How I Plan to Contribute to Rehabilitation Counseling
I have always wanted to help people with disabilities. I have compassion for their suffering and embarrassment, a desire to help them overcome their limitations and frustrations, and an inner drive to demonstrate that their lives can be productive and impacting. Wanting to help is not enough, though. Obtaining a degree from an accredited school is the first essential, but the degree is just a representation of what I expect to learn: the psychology and physiology of addiction, spinal cord injury, stroke, mental illness, and other disabling conditionsùas well as the means to help the victims of those conditions recover every aspect of their lives from the physical to the emotional. Although medical science is not always able to perform miracles, rehabilitation counseling can. It can restore lives in spite of medical handicaps.
There are three primary focal areas that I plan to pursue after graduation. The first is independent living. Having known people who for reasons of incompetence or injury were unable to manage their own daily routines, I have seen firsthand how emotionally destructive it can be to be forced to rely on others for help. In many cases, those ôhelpersö are disinterested, condescending, or even abusive. Even when they are good-hearted and helpful, the handicapped person suffers from feeling useless, burdensome, and helpless. I would like to explore and develop innovative solutions for independent living that can enable people who were previously dependent on helpers to live on their own and lead relatively normal lives. One of the areas that I feel is most helpful is training patients to develop solutions to their own problems. A handicapped personÆs first response to a dilemma that looks impossible is to think, ôI canÆt.ö In independence training, the person would be placed in such a situation and then encouraged to think of a way around t...