1. What personal experiences and perceptions of trauma do you feel you bring to your work as a Mental Health Worker?
A personal experience with trauma in a nutshell, I was sexuality molested by my father from the ages of 3 to 8. Which is why I started using drugs by the age of 11. My drug career consisted of traveling around the lower 48 states living on the streets and lived the true life of a drug addict. I now have almost 17 years clean and working on my degree to become a substance abuse counselor. I like to think that I would be able to relate to other addicts and may be provide a little bit of hope for them to know that they can rise up from rock bottom with the proper support system.
2. Describe how these experiences …show more content…
I know being a substance abuse counselor that sooner or later I will have a child abuser in my office. I know that they only abuse because more often than not they were abused themselves. Do child abusers know what they are doing only traumatizes the child and changes them for the rest of their lives? Do they need to abuse substances in order to deal with the guilt of the hurt they cause children? These are all questions that I do not have the answers to as of yet. I confronted my abuser when I first started working the steps and told him that I forgave him for what he had done to me as a child. His response was he was not going to apologize for anything because he had done nothing wrong. I suppose there are people who abuse children and sees it as normal. I had always thought these people were born just to inflict harm, but now I think that they are not burned, but only a product from the abuse that they had suffered as a child. So as you can see I am very conflicted about having to work with these people and would not be able to provide the best care possible. So I would go to my supervisor and explain the situation and see if I would be able to pass the case onto another