Thursday, April 28, 2011

My Journey So Far...


"The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality."--Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann

"The road to enlightenment is not paved."--Renee Gama

   So, I grew up within a family that yelled at each other a lot. Not because we didn't love each other, but because we did. You see, if I found myself having a disagreement with someone I didn't know very well or cared much about, yelling seemed hardly worth my energy. But when it came to loved ones, such as my family, I noticed we tended to get into verbal shouting matches fairly regularly. These arguments tended to be between my divorced parents or my mother and brother or my brother and me. My parents didn't live together after I was four years old and my brother was one (I'm 32 now), but they still had to communicate whenever it came to their children, and I used to believe they yelled at one another out of hatred. I realize now that they still cared about each other in their own ways, so I think it was important for them to spend the time and energy trying to get their points across to each other (rather than ignore each other completely with silence).

   I speak for myself here. Everything you will read has been filtered through my own experience, memories, and knowledge, and my intent is to share a journey with you about why I have chosen to focus much of my life on helping other people communicate more effectively with each other. As you have just read, I grew up within a family that loved each other yet seemed to have trouble communicating. A lot. I often sensed there were better ways we could get our messages across to one another, but I was only a child then and had a great deal more to learn about communication before I would begin to start piecing together a better understanding of what it was all about.

   So, for the time being, I continued to put up with the yelling, as well as the "usual sibling rivalry" that seemed expected between my brother and I. Unfortunately, as we grew up together, our relationship became more and more strained. My brother encountered many problems attempting to communicate with his peers, teachers, and other authority figures. I became easily fatigued trying to deal with his frequent demands for attention, as I sense my mother did as well. With our father often out of our everyday picture, I believe my brother craved a stable male role model, though we all could have used a stable example of how to run our family in a way that would help us find peace and harmony within our busy lives.

   Since therapy was always an expensive option for my family, I don't believe we ever attended a family session more than once, and none of us had our own therapists. It is difficult for me to say exactly how therapy would have helped my family at that time, since my brother was usually the "squeaky wheel who got the grease", meaning, his acting out at school and at home drew most of the attention away from other issues that could have been another area of focus, such as: our family yelled at each other a lot. I know I felt envious of families that didn't seem to yell as much. (Though what happens behind closed doors can be a different story entirely). And those families on TV in the 1980's who always knew how to talk out their problems, listen patiently to each other, and resolve their issues (usually within a half hour) seemed to have everything I wanted for my family. I knew it was all a script and not "real", yet, I continued to sense that there was a better way to be learned out there regarding how to communicate as a family.

   So, I entered junior high school and high school, experiencing romantic relationships--having arguments and shouting matches with most of these guys because I cared about them (and I like to think they cared about me too). I was following my own "script", so to speak, just communicating the only way I knew how to do at the time. For the most part, I managed to be in rather long-term relationships for my age (averaging one to four years), though the idea of "how to fight fair" was just beginning to enter into my consciousness. Was it from one of those teen or women's magazines I was often reading? Was it from TV? Maybe. Either way, I had continued to wonder what that "better way" of communicating was, so I began pursuing it once I entered college.

   I took my first Communication course in junior college. I believe it dealt mainly with interpersonal communication: basic sender and receiver of messages stuff, but also more interesting issues: like the ways in which men and women tend to communicate (differences and similarities) as well as ways in which various cultures tend to communicate. It was exciting to finally be getting into the "nuts & bolts" of communication studies, and I soaked it up like a sponge. When it came time to pick a major, I went for Social Science (the general field at my junior college that included Communication and Psychology). Thinking that I wanted to be a counselor when I was done with college, I transferred to San Jose State University and declared my major as Psychology, with a minor in Speech Communication (as it was then called--later changed to Communication Studies). I quickly found that the focus of my major was very clinical: teaching us about various mental disorders for diagnosis, parts of the brain, etc. while my minor focused on subjects such as public speaking, and various branches of the Communication field--which was very broad indeed. I think I had maybe one class on Interpersonal Communication (my true love), and I knew I needed to learn more.

   By the time I graduated, I realized that I was not in the least interested in clinical Psychology; rather, my passion was in human relationships and how people communicate with each other in ways that can either help or harm said relationships. Maybe I was supposed to be a couples' counselor--or just a counselor in general (again with that theme). So....

   I packed up my stuff and moved to Oregon in 2003 with my best friend and fiance (the story of this relationship will be the subject of another blog of mine and eventually a book he and I hope to share with the world). My plan in OR was to become a resident and apply to the University of Oregon's Marriage and Family Therapy dept. I already had family in OR, so I found the opportunity to be a valuable one. I was volunteering as a support group facilitator for a domestic violence agency at the time, learning what I could about how to counsel women who have endured such trauma. The experience I gained was very rewarding: I could never put a price tag on the feeling I got when a client once expressed her utmost gratitude for "saving her life". Helping these women certainly added a dimension of value to my life that I always look back on with a unique fondness.

   So, I applied to the U of O, made it through the first round of interviews, but ultimately did not get chosen for their program. There were just too many applicants and not enough positions available. So be it. I was encouraged to apply again the next year, but after living for two years in OR, the native Californian in me was itching to get back "home" and focus on other things--not abandon my dreams completely, of course--but to get back to my roots: Communication. Thus, I was disappointed for about two minutes before the joy in coming home settled me.

   I reapplied to SJSU--this time for their graduate program in Communication Studies--and was almost immediately accepted. I took that as a pretty good sign, so I packed up my stuff again in 2005 (minus my fiance of almost eight years--again, this will be the focus of another blog. Though I can say there was a lot of yelling involved) and moved back to CA. I'm still proud of the fact that I managed to secure a student loan, find an apartment, and move back down here in about one month's time. I think I was running on pure adrenaline and determination in those days.

   Alright, so now I'm thinking it's time to take classes focusing on what I've always wondered about: those ever elusive "better ways of communicating" that will help people strengthen their relationships. I was ready for this! But, again, I think there was only one class focusing on Interpersonal Communication at that time. Here we went again...but it wasn't a complete letdown. I was beginning to finally build a foundation upon which my new paradigm of thought was taking shape. I was learning all about the Communication field (and it is vast), including organizational communication (how to help companies strengthen their group communication, raise productivity and morale, problem solve, etc.), multicultural communication, and my lasting love: Social Construction.

   I began soaking the social construction information up like a sponge again, being drawn to the concept of multiple realities. It felt validating to learn from this theory that we tend to form our realities through the relationships we have with others, and that no one person's reality is more valid than another's. The beauty of this theory is that its very nature is based upon interpretation: subjectivity reigns supreme, and I began to feel like I was onto something...

   If we create our own realities, and there is no "right" one, then maybe my family was only expressing the reality we knew. Ok, I could accept that. I could also accept that whoever I was going to help in the future (including myself) must stop taking one's own reality as "just the way things are" and stop believing that "we can't help who we are". Oh yes we can, and I was going to become my own example.

   I realized before I finished the Comm. Studies program that I was going to give Marriage & Family Therapy another try. I wanted to get to the point where I could work directly with clients again and help people reach their own potential. I was accepted into an MFT program in 2008 (a significant year for my family, as my father passed away--this will also be the subject of a future blog) and began immersing myself in another (though intimately related) field of study.

   I wish I could say that I was finally satisfied with what I was learning. I wish I could say that my questions about human communication and relationships from childhood were being answered to the fullest, but they were not. Granted, I became excited when I detected certain glimmers of social construction influence within Narrative Theory, with its focus on problem-saturated versus preferred narratives of self, but there was never enough influence in any of the theories I used in the program to fully satisfy my initial curiosity about human communication from childhood. I was learning about it in other ways--articles, books, movies, TV, the Internet--and my MFT education was definitely valuable as well; however, the program was obviously geared towards working in the mental health field (duh!), and I did not realize just how clinical the focus would be until I was fully immersed in the experience. That being said, I will always appreciate what I learned from my teachers, supervisors, and colleagues in the program. These people have hearts of gold, and I love them.

   Working with clients was just as rewarding as I remembered from my days working as a support group facilitator. I began finding my niche in psychoeducation and offered little tidbits of information to clients as part of their overall process of therapy. The feedback I received from clients seemed to validate my growing hunch that this was certainly something I was good at providing, so I decided to try and run with it once I finished the MFT program. Communication Counseling, my new consulting business, is the direct result of this.

   I have incorporated all of my skills and knowledge from both my Masters degrees to try and provide potential clients with education and tools to help strengthen their own communication skills. This blog will be another forum upon which I hope to share some of the more lasting lessons I've learned while on this journey. At this point, I'm happy to say that I've learned how to stop yelling and utilize other skills within my communication toolbox. (Though emotions & reactivity have a way of trying to get the better of me at times). But I hold myself accountable. Every time. I don't blame my family or take reality for granted by saying "That's just the way it is. There's nothing that can be done about it". I work hard to apply my knowledge to help make my reality better, and I expect others to do so too. You can expect to learn a lot from me as you continue to read, and I thank you for doing so.