years, and still today, it is not safe or business-wise for secular or atheist professionals to out themselves as atheists because many people who refer clients are in religious-based social or community organizations and these people are highly unlikely to refer a client to a Humanist or an atheist professional. So, sadly, people looking for religion-free help are on their own. And it is a real crap shoot.

Well, MANY THANKS to Dr. Darryl Ray for starting up the Secular Therapy Project! As the founder and project leader of Secular Therapy Project, Dr. Ray went live with the Secular Therapy Project in 2012, a project designed to help clients and therapists find each other and, hopefully, to help these clients to engage in productive, life-enhancing work.
Now doesn't that sound nice?

You can support this project in three important ways:

1. Tell any secular therapist to register with us.
2. Tell people in the secular groups you attend about the Secular Therapy Project, blog about it or write on Facebook or Twitter about it so that people in need of these services will know where to go.
3. Donate any amount to help them maintain and grow.

Anybody who frequents the atheist conventions have seen Dr. Ray or have even heard him speak. I, myself, have spent some quality time with him at conventions in the past. I promised myself that when I was finally able to get back into the practicing field I would promote this project as much as I could. Now that I'm employed and practicing again, this is just my first mention!  
😉

Contact the Secular Therapy Project Here.