One problem I've had was which major to choose and what I wanted to do with myself as a career. Internally, I felt like I was being churned up. I had a hard time finding congruence. It didn’t help that I really wasn’t in tune with who I really was back then, 10 years ago, either. Another problem I had is my x-husband that was cheating on me. That was extremely difficult to face. It was difficult to find congruence then, too. Mostly because I always told myself that if that ever happened to me, it would be the end of my marriage. I was determined not to get divorced. I fought my inner sentences that kept saying, “You can get this right” and “You can make this work”. Another problem I’ve had is trying to find where I belong in church. I’ve felt on the outside, like a disease. It was hard to feel like I belonged with the people in my religion, who promote eternal marriage and I trashed my eternal marriage. The pattern that I see is this sentence that says, “If I sacrifice enough, I will be of worth.” That was my old sentence, which still flares up now and then. My new sentence that I work hard to run with is, “I am.”

I enjoyed learning about characteristics of effective counselors. I think that being an effective counselor definately has to pull out a full length mirror & check out some of his/her own stuff. After talking about the code of ethics, I called my sister and talked to her about the things my therapist does/doesn't do. It was interesting to get more information on his personal techniques.

After class today, I've found that there are many avenues to counseling that I might pursue. SUU will be offering a course in fall of 2010 that might work for me, but they're only going go have about 15-20 people in the program; and that's hoping that the program can be passed through and accepted. There's a possibility with this economy that budget cuts might impede the program from developing. I'm not real interested in Social Work. I don't know if LCP is what I'm really interested in either. I really love what Steve does in his career and would really love to pattern my work after his.

I'm taking this intro to psychotherapy class, tonight was the first night. I talked to Sheryl Poole and to a couple of other people in other classes and have gotten their opinions on high school counseling. From what I've heard about it, I'm afraid I will feel disappointed in the lack of meaningfulness in high school counseling. I want to make impact in my career, and I'm afraid that counseling teens on what high school classes that they need to graduate and what colleges want to see might not give me the satisfaction and the depth that I'm looking for.