56 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 1 1. What led you to pursue a degree in counseling compared to other helping professions? What initially led me to the helping professions was my academic interest in criminal justice. While pursuing my undergraduate degree at St. John’s University, I completed an internship with Nassau County Probation Department. Here I observed the DWI Unit. It was suggested that if I wanted to pursue a career in probation, I needed some work history in social service. It was suggested the best place to do this was working in foster care. I took the suggestion; I obtained a job at Catholic Home Bureau. This is where my passion was awakened. I began working with adults caught in the grips of addiction in 1987 as a caseworker in New York City for the Catholic Home Bureau Agency. This was the peak of the crack epidemic. This was also the era when HIV was still an unknown disease. Early on I saw how addiction impacted the lives of people and how their families were being destroyed. Working as a caseworker, I felt I was not doing enough to help and desired to help this population more. I returned to school to acquire my substance abuse training at Molloy College in 1991 as a Credentialed Alcoholism Counselor (CAC). In 1993, I began working in the therapeutic field of addiction as an addiction counselor at Kings County Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York. Here I was able to help those caught in the grips of addiction from various areas of life, not just foster care. Many of my clients had lengthy histories of abuse, neglect, mental health issues, or involvement in the criminal justice or foster care setting. This encouraged me to want to learn more and pursue my graduate studies. In 2009, I returned to school and obtained my master’s degree in professional counseling, and I returned again in 2016 and obtained my master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. I became a Licensed Professional Counselor in 2018. 2. Recently, you were awarded the Lora Roe Memorial Addiction Counselor of the Year Award from NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals. What has been your experience working in both mental health and addiction settings? What challenges or barriers have you encountered as a counselor in this area? As I mentioned before, working with addiction intrigued me. There were so many different facets of addiction. As I began to understand addiction and alcohol and substance use disorders in the DSM, I noticed clients coming into treatment for their addiction had endured long histories of untreated mental health issues. A lot of the referrals from social service agencies were of people who had endured untreated trauma histories. Those mandated to treatment by the criminal justice system many times had untreated and undiagnosed mental health issues. One of the barriers I encountered early on was not being a dual-licensed counselor and not being able to address those co-occurring disorders because I was only an addiction counselor, licensed to only treat substance use disorders. I knew in order to be effective, I needed to treat the whole person and not just the addiction portion. This gave me the drive to pursue a higher-level education and licensure in order to treat the whole person. A challenge I recognized was that once a person left to pursue a higher level of education, they would pursue a higher level of pay, which many times is not being offered in a substance use disorder treatment setting. I worked many years in a treatment setting, and because I did not have a master’s-level degree or license, my salary did not match my years of experience. This did not deter me from the field. My passion for helping people causes me to stay in this field. Counseling has given me the ability to help people find their hope and develop coping skills to manage their emotions. However, I know that many of my peers have left the field due to the low level of pay.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU5MTM1