A note on mental health.....

Mental Health scares me. There, i've admitted it aloud. Were i psychoanalyzing myself, i might note that in this instance the "tell me about your mother" joke would aptly apply. The root of my aversion to mental health really does stem from my mother, or rather from her psychiatrist. See, when i was a child my mom had two psychiatrists- we'll call them Dr. A and Dr. B. Dr. A i liked, daddy liked him you know. Dr. B. i did not like. It was Dr. B who daddy called a "quack", and it was Dr. B whose name was used in phrases like "Dr. B says you don't love me". Now i have always been a people pleaser at my core, for as long as i can remember. So the implication that my statements of love were invalidated by someone else stung. In hindsight, Dr. B may not have been that bad. Mom took bubs to him once, and bubs said he seemed alright. There was probably a lot going on in those situations which i did not, in my childish awareness, understand, which i still do not understand. Still, he became for me the poster child for mental health quacks who messed with people's brains. Therapists were the people who told parents that their children, who most certainly loved them, did not, in fact, love them. Even as i aged and acknowledged that there were instances in which therapists were helpful, and that there were good ones in the field, they were not for me. It is a testimony to my mother's love and self-sacrificial nature that Dr. B in time went away. i wrote, in all pre-adolescent angst, about my hatred of Dr. B., in my first diary. Mom cleaned my room one day, and i feared that she may have found and read it. At some point it came out that in fact she did. Dr. B's disappearance from our lives, i suspect, had much to do with that diary, and with her ending the therapeutic relationship out of love for me. Why am i purging all of this on the written page (well screen) now? Because there is a chance now that therapy is for me. Not in the way you might be thinking, however. See i came home from Albania and began a degree in social work. Somehow i managed not to realize at first that this meant i was getting a degree in counseling. Through three years of graduate school i vehemently protested that i did not want to be a clinical practitioner. i was not interested in clinical social work. i was not interested in mental health. Fast forward to recently. See, there was this advertisement for mobile therapists. Master's level clinicians wanted. Now i've been feeling of late that i should learn how to help people in that way. i had the epiphany one day that even in case management, you end up playing therapist to clients- if they didn't have problems they probably wouldn't be seeking your help. Mental health is following me. Perhaps even more motivational was the fact that the job offers a $25 an hour salary- in the face of my recent reduction in hours (more on that later) and subsequent return to substitute work (and the knowledge that the sub work won't take me through the summer while the hours reduction probably will) this amount of money is significant. So i bit the bullet. i applied to the job. i had a few telephone interview type discussions with the company. i was offered an in-person interview. i did quite poorly in the interview (as a former instructor of interview skills, i feel qualified to say that i actually stunk). i was offered the position. The pre-employment forms are sitting across the room from me, mostly completed. So long as they are turned in on Monday, i can get into this month's new-hire training and theoretically start in the very near future. This scares me more than most people probably realize. It means fighting against years of predisposition against mental health. Most of my life thus far has involved resentment, distrust, begrudging respect, aversion, and anxiety about the field. Of late it has been mostly fear that i would not be good at it. That i might mess someone up. That i don't have the experience. i even flat out told the interviewer that i was concerned i did not have the clinical experience to do the job. She offered it to me anyway. Not sure if they are desperate, or my credentials are that good. i'm guessing the former. So i'm praying and guessing about taking this job. It would involve me writing treatment plans. It would involve me providing intensive in-home or community therapy to children. It would involve me being the clinical supervisor of the therapeutic staff support worker assigned to that child. me. The kid who used to call mental health practitioners quacks who messed with people's minds. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor?