Profession

As a kid the term ‘profession’ was what you made in church regarding your beliefs, your profession of faith.  When it came to a career or what I wanted to do with my life, I was clueless.  People in my circles just went to work at some job.

Trying to decide what I was going to do the rest of my life wasn’t on my mind in high school.  My guidance counselor at Will Rogers High looked at my grades and said, “you’re good at math and science, how about engineering?”.  My best friend was declaring a civil engineering major and my grandfather had been an engineer, so why not.  No one in my family had gone to university so there was no experienced advice to be had there.

photo is the beautiful Student Union at Oklahoma State

So with David, my best friend and ultimate college roommate, I registered at Oklahoma State.  Most everyone at the church where I grew up went to a Nazarene college.  There was one in Oklahoma City, Bethany.  Should I have chosen to go there, I would still have had to transfer to the university for engineering so it made sense to me to just start at OSU.  To make my choice of colleges slightly less ‘worldly’, Oklahoma State was one of the two secular state schools (along with Ohio State), that had a Nazarene student center. Not having gone to a church college, I remained on the outside in the church culture for a lifetime. Like it still can be in the South, the first question when people meet you is “Where do ya’ll go to church?”, before they even ask you name.  At church socials throughout my adulthood, the question often came up,”Which Nazarene college did you go to?”  When I said none, I went to Oklahoma State, it was “oh” as they turned away.  At OSU, along with the Nazarene center, there was a Baptist Student Union and a Wesley Center.  We churched students went to all three, wherever things were happening.

The summer after our freshman year, David and I got career conditional summer jobs with the Corps of Engineers in Tulsa; career-conditional meaning that when we graduated, we’d have a job with the Corps. That summer I worked in the soils lab and in the field digging soil samples for a future dam in southeast Oklahoma. The next summer I worked in drafting.  My exposure to the largest engineering firm in the world didn’t excite me. Back in Stillwater, I’d tried a course in architecture but to switch to architecture would have meant adding a fifth year—an eternity at that age.

So the first semester as a junior the pastor from Tulsa Central, Eugene Sanders, was speaking at the Nazarene Center on campus.  Central was the church I’d grown up in, where my parents still were and where mom was church secretary.  During Sanders message I felt the unction to change majors—but to what?  Psychology came to mind although I’d never had a single course.  I told David that night my thoughts, he and my other engineering buddies thought I was crazy.  My grades in engineering were close to a 3.5.  I was in differential equations and nuclear physics classes that fall.  A career at the Corps was a slam dunk.  Was all that just too much a given?  Engineering was just not a fit.

The next morning I went to the college of Arts and Sciences to see what a change of majors wound entail.  I found out it would work still within four years but I would have three semesters of all psychology.  So I switched.  I anxiously made a call to my parents to tell them.  Their concern was that I had made good money with the Corps jobs the previous summers and I’d lose the Corps job.  I was still in my nineteen-year-old evangelical/fundamentalist mode and told them God is in the switch and the money would work out—but as I hung up the phone, I fretted “Crap, where wound a match of that money come from!”.  Engineering mates now did think I’d slipped over the edge.  My roommate conceded though saying, “well, you might as well make a career of it.  Guys are always coming to our room late evenings to talk and jam away”.  The next semester began my immersion into psychology.  That Spring David and I continued as roommates but studying for psychology is all about reading, reading and more reading.  Engineering students get together and crank out problems—the two styles of study did not mesh. The decision was to split up the following year.

That Spring I’d seen an ad in the campus newspaper about being a Fallout Shelter Technician (one who surveys properties for a possible fallout shelter).  I took a correspondence course to qualify.  Finals ended and I was sweating not having a summer job.  I called home and mom said, “you’ve got some mail”.  One letter was from Omaha, Nebraska, The Corps of Engineers. It was a job offer at the identical pay scale I’d had the previous two summers.  I was in Omaha within the week and spent to summer across Iowa surveying buildings.  Another guy on the survey team and I became proficient surveying hospitals—notorious for multiple additions but losing the plans.  The last several weeks, hospitals were all he and I did.

As I entered my second semester in psychology it was like a hot knife through butter.  ‘Johnny come lately’ from the school of engineering made straight ‘A’s.  To help with income, I also served as resident assistant on 3-North, the floor in Cordell Hall where I’d lived the previous two years, rooming alone that last year.  There were lots of freshmen on the floor of forty-five students but I will spare you the wild stories of that year.

At the close of my senior year, I received the Department of Psychology Award.  That award and the salary level the previous summer were confirmations to me that it was a good choice.  I knew there would be grad school—several years, not one. Consulting with Gene Sanders again, I learned of the joint masters program at Southwestern Baptist Seminary and The University of Texas at Arlington.  Over the next four years I would get a Masters of Religious Education and a Masters of Science in Social Work.  Three months after graduation, we moved to Tennessee Labor Day weekend of 1975.

I even now wonder where to idea of switching to psychology came from?  Did God have anything to do with it?  Was is destiny? Or was it just me trying to figure out my family, my life and life in general?  It’s often been said that many of us going into these helping professions are just trying to make sense of the families we came from.  I won’t argue with that. Edward Hallowell, in his book, Because I Come from a Crazy Family: The Making of a Psychiatrist, “Most people with my background who do survive do not thrive.  They become cynical and pretty weather-beaten.  They tend to not trust, to put it mildly. I, however, became to gullible, wide-eyed optimist. The price I paid is that I carry a lot of sadness inside me.  But that also gives me a deeper understanding of other people’s sadness that lectures and books can’t give”.

I say, “ditto”.  When after a few sessions I would ask a client (I never called them patients), why did you stick with me and not one of the half dozen or more other therapists you’d tried out, the reply often was, “You ask the right questions”.  I do have good ‘attending behaviors’, making good eye contact and such. But it’s the histories with the degrees of commonness, where the ‘right’ questions came from.  It’s my never ending quest for understanding personally, continuing to ask questions to this day of myself and my story.

My motivation was more looking for reasons rather than solutions, a fix or cures.  Probably influenced by my early cynicism and disbelief in some of the theology I’d been soaked in, I knew already there were few quick answers.  As a quote on our wall at home says, we are just walking one another home.  Another counselor I supervised asked one time, aren’t we therapists just ‘professional friends’? In many ways he was right.  To have the opportunity to share my story is near priceless and good friends provide the chance to do so—as well as a good therapist.  Ironically it is not so much about being heard by another as it is hearing our own story—owning it—ever so gradually.

As Scott Peck said, life is difficult.  Friends along the way provide some assurance that we aren’t alone—be they personal or professional.

So the career was a ‘fit’.  Twenty years of experience at the non-profit prepared me for twenty-six years of private practice.

What’s next?

You’re reading it.  Writing—and thanks for actually reading it.