Shadows in the Halls: Bullied by Faculty in My Counseling Masters
My account of what I experienced in Grad School for Clinical Mental Health Counseling
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“It is a privilege to not have to think about your identity.”
We were discussing ways to bring our behavior in line with our values, and the University of Tennessee’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling Masters program CHORIS value system. It was the first day of class, and I didn’t know the student who called me out in front of the entire cohort.
I was ready to learn and I was determined to do well in class. I thought it an antagonistic tone to set in a program where we were grouped to function as a cohort. Not to mention our course of study was learning to give unconditional positive regard to perfect strangers.
I was easily 20 years their senior. I knew I stood out as an older student, and the gap between us covered a lifetime of experiences. The rest of the cohort was mostly in their 20s and none of my classmates was even a parent yet. It wasn’t hard to notice that for most I blended in with the furniture when our organized activities were over. It’s such a common part of aging it’s rarely even mentioned. But obviously at least one took a deeper issue with me.
In my thoughts, I questioned how the meditation of the non-self, where you diminish your fixation with your identity, would be considered a privilege. Reducing your self-focus allows you to act on your values. This practice is the core of Buddhism. It’s something you have to learn and work at.
Perhaps it would seem a privilege to someone with an identity disturbance, but it’s a tool, a tool useful enough that two major psychological treatment theories adopted parts of the process, including Dialectical Behavior Theory which even treats identity disturbances. That’s why I brought it up.
Maybe I could have described it as creating a state of ‘egolessness’. Maybe that would have sidestepped the friction, but I didn’t. I also didn’t mention its religious history. I’m so accustomed to practicing the meditation that I rarely think about its religious angle. Besides I’d already shared my Buddhist leanings earlier in the hour and it didn’t seem particularly relevant. This was a master’s program in Clinical Mental Health Counseling after all. I expected the professors to know that Buddhism was deeply embedded in modern psychology.
While I was uncomfortable with the exchange, I decided to brush it off. With my own kids in college too, I’d lived through enough to know that patience often makes room for understanding.
There was so much to get organized, from confirming digital textbooks to navigating multiple logins over UT’s Byzantine IT system to making sure my bills got paid, the dog fed, the house cleaned and my spindles ready for my upcoming guild meeting.
I was also still trying to get a feel for the environment. We had been encouraged to be open and share vulnerably with each other. We’d been told in orientation to think of this as a ‘brave space’ where we could discuss sensitive topics. The cohort ahead of ours even talked about how they knew each other’s personal trauma before learning about each other’s favorite colors.
We were also informed that support plans were sometimes required for students who couldn’t accept criticism and were defensive and that we’d have to be open to more personal feedback than anyone would want.
Accepting feedback was so important we were required to write a paper on self-awareness, specifically how often others know parts of us better than we know ourselves. Accepting anything and everything with aplomb was the sign of professional comportment they were looking for. In retrospect, this was definitely a red flag.
Having raised four kids through their teens and beyond I’ve heard quite a lot about myself. They were not shy letting me know all the ways I fall short. I wasn’t expecting there’d be many surprises. I had also done a lot of personal work on boundaries and values as my marriage imploded.
I knew I could take criticism well enough. I was less sure about what they were implying about student boundaries. Were we allowed to have them or disagree with their assessment?
This was concerning partly because of the political overtones in class. One professor made disparaging remarks suggesting J.K. Rowling was a tainted figure due to her beliefs. Another professor called out parts of TN law as bad because it could be used to invalidate LGBTQ clients. We were also informed that tensions between Christian counselors and ‘good’ counselors were so bad, that the state professional organizations split into two groups. Another talked about their experience working elsewhere and learning how important it is to stay out of politics.
I may not have been fully up to speed on Harry Styles' latest business, but I’d seen enough of the news to know that I was only one misunderstanding away from being a Karen in the wrong circles. I also knew that label came with a heavy price tag.
The progressive environment at the university was concerning because of a bad experience with my former Unitarian Universalist church. The congregation splintered and my family was ushered out when we protested the parents taking over the high school-age youth group, a move I saw as infantilizing the kids right when they needed to be making their own decisions.
At the same time, my experience with counseling done right was largely about confronting reality very honestly, and then finding healthful ways to cope with what you find. I didn’t think I’d get much out of this program if I hid my true self. So I took the faculty at their word that this was a ‘brave space’. But, it was also important to me to find positive, respectful ways to express my thoughts and feelings.
I wasn’t looking to make waves or call out anyone.
Mostly I was palpably aware that I needed to do well. Becoming a counselor was a goal I’d pondered for years. Helping others in crisis the same way I had been helped I thought would provide meaning for some of the things I’d been through.
Now that I was divorced though I had to begin a career to support myself and my kids. I’d been out of the paid workforce for over two decades raising my children and I was insecure in how I’d do in the job market with such a big employment gap.
Because I love psychology and I was so hungry to learn more, I believed I’d be a great counselor. I had a lot of experience giving peer support as a volunteer, and everyone I knew told me that would be a perfect fit for me. I just had to make it through grad school first.
My kids and I needed stability. I wanted them to see me succeed so they would feel like the world was safe again. And I had just enough in my settlement to finish the degree in the two years the program allotted. Financially I would just squeak by. Most importantly I didn’t want to let my kids down.
Over the next two weeks, I mentioned the meditation again, in the context of how you can manage your feelings when a client pushes your buttons. I said you can reduce your sense of identity and view your client through your values, specifically compassion. That would allow you to act appropriately without getting emotionally overwhelmed.
As class was breaking up my professor made a point of warning me that this kind of practice might be invalidating to other identities. That made no sense to me. How do thoughts in my head do anything to someone else? Thoughts and actions are not the same thing. My internal relationship with my identity doesn’t involve others.
Two days later another professor specifically stopped to tell me that this kind of thinking was problematic and not inclusive. I was so confused. I hadn’t brought that up in their class. There must be a misunderstanding here, but the faculty had apparently been talking.
To me, it would have made more sense if they’d told me spaceships were born from cancerous sea turtle eggs. We are still in the United States, right?
I stopped to ask my advisor what this was all about. He informed me that looking at the world through your values would have been ok a few years ago, but not anymore.
I didn’t know what to make of that. That didn’t seem right, but also seemed like something that I’d have to consider if I was going to get through this program. It never occurred to me that anything from Buddhism, much less from the psychological theories we were actually studying, would ever be a serious problem. I probably should have asked more questions.
If I’d had time to think maybe I would have, but I still had mountains of reading and homework. Figuring out how to get my phone to store my virtual ID so I could get into the library study room felt like an additional evil IQ test. Doing my schoolwork seemed like the appropriate priority, and it was something I could do.
They hadn’t explicitly said, this is bad thinking, you have to stop, which was good. I’d have pitched a fit at that. I also knew that explaining the meditation of the non-self can be difficult. Maybe I hadn’t explained it well enough. I’d noticed they had also been very careful in their introduction to doing guided meditation. It seemed like they thought some of the students would take issue with using a technique that may be outside their comfort zone. Was it possible they just didn’t recognize it or did not know much about Buddhism? I just wasn’t sure.
I never thought to complain to the administration or that it was something that couldn’t be worked out. My past experience in school was largely positive and challenging ideas were an engaging part of the process. My goal was to get through school and start working as quickly as possible, not get embroiled in drama. Based on results I lacked some insight here.
By this point, the cohort was practicing active listening to each other and sharing personal aspects of themselves openly as we had been encouraged to do. The professors wandered through the class and listened.
Shortly after that, there was a lecture on identity, microaggressions, intersectionality, and privilege. The professor asked the class for volunteers to speak about their identity. I was surprised when people described themselves by their race, sexual preference, gender, or disability.
They didn’t talk about hobbies, important experiences, values, beliefs, family, aspirations, responsibilities, personality, or any of the things I consider the important parts of my identity. I didn’t connect with this line of thinking and I found myself zoning out when I wasn’t answering my daughter’s emergency texts.
The professor pulled up a wheel diagram from the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies or MSJCCs. We learned that if you’re white, you are privileged and you need to ‘do the work’. It wasn’t clear exactly what the work was or how we were supposed to do it, but it was stipulated that if you’re privileged (white, hetero, able, etc.) it’s not ok to ask a marginalized person (tan to black, not hetero, etc.) about their experience because that put an additional burden on them while they are already working hard to tolerate your whiteness.
Meanwhile, I’m texting my daughter on how to stop the bleeding and use superglue in place of stitches after her brother opened a gash over his eyebrow in the cramped room they have to share.
I didn’t speak up during the lecture, but after class, I questioned my professor about the value of this instruction. This didn’t sit well with me. I thought it was inherently mentally unhealthy and shaming. I had recently finished rereading Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, so I told him that I thought it inspired tribalism and hostility.
Not long after this lecture, I was eating lunch in a communal area in the building adjacent to our class building. I was by myself, as I was every day until near the end of the semester. It was lonely at times, but I used the break to study and fiddle my way through my technology issues.
On this day, the person who called me out and another classmate asked to join me. They were both in my small group. I thought this a positive gesture at first. I had recently shared in groups class my experience at the UU church, and how a climate of groupthink had turned the environment hostile. They had been interested in that.
The pair asked me some questions about that church situation and how it was resolved. I shared how the congregation became increasingly intolerant and many people left. By the time I left, they were fighting over whether it was ok to clap after music because some performers got more applause than others and this could hurt feelings. They made ‘peace’ by driving out anyone who didn’t agree to give up clapping.
By the time the exchange was over something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had an uncomfortable intuition that there was a hidden agenda in their curiosity. I avoided the communal area after that.
In the weeks that followed, neither classmate showed a similar level of friendliness, even when I made gestures to greet them in the hallway or walking to and from class.
While our regular lessons were going on, the cohort was also tasked with writing papers and taking special training about the CHORIS values. CHORIS stands for commitment, humility, openness, respect, integrity, and self-awareness. These values were brought up daily in class, often with particular emphasis on how we needed to constantly strive toward near perfection.
At these training sessions, we were given further lectures on those values and asked to do exercises from meditating, to writing, to having conversations in pairs
At one of these trainings, we were asked to write and think about the values and how we could live up to them. At this point in my life, I have very strong feelings about what I value. I had already spoken up in a class assignment about how these trainings were out of step with my life stage. In my application, I even wrote about how important humility is to me. Humility was a value the department had only just adopted with my cohort.
On this day I wrote about courage. When asked to speak, I told the class that the CHORIS values were good and in line with my overall views, but I said that without courage for me they were meaningless in practice. I said that I have to value courage first before anything else. I said that if I don’t have courage, I can’t live up to any other value.
We were also asked to share with a partner attitudes in the past or present that might be racist or bigoted while the professors wandered the room. At the end of the exercise, I shared openly with the group how there was much more casual racism back when I was growing up. Things like using slurs or telling bigoted jokes.
I even shared how I’d reconnected with a neighbor who was an immigrant from India. I apologized to him for some jerky racist things I remember someone close to me saying. He related how he had done the same to others and we both talked about how we had grown and learned to do better. It was a beautiful moment.
When I finished, the professor hastily went back to telling the class they should not reach out in similar situations because in doing so you put a burden on the marginalized person to forgive you. I noted this moment. Not only did it feel off, but when did it become good psychology to dodge accountability? I had experienced similar moments in class by now, and I started thinking that maybe it was better to stay quiet.
This was awful because I adore psychology to the extent that I read theory textbooks for fun. I had been excited to learn more and participating in class made what could be rather dry lectures engaging.
In another class, shortly after that a professor went around the room and asked each person what we thought would be our most difficult client to work with. To a person, the rest of the class said a bigoted white man was their nightmare client. When I said my idea of an impossible client would be a psychopath or a narcissist, the professor responded as though this was a silly idea and that I should have no concerns about treating a psychopath. I remember him saying that they just want love.
This professor otherwise seemed a gentle and caring person and he had provided some good modeling in earlier lessons, and I didn’t understand him making this kind of turn.
By now I began to feel alienated from the group, and I could tell it was affecting my performance when we began doing practice therapy on each other. So I scheduled a meeting with my nice psychopath apologist professor.
In that meeting, I brought up the moment from class and said that it didn’t seem like him to take a student’s concerns lightly and I wanted to know if I’d misunderstood his response about psychopaths. I talked about a personal experience that led me to be wary of certain personality types like narcissists and psychopaths. He listened and assured me that what I had said was considered confidential and would not be shared with anyone. He didn’t quite speak to my concern. He reflected back what I’d said just like we were doing in class lessons.
Conversation moved to how the format of writing about the CHORIS values was at a different level than where I was in my development. I said that it felt like they were trying to tell us how to interpret those values and what to believe. I said this didn’t feel appropriate to me and that my values are for me, they are not something that I perform for points in class. He suggested that maybe I felt humbled to be back in school, which was not my point at all.
I later learned that his takeaway from this conversation was that I was afraid of men. Were that the case, I’d be proud to be so ballsy that I’d request a meeting with a male professor in private to confess I was afraid of men. But that’s just nonsense.
It was two days later I got a message from my advisor that I needed to meet with him and was on the verge of being assigned a support plan. The tone of his email suggested that I’d done something wrong and I was in trouble.
I was alarmed. I had quit talking in class over the last month after the criticism of my Buddhism and other off-feeling interactions with both faculty and other students. When I thought I could be doing so poorly I was targeted with a support plan I was terrified. I lost 10 pounds over the weekend waiting for the meeting.
At that meeting, I learned that one of my professors thought my thinking was too concrete and an unnamed faculty member said I was transphobic.
Initially, I was somewhat relieved. I knew I wasn’t transphobic. I’d even marched in the Knoxville Pride Parade. But I was also very stressed. From our lectures, it was clear transphobia was a big bad deal akin to drawing a picture of Muhammad. I was baffled at how concrete thinking could be a bad thing. Concrete thinking certainly didn’t impede my side work as an artist. Also, how am I supposed to be less concrete?
When I left his office I felt pressurized, confused, and scared. I was spending so much time either in school or doing school work, I didn’t have the brain power to adequately think these things through. Was Buddhism bad? Was my thinking wrong? These things didn’t feel right, but I was getting so many messages from all sides that I was bad. I started to have small doubts about myself, even as I reminded myself that life was much more complex than good and bad most of the time. I had no prior experience with Critical Theories. It would be months before I would read enough to understand what was happening.
Only a few hours after getting that news, I had my small group, there again was the student who had called me out on the first day. The small group was a part of our group work class and there was an agreement of confidentiality, so I won’t talk about the details of what was said. I’ve also avoided other identifying elements about my experience to obscure the identity of the people in question.
I will say that we unexpectedly deviated from our planned activity, and when you encourage people to focus on things like race, privilege and having one group responsible for ‘doing the work’ for all the others, this is a combustible mix.
It was an absolute disaster.
Afterward, I reached out to two different professors. That’s what the program handbook recommended when there was a problem with other students and you needed help. I let them know that I felt like I was walking on eggshells. One told me to use ‘I’, statements, which I actually already had in hand and to go talk to my female professor.
I asked the female professor what could I do to improve the situation at group. I say that I think they may be misunderstanding my Buddhism. I told her that it seemed like I was being held to a different standard. I say that I’m working very hard and that due to my finances, I need to finish this degree within the window I have so that I can get to work as soon as possible.
She mentions that she has a duty as a gatekeeper of the profession and she tells me that at my age I stood out. She said my thinking practice is colorblind racism and transphobia. She said I was flaring. She said she’d watched the video and I’m being defensive and I should apologize.
My impression of the situation is completely different. She says I lack empathy. This feels very wrong. It feels like a threat. I let her know that no one has ever told me that before, and I’d need to think about that. She gave me contacts for therapists who might help me and asked if I was ok to drive in a way that now seemed caring. It was confusing.
I left her office and cried in my car. I didn’t have the sense that she was lying, but I knew what she said wasn’t true. But also if my professor believed that I was racist, transphobic, and lacked empathy, where do I go from there? What’s the recourse? What if it is true? Am I all those awful things? It felt like my dreams of being a counselor, having financial security, and making my kids proud, were being beaten like a bad boss in a baseball bat factory, and I still had homework to do when I got home.
I took an immediate detour to a support group. I needed some outside input to get perspective. There is a voice screaming in my head, that my female professor wasn’t really looking out for me, but there is also another voice noticing that she seemed nice and had asked if I was going to be ok before I left. It also seems like some of my classmates are targeting me.
My professors were people who presumably studied psychology. They had worked as counselors. That suggested an authority of subject. Maybe they knew something I didn’t. I felt bewildered, terrified, and like I was trying to think through cream of mushroom soup.
The one thing that I’ve got going for me is that I’ve felt this way before. In my divorce, and at my old church. This was painful, excruciating even. My thoughts are dark, wild, and outraged. While I could only contain my crying so much, Buddhism had taught me that even excruciating feelings are fleeting. I knew some tricks to direct those painful energies in benign directions and I suffered through the rest, knowing they would pass in time. This is because Buddhism is less something I believe and more something I practice.
I also knew that many people with the badge of authority don’t carry the actual knowledge or intelligence to back that up with sound judgment. That said, I am still vulnerable to the power of knowing someone has authority, particularly over my future.
I wasn’t thinking yet that I could or should fight back. But I did know the only way out was through. I accepted that whatever happened now, was going to be torture for a while.
I knew this environment was toxic.
Two weeks later there was another major blow-up in my small group. I left in tears, cried most of the way home and barely slept for the nightmares.
What’s the price of a second disaster? I didn’t know. I was looking for any trace of hope I could find. I was doing everything I could to do exemplary work, be on time, and maintain perfect attendance while limiting my participation in class. You can’t say the wrong thing if you don’t speak. When I wasn’t doing school work, I was scouring my psychology reference library for ways to manage myself and this situation.
If I was going down, I was going to give it my best the entire way.
In an effort to be proactive, I reached out for a support plan. Why wait if this is the looming threat? And if it is genuine help, as one doc student told us, well I could use that. I was regularly crying just to get through the day. I felt hopeless and powerless. My thought was if relations with my classmates were problematic, I would need support from the faculty to get through the program.
I now had my first-ever prescription for anti-anxiety meds and a high blood pressure scare. I had not felt this invisible since I was a child.
At my first support meeting in my advisor's office, I try to explain that the Buddhist practice of the non-self doesn’t reflect judgment of others, but before I can get that out my female professor who is also there cuts me off and calls me defensive. I try to share that my values include the CHORIS values, and it’s unlikely I’ll abandon those values. She cuts me off again and says that I’m thinking in black-and-white terms.
She even floated the idea I should be open to changing my values and beliefs because I had chosen to believe those things once. I could change my mind again. Practically vibrating in her chair she reiterates that I have no empathy.
Lack of empathy. It’s a characteristic of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. Pretty much the opposite of what you’d want in a counselor. In my opinion, any of those conditions would be cause to remove a student from the program, or better a faculty member from employment. In front of my advisor, this accusation came across like the first shot at Fort Sumter.
Is it true? Do I lack empathy? Isn’t that the root accusation whenever someone is called a racist or something similar? I wasn’t feeling empathic toward my professors at that moment, that was definitely true. Do I need to prove that I do empathize? Is that even possible? Wouldn’t they just find another way that I was wrong? How do I disprove a negative?
At that point, I freeze. It feels like it’s at least a minute or two before I speak again. I stumble through the rest of the meeting trying to ask for support.
At the second meeting, the professors ask me why I froze up the week prior and I tell them that I’m terrified. They don’t ask me why. They tell me that is unacceptable behavior for a counselor and that I need to find a way to communicate that I need a second to calm down.
The female professor says that I’ve fulfilled the required number of small group meetings and that I don’t have to go back. She says this is for the group’s protection and my own. She also wants me to write an apology which would mend things as though I was returning to the group.
I’m relieved that I don’t have to return to the group, but I also think that this is a poor way to resolve such a situation in a master’s program for mental health counseling. I knew I had gone above and beyond to follow best practices when there was personal conflict. I thought it was wrong to let this go unresolved. The program handbook said faculty would act as facilitators in such situations, but that wasn’t happening.
My advisor hands me a paper on empathy. It’s half done in pictures like an old McDonalds kid’s menu. Having raised four children and with twenty years of lay peer support counseling behind me this is insulting.
He moved on to the terms of the support plan and I read over a draft which included mention that I needed to consider “colorblindness” and “gender blindness” in relation to the “death of the focus on self” which was what they were calling the Buddhist meditation of the non-self now. I was supposed to come up with the pros and cons of being colorblind and gender-blind.
I was frustrated, and I began to say that the meditation was just a way of thinking and that I could still recognize color, but the female professor cut me off and said I was thinking in black-and-white terms and I was being defensive. I try to say that I recognize that I have a dark side but she cuts me off again and says that I’m speaking in black and white terms by using the word dark.
I noted that it could be charcoal or aspen gray, and I brought up that I’ve written stories in the past that deal with gray areas and have multiple points of view. The female professor suggested that I look at changing myself the same way I would revise a story.
I said that I didn’t want to betray myself. I said that I had been gaslit before.
When I leave the office, the biggest thing that I notice is that there is no concrete direction in what they want me to do, but I have a very strong feeling that they want me to apologize for being white. Why else demand I think about colorblindness or ask me to ‘revise’ myself, change my values, and write an apology?
“Are you suicidal?” My advisor asked.
I was sitting in my advisor's office again. Christmas was just a few weeks away, the semester almost finished and I remember gripping my iPad as my heart sank into my belly. I had written in my application that I wanted to be a counselor to prevent suicides. I found his question both unattuned and insulting.
I forced myself to hold it together.
The night before, I had an intuition that if I shared my rewrite of Goldilocks and the Three Bears one of them might suggest I was suicidal. I suspected this not because of the story, but because by now I had been misinterpreted by the UTK faculty so much, I was finally starting to give up hope that I’d make it through.
I couldn’t think well enough to put it into words, but I knew this was abusive. I was determined not to quit until I absolutely had to. But I was discouraged.
In my story, Mama Bear is trying to use Winnie the Pooh’s balloons to float into the sky. Goldilocks and the other bears think she’s going to fall and hurt herself. Mama Bear is vindicated in the end and they all join her floating on the breeze. It’s a story of transformation.
I took the risk and shared it because I no longer trusted my female professor, but I thought that if anything could, this story would demonstrate that I see things in shades of gray at least to my advisor. It was a last-ditch effort to show that there is texture in who I am.
In the meeting, I stridently denied that I was suicidal because I wasn’t. I’d quit the program before I killed myself. I needed the credential to work, not their validation.
My advisor then pulls out the apology I’d written. I’d used a book by a psychologist on how to phrase things like great apologies. I’d taken lines directly from the pages because I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. My advisor went about rewriting it. When he was done, he read it out loud and asked me what I thought.
“I said that it didn't sound like me, but it was fine.” His eyes darted up from the paper and I knew that wasn’t the answer they wanted. I’m now told that I’m not emotionally open. It was too much. I start to cry. I talk about how I’m crying between classes and that I have to journal about what I’m grateful for during the breaks just to get through the school days, and then I’m crying again as I drive home from school.
The female professor then says that I’m not integrated enough and that I need to share all of this in front of the entire class.
I say that I need to be compassionate to myself and not do that. Then I say that I missed my kids.
My advisor now says that my tearfully sharing how I missed my kids made him feel so connected to me. The female professor said that she also felt connected to me. But I did not feel connected to them. I found their display disgusting, and their lack of genuine empathy disturbing. And as if on cue, my advisor said with a smile that he remembered that empty nest thing, and he’d been there and done that. Like it was nothing. These are licensed counselors teaching counseling.
The female professor predicted that my holiday break would be a mixed bag.
After the Goldilocks story debacle, my advisor called me in for one last ‘support meeting’ five days before Christmas. Before walking in I decided that I wasn’t going to accept any path forward that required I admit to being inherently bigoted. I had already walked away from my UU church and my marriage. It was breaking my heart and I was terrified for my future, but I could walk away here too.
I had some fleeting thoughts that I should record the conversation, but I wasn’t sure that was legal. And at the last minute, I didn’t think I could manage my phone to record well. My discouragement sapped my resolve.
My intuition told me that I may be getting kicked out, despite finishing with three A’s and a B+. My intuition was mostly right.
I learned I could technically stay in the program, but my female professor blocked me from starting practicum with my cohort in the next semester. She said I couldn’t get along with my classmates. My advisor flagged my Buddhism as a schema that needed to be corrected. The female professor said I needed more time to learn their principles. She was talking about Critical Theories Ideology.
In that last meeting, my advisor again asked me if I was suicidal. I told him to stop asking me that. I told him it makes me angry that he keeps asking that. After already adamantly denying that I was suicidal at the last meeting, it felt like they wanted me to be suicidal because then they could point to that as clear evidence of my unsuitability. It was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever experienced.
I said that this support wasn’t supportive. I said that this decision was effectively kicking me out because I couldn’t afford to stay for an additional year or more.
When they said that I could appeal my delayed practicum I replied that was a spurious gesture. I said, “How can I defend myself without validating your claims that I am defensive?”
The female professor said, ‘Oh look at you.’ Her delivery was mocking.
Then she went on telling me I had terrible counseling skills and that the other students had been too nice to tell me how awful I was at counseling. She reiterated that I had no empathy and that my thinking was now also legalistic in addition to everything else.
She said a lot more, but it was all the same, I was bad and she could list the reasons for days.
I was a wreck for months after I walked away from that counseling program. I suffered waves of shame and fear. I had many crying spells as I discharged the grief. And I spent an inordinate amount of time sitting and watching sand shift in one of those framed liquid, moving sandscapes.
I was afraid of people, and I had worried thoughts about people that looked different from me.
I worried that I was lying to myself. What if I did lack empathy? Would I know?
But I also filled out forms and filed a complaint.
I made some art too, and I rebuilt my website to showcase it. And even though it made me headachy, tearful, and nauseous, I wrote down everything that I could remember about those support meetings.
I argued with my fears and my worried thoughts of different people.
With a lot of fear, I even asked a few people whom I really trusted if they thought I lacked empathy. I said that if it’s true, I need to know. Their responses helped me purge the shame and self-doubt.
I played with Chatgbt and had it write fairytale after fairytale until I realized I was trying to rewrite Animal Farm.
I kept writing myself, even when I struggled to make sense and put into words what happened, even when memories slipped in and out of my awareness like air bubbles surfacing in a pond.
I also reached out and talked to anyone who would listen. The vast majority have been appalled when they heard my story. I’m even raising money and looking for a lawyer. I want my tuition back and I want people to know what’s happening so they can make informed decisions.
I’ve also read like crazy and watched videos explaining Critical Theories and the ideology behind DEI. Now I feel comfortable saying I better understand what happened. DEI is not at all as nice as diversity and inclusion sound.
So am I privileged? This isn’t the first time I’ve been terribly treated based on my inherent characteristics, so you tell me.
I do feel fortunate to be American and have the opportunities that allows me. I also struggle like everyone else, and I don’t think making suffering into a contest is productive.
I doubt I’ll ever be a counselor now. I’m not even sure I still want that. More's the pity, so many have told me I would have been great at it, and I do feel for the many men who find suicide to be their only outlet. I know I want to keep fighting on their behalf and my own. They deserve better than this hateful DEI counseling framework.
I need to find paying work and I’m ready for that. I’m falling back on my English degree, creativity, and my talent for research. I wrote an article about these problems in counseling and I saw it published at Minding The Campus. I mostly hope I can find something where I can keep fighting this toxic ideology before others have to suffer like I did.
I’m still scared I’ll fail, end up in yet another DEI situation, or face retribution for speaking out. I often wake up in the night panicked that I’ll lose my home. But I keep putting one foot in front of the other. I’m going to stay true to my values. I find it so much better than being driven by fear. Yes, it’s excruciating sometimes. Given the alternative, I feel deliciously alive.
About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I encountered, however, was a program deeply entrenched in Critical Theories ideology. During my time there, I experienced significant resistance, particularly for my Buddhist practice, which was labeled as invalidating to other identities. After careful reflection, I chose to leave the program, believing the curriculum being taught would ultimately harm clients and lead to unethical practices in the field.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to investigating, writing, and speaking out about the troubling direction of psychology, higher education, and other institutions that seem to have lost their way. When I’m not working on these issues, you’ll find me in the garden, creating art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.
You can also find my work at Minding the Campus
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Dear Suzannah,
Thank you for your bravery in sharing your story. Although mine is not the same, I also had a traumatic experience in a clinical mental health counseling program from which I walked away. This is a profession that eats itself. I am glad to be done.