When I was getting my counseling degree, there were two distinct categories of students I encountered and I quickly turned spotting them into an artform. These two “types” of aspiring would-be therapists represent a very clear divide in how people approach this career. Is one better than the other? I certainly have my biases, but I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Since we’re talking archetypes, I’d like to tell this story in the tradition of an ancient Greek epic. Our clients are the “Heroes” on a journey to solve an unsolvable riddle: their own mental health. They’ve taken potions, battled monsters, and found themselves in the Underworld a time or two. The plot has taken a twist and our Hero is in a strange land called Therapy. Here, they encounter the “Healers,” who offer guidance and intuitive magic, while the “Oracles” hold court with their mysterious wisdom. But who are these people?

H is for “Healers”: Humble and Humanistic

The first group of counselors I call the Healers. These are the sensitive empaths, the people who tell you “All of my friends come to me for advice.” They likely listen to dream-pop and indie film soundtracks (guilty), daydream in class (or dissociate dreamily), and are very open about surviving their own struggles. Their “why” is very simple: they see a need for healing this world and want to be a part of that emotional bandage. Why else are we on this Earth? If you ask a Healer, it’s to help others empower themselves. Helpers are too humble to take all the credit. 

O is for Oracle: the Omniscient Overseers

Then there are the other folks, and I will call them the Oracles. They have this “wisdom” that was granted to them by outside forces, and view people as science experiments to be figured out with formulas. And don’t get me wrong, interventions and technical knowledge are integral, but the Oracles can lack holistic warmth. They think they know it all, and luckily for you…they’re here to share their endless wisdom with you. They’re on this Earth to show everyone else how to live right, because they’ve apparently cracked the code. They’ve probably never been to therapy themselves, and if they have, they would never dare to admit it to a client. 

Healers and Oracles and Everything In-Between

Have you decided if you’re a Healer or an Oracle yet? Maybe you’ve decided you’re actually a woodland sprite playing a flute in a flowery meadow. That is totally valid. However, I’m trying to make a point here. Back to our hero’s story…

Truth be told, the best kind of counselor is probably a balance of the two. You’ve likely deciphered which camp I tend to gravitate towards. I will admit I identify more closely with the Healers, and I’ll give you some personal history to explain why. I worked in marketing for ten years before I chose this path, and it wasn’t until I turned 30 and after three years of therapy. I had been that lost person sitting on the couch, ripping my heart out to a stranger. Speaking my deepest truths, the “old me” burned away and I found my knowledge in the ashes. 

I was so moved by my experience in therapy and the way it helped me heal that I wanted to create that for others. And I knew I had an advantage some folks wouldn’t…I had lived with a mental health disorder and sought help for it. I understood being a skeptic and having an epiphany when your therapist asked just the right question. Therapy could see me wholly, as an entire person full of identities and fears, not just a list of symptoms and codes.

Erasing Stigma Starts With Us as Providers…and as Humans

All of this is to say, I think anyone wanting to become a counselor should be a client at least once in their lives. I understand that good counselors exist who don’t identify as someone with a mental illness. I’m sure they’ve been through their own struggles, and perhaps they’ve been directly impacted by mental illness in a profound enough way to make them choose this job.

But it does make me wonder what the catalyst was. What made this person think that being a counselor was their calling if they’ve never seen one in action? Perhaps I’m a little jealous that there are counselors out there who were simply so sure of their knowledge of the world and human behavior, they knew they would crush telling others how to heal. 

Moving Forward with Compassion

The Hero has consulted the Oracle now, and spent an hour with the Healer. He or she is continuing on their quest, equipped with knowledge they didn’t have before. There are so many ways to view counseling and what it does for people. There are myriad ways to theorize why and how people heal, and we can only benefit from diverse viewpoints. In the end, I…as your humble narrator… hope that the moral this adventure taught you is that compassion must be at the core of all counseling. Just like the legends and heroes who dot the constellations in the sky, we all have something to offer our clients as individuals. We have to admit our humanity first, however, to truly connect with the humanity in others.

Written by Manuel J. Cantu for www.colorsofaustincounseling.com 

Before I became a counselor, I graduated from UT Film School and was determined to be either a cinematographer or a screenwriter. Little did I know, life ironically had some plot twists and surprises ahead that eventually forced me to “reframe” (photo pun intended) how I saw myself. While I do still daydream about living out my artistic passion, I am confident that I found my true calling as a professional counselor.

Luckily, I found a way to blend my love of storytelling with a therapeutic approach built upon critical parts of media and literature: universal themes, character building, symbolism, metaphor, and interpretation. 

We All Have a Story…But Who is Telling It?

Narrative therapy is a counseling orientation that believes healing occurs from first telling one’s story and then rewriting it. It aims to help clients identify what stories they tell themselves about themselves and how these beliefs are affecting them. Moreover, it works to understand where these narratives came from – oftentimes our own families, cultures, and communities.

Once you isolate your struggles (depression and anxiety, for example) as things that exist outside of yourself – again, deciding who you “are” and rewriting that story – you can feel empowered to change by envisioning a new version of yourself. Too often, we let dehumanizing and oppressive narratives infiltrate our own sense of self. Take for instance, the systemic and cultural oppression that results from racial stereotypes and political propaganda that aims to demonize the “other.” This can lead to debilitating self-narratives built on internalized racism, homophobia, and myriad forms of self-hatred.

If I am working with a client who frequently brings up the media and literature they consume, whether it’s television, film, or books, I will invite them to do an exercise. I believe there are clues to our healing embedded right in the stories we find ourselves constantly drawn to. We can't control the stories that are told about us and our communities by oppressive systems, but we can take back and rewrite those narratives. This is a necessary component of liberation and why I love narrative therapy so much. Social justice is built into it.

Looking for the Self in Characters Real and Imagined

There’s a reason people idolize movie and television stars, why we can often name celebrities or characters who we look to for style inspiration or quotes we live by. Art has been our way of understanding our world for centuries. Many communities are only just starting to see their stories told in responsible and affirming ways, and the effects of being invisible on screens and in literature has ripple effects that lead to low self-esteem and a self-image that views anything outside of heteronormative Eurocentric standards as less-than.

I had a client who loved to talk about film, so one day I asked them to list their top five favorite films. Once we had the titles, I asked them to tell me who their favorite character was. Not surprisingly, the protagonist in each film was always an anti-hero, or a lead character who is neither entirely good or bad, but exists in some moral gray area we can all relate to. My client often dealt with feelings of shame and low self-worth, which these characters were normally grappling with themselves. When I asked this client to tell me which character they most related to, however, it was often a side character or someone who wasn’t driving the story. This spoke to their general feeling of powerlessness and ambivalence about their life.

It’s worth looking at the people we are drawn to and what they say about us. Are they a reflection or a foil? Do they represent a stark contrast to who we are and therefore embody who we want to be? Do they feel like a version of ourselves, like the writer took everything in our brain and fashioned a character around it? Perhaps these characters help clarify our values or remind us of an influential person in our life. These personalities, real or imagined, can speak to us in many ways.

Haunted Houses and Fantastic Lands… Which Worlds Are You Inhabiting?

There is a theory that people with high levels of anxiety are drawn to horror films. It seems like a paradox, doesn’t it? Jump scares, grotesque images, and unsettling sequences – why on earth would someone with anxiety willingly subject themselves to this? Precisely because it’s a choice. The horror genre can be its own form of exposure therapy, which allows people to practice coping with anxiety in a controlled environment and experience release in a safe setting.

My client loved the fantasy genre, specifically stories in which an outsider is exploring a world completely unknown to them. Not surprisingly, a topic that kept coming up before we did this exercise was their feeling that no one understood them. They often felt like they were navigating a world they didn’t understand – the values, the ways people treated each other, all felt foreign to them. Also present in these particular fantastic tales were themes of power and control, fighting against an oppressive system or ruler. My client felt comfort in the characters fighting for the greater good and validated by the fact that it wasn’t so easy for them either. Imagine, too, the catharsis any minoritized person might feel in accompanying heroes who are treated as outsiders and persist in spite of that.

The Exciting Thing About Story-Telling

What do we do with this brand new knowledge of the self-narratives we have been believing (sometimes mistakenly) our whole lives? We start rewriting our history. Telling our story from our point of view, free from the opinions and prejudices of society, free from the hurtful voices of those who robbed us of our self worth. Why don’t we like ourselves? Is it because homophobic, racist or sexist values told us we were nothing? If that’s the case, do those values line up with our own personal view of the world? If not, why keep being governed by them? 

We can examine our history and retell it from our own perspective, with more accurate fact-checking and acknowledgement of the roles trauma, mistreatment, and manipulation played. We give ourselves compassion and look at our past selves as people who deserve our kindness and understanding. We tell their story and heal the splintered parts of our identity.

A story can have so many interpretations and endings. One sentence can branch out into a thousand possible journeys. Where do you want your own journey to go? What happens in the next chapter, episode, act of your life? You have more power than you know to author your own destiny. With higher levels of hope, you can live a fantastic story!

Written by Manuel J. Cantu for www.colorsofaustincounseling.com