| Counseling Gary Pence I might have majored in psychology in college if my first psychology class had seemed more human and humane. I took it my very first semester as a college freshman. An honors section conducted something like a seminar, it was taught by a graduate student who focused us on the experimental research aspects of psychology. I wondered why people felt and acted the way they did (probably why I felt and acted the way I did), but we studied experiments in perception, Skinner boxes, and laboratory rats. It all seemed abstract, cold, and remote from my immediate interests. It didn't help that one day, when the students all together moaned and groaned and complained about an assignment our instructor was laying on us, he threw his books down on the table in a fit of pique and proceeded to blast us for our laziness, ingratitude, and immaturity. In today's terms, he went "ballistic." And I asked myself whether I wanted to study a field populated with such weirdos. Instead, I majored in classics (which was populated with nice normal sensible people like me). Yet I always retained my interest in psychology. I thrived a couple of years later on a course in the psychology of religion, in which I first read Freud (The Future of an Illusion), Fromm (Religion and Psychoanalysis), and Gordon Allport's The Individual and His Religion. But it wasn't until 25 years later, in the mid 1980s, that I began to study psychology again in a systematic way. I acquired an enthusiasm for Jung's theory of personality types and took a one-week intensive course that certified me to use and interpret Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an instrument used to measure an individual's personality type according to Jung's typology. I began typing myself, family, friends, faculty colleagues. students, any who would let me impose the instrument on them. Then, during a sabbatical leave I attended a 3-day Tavistock Group Relations Conference sponsored and directed by Verneice Thompson, a Berkeley psychologist. The conference was designed to teach experientially the unconscious and covert dynamics of the exercise of authority in groups. Much of the conference was spent in a small group of perhaps 10 people and a staff person who largely sat silently and from time to time issued cryptic interpretations of the group's process: "The group is intent on killing off the director of the conference." "The group is colluding with A (a staff member who had spent the night with her husband, another staff member, contrary to the rules of the conference) in sabotaging the conference." "The group is feeling rage toward the director." I found these comments unintelligible and exasperating, since I had nothing against the director and didn't even know A. Nonetheless, I learned at the conference something about how the unconscious works, was intrigued with the discovery, and asked Verneice to work with me independently during my sabbatical on the issues raised by the conference. So we met each week and I learned all about unconscious process and devised a pilot project in group dynamics that we conducted with "formation groups" at the seminary the following year. I joined the staff for the next 3 conferences directed by Verneice and got more training for myself by attending a 7-day Tavistock conference at Mount Holyoke College. When another sabbatical leave came along in 1989, I was ready for a change. I left my dean's position at the seminary and spent 1989-90 doing the first year of a master's program in counseling at California State University, Hayward. I returned to PLTS in September 1990 and began teaching pastoral care and counseling while continuing the coursework for the master's degree. I did clinical internships at two private agencies, eventually completing the MS and the 3000 supervised clinical hours and three years of my own therapy, and was licensed by the State of California as a Marriage and Family Therapist in 1995. I had an office in the Montclair district of Oakland for a decade, where I maintained a small private practice with individual adolescents and adults, couples, and families.. I followed Heinz Kohut's theory that, for healthy development, young children need "mirroring" by their parents. That is, they need parents who accept, admire, and adore them and are attuned to their feelings and responsive to their needs. And young children also need parents who can be "idealized," that is, parents who are dependably present for them, consistent, and strong in protecting them and providing a safe environment for them. They do not need parents to be critical, corrective, and punitive. I also continue to accept and work from Carl Rogers' "core conditions for personal growth" - unconditional positive regard (acceptance), congruence (genuineness), and empathy (understanding, attunement). That is, to grow and thrive I believe that people need relationships with others who will fully, totally, and warmly accept and respect them as they are, regardless of their ideas or behaviors. People need relationships with others who are able honestly, candidly, and genuinely to speak and act out of their true selves without inhibition or dissimulation, that is, people who are transparent. People need relationships with others who are able to understand, value, and attune themselves to another person so that that person feels himself or herself to be seen, known, understood, and accepted. I was eclectic in my approach to therapy, starting from an object relations orientation as my theoretical foundation, linking it to family systems understandings of individuals within their relational networks, and applying cognitive and behavioral techniques when appropriate. I also adopted a developmental perspective, drawing especially on Robert Kegan's work on ego development, which is an adaptation and extension of Piaget's earlier "constructive-developmental" stage theory. Interestingly, as I look back at the teaching fellow who blew up at my freshman psychology class, I no longer think of him as a "weirdo." Just as another human being having a bad day. Don't we all?
American Psychiatric Association American Psychoanalytic Association American Psychological Association |