faith and fear

Wow. I feel so confused right now. Actually, confused doesn't even begin to describe it. Perhaps terrified is a better word. I have had a pretty defined idea of what I wanted to do with my life and my education for several years now. And now...I'm just not sure. I began questioning all of my plans today.

I have always been pretty sure that I wanted to be a counselor. I've never been sure specifically what kind of counselor I wanted to be, and I figured that was okay since I'm not very far into my upper-level psych classes and would have time to figure it out. But in general, I've always gone back and forth between marriage and family therapy or something to do with adoptions.

But today at the institute dollar lunch, I had a conversation with Brother Wright that absolutely terrified me. Brother Wright, in addition to being the institute director, is also a marriage and family therapist--a fact I did not know until today. I was immediately interested and began peppering him with questions (he was doing the same to me so I figured it was okay). One of the things he told me that shook me to the core was that he hates doing marriage and family therapy. He hates it. And when he told me why it completely made sense. He started talking about the things they don't teach you in school--the on-the-job-training type of stuff. He told me his first client was a transvestite who was married but didn't want to fix anything about his life. He talked about sex addicts and physical and emotional abusers. Obviously I knew all that stuff existed and that I would have to deal with it, but I didn't realize that I would need to be dealing with it on a daily basis.

Honestly, I'm just not sure I have what it takes. I'm scared that I would be bringing that stuff home with me every night. I'm scared that I'll become hard and de-sensitized to the things of the world. Basically...I'm just scared.

I also talked to him about my desire to work with adoptions. He told me a good idea for that would be to continue what I was doing right now and get a bachelors in psychology and then a masters in social work. I feel like that's probably what I'll do. Even then, I'm scared that I'll be bringing home all that baggage every day.

Regardless of how scared I am right now, however....I still feel pretty sure that I'm supposed to do counseling of some kind. Maybe I'm just going to have to make sure that it's something I'll be able to handle--that I won't be an emotional wreck every day for the rest of my life. I'm far too sensitive for that. I guess the biggest thing is that I'll have to pray about this. I'm sure nothing will help more than that. Faith. I need to have faith.