The Path from Journalism to Counseling
When you lose the only career you ever had—the only job you ever schooled for, trained in and practiced in your life—it can take a while to figure out what’s next.
For me, it took six years.
Fired in January 2011 from my job as senior editor at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, I was able to find work only a couple of months later as a writer-editor at what is now Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, an academic medical center in Winston-Salem. But it wasn’t the work I wanted to do.
Thanks to a challenging boss (Aside: I’m being ridiculously fair here using the word “challenging.” But that’s another blog post.), I decided to focus on what I really wanted to do in life.
The year 2017 thus became one of joy for me. First, and most important, I was married to my wife, Terrie. Second, left the job and awful boss (hmm, went from “challenging” to “awful” in one paragraph) at the medical center. Third, found a better and remarkably appropriate job. Fourth, started school for counseling.
Clinical mental health counseling requires a master’s degree, and heading back to college was something I was not eager to do at age 57. But when Wake Forest University told me I didn’t have to take the GRE (because I already had a master’s, in journalism), it made things easier. And the learning turned out great; I did better as a counseling student than any other of level of education I’d had.
It also helped that I was able to switch jobs. I left the medical center to become communications manager for the National Board for Certified Counselors, the credentialing organization for the counseling profession. Its national headquarters happens to be in Greensboro, North Carolina, half an hour from home. Go figure.
But this blog is about journalism and counseling. What is it that these two seemingly disparate professions have in common?
The answer is, in a word, story. I spent the first 29 years of my professional life chasing stories as a writer or editor. Loved telling the “big story,” the one that would make the front page. In particular, over the years I became a fan of narrative storytelling, using the format to help share some of the most important stories of my career. Stories like the aftermath of 9/11, the death of JFK Jr., the case of a Yale instructor wrongly accused of murder by New Haven police, the racially charged story of a Winston-Salem man who spent nearly 19 years in prison, wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman.
As a writer and editor, I work to share interesting stories on a macro level with the world. As a counselor, I am trusted to listen and discern stories on a micro level.
The work of clinical mental health counseling isn’t about changing the world. It’s simply to be with fellow human beings who allow me, who trust me, to hear their story. It’s about being present, figuring out with clients where their lives are out of balance and determining with them ideas how to move back toward balance.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee has attorney Atticus Finch tell his daughter, Scout, that, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
That is the work of counseling. And, as my former supervisor, Ron Wachs, used to tell me, that is hallowed ground.