Читать книгу Taming the Abrasive Manager - Laura Crawshaw - Страница 15

Degree in hand, I moved to Seattle with the plan of paying my dues by working in respected settings and eventually opening a private practice to treat emotionally disturbed children. To that end I enrolled in the Child Therapy Certificate Program of the Seattle Institute for Psychoanalysis, where I was privileged to be clinically supervised by Edith Buxbaum, a student of Anna Freud. After two years of seeing patients in a community mental health clinic and working nights as an emergency room social worker in a major trauma center, I experienced two revelations. First, I realized that if I were to become a private practitioner, I would have to sit in a room, inside, all day, every day. Whoa— this heart not only bled, it wandered as well. The prospect of being cooped up in the same clinical stall every day made me want to hightail it out of there. Second, it became clear to me that Seattle was overrun with psychotherapists—I’d have to wait until a fair number of them dropped dead before I could have any hope of opening a viable practice. I’m not the deathwatch type, and beyond this, I was (and still am) a total tourist—I lusted to explore the wider world beyond the four walls of a clinical office. So I heeded the call of the wild, purchased a ferry ticket north to Alaska, and bolted. There were jobs aplenty in the Last Frontier, and who knew what other experiences awaited?

Within a week of my arrival, I was hired as the first full-time clinician in the first stand-alone employee assistance program (EAP) in the state, embarking on the greatest adventures any tenderfoot clinician could hope for. EAPs provide confidential counseling services to employees and eligible family members experiencing problems in their personal or work lives. Our initially tiny company eventually provided counseling to Alaskan employees (and family members) of over 600 corporations throughout the state. I was trucked up and down the Alaska pipeline in –70^◦F (–56^◦C) temperatures to explain the benefits of EAP counseling to pump station employees and helicoptered out to Bering Sea drill rigs to deliver the same message to exhausted roustabouts. Back at the office igloo I counseled employees on the problems they experienced at work and home, learning that shooting a spouse’s sled dogs was a reliable indicator of marital distress in Alaska. Another indicator of marital peril lay in the discovery by one newlywed that her gun-loving, hard-drinking husband’s past two wives were buried on her new love’s wilderness homestead. I referred unwilling addicted air traffic controllers into substance abuse treatment and helped wildlife biologists cope with their fears of flying. It was truly the Last Frontier—right down to the guns.