[humanser] Dealing with blindness when applying to internships

[Karen Rose]

Hi, Milissa and All:  Oh, how I had hoped these issues on the part of
supervisors had gone away by now.  I am a totally blind therapist in Ca. in
practice since 1984.  Way back in the day, I got asked questions like this
in interviews, and always answered that Freud never made eye contact with
his patients--he was sitting behind them.  (Not that I'm all that
traditionally psychoanalytic in orientation--that answer just seemed to make
professors have to reflect.

In my first few years of practice, when working in clinic situations, I
would often raise the question of blindness by the end of the second session
if the client had not done so, just to make the topic safe.  In the
beginning, I would offer them the opportunity to work with a sighted
therapist if they felt uncomfortable with me after the second sessions.
Because supervisors had been so concerned with the issue, I actually counted
the number of clients who took me up on this.  The number was twelve, in
fourteen years of practice.  Now, I've stopped this practice, as I am in
fulltime private practice and can no longer offer this to clients, but it
appears that very, very few of them care.  Clients are interested in both
feeling better and getting better.  They are in pain about their own issues,
and mostly couldn't care less about ours.  

I think that blindness, like any other characteristic of a therapist, can be
used as a Rorashach card--an object onto which projections may be made--and
this can be useful in therapy.  I often get the projection, "It's wonderful
that you can't see me.  You won't judge me on the way I look, llike everyone
does."  (Actually, this tells me that not "everyone," but this client, makes
such judgements.)  Or, I'll get the projection about having better hearing,
etc.  (I usually correct the better hearing one, and then talk about hoping
to be able to "hear" what the client is saying emotionally.)  There are lots
of ways of using blindness as a therapeutic tool.  Most of my examples come
from blindness, e.g., examples about fear and/or trust connecting with just
going forward and crossing streets anyway; examples of actually doing what
you want to rather than being blocked by "the odds being stacked against
you," or by "what society expects," etc., by using the example, "If I did
what was expected of me, or what I am "supposed to," I wouldn't be here,
since my group is seventy percent unemployed.  So why not go for what you
want, rather than what you think you can do, or what others have said is
available to you?"

Tell your potential supervisors, and professors too, that blindness is an
asset as a therapeutic tool when used well.

Karen Rose, MFT

-----Original Message-----
From: humanser-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:humanser-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Milissa Garside
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 6:57 AM
To: 'Human Services Mailing List'
Subject: [humanser] Dealing with blindness when applying to internships

                Hi Everyone, 

I have been on this list for a while and have enjoyed the discussions. 

I am currently a graduate student at Lesley University getting my masters in
mental health counseling. I am slated to begin my first internship in the
fall of 2010. However, my advisor recommended that I put my internship off
for a year because I do not have any "work experience." I have been advised
to get some volunteer work which I have done. Although I do not have any
"work experience" I do have a great deal of volunteer work within the human
service field. The decision to wait another year does not sit well with me.
As a result, I have spoken to several people at the university including the
disability coordinator as well as the field training person. The field
training person saw my resume last night and agreed that I have enough
experience to warrant applying for an internship. However, both she and my
advisor have raised the question how is it that a blind person can establish
a therapeutic connection with a sighted client? . I don't feel that they are
asking these types of questions because they are trying to prevent me from
interning. They just feel that these are questions that internship sights
are going to want to know and I am going to need to be able to answer it
confidently. When I was first presented with this question, I did not know
how to answer it. I'm wondering if this is something that super visors
really want to know? And if so, how does one answer the question of how we
as blind people establish a therapeutic connection without sight? Any help
is greatly appreciated. 

Thank you. 

Milissa



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