Welcome back to another episode of Career Stop Work.

Today, we'll be taking you on a day in the life of a mental health counselor.

I'm Melissa Mecca.

GREGORY And I'm a licensed professional counselor in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.

A licensed professional counselor is a mental health professional who diagnose and treat mental health issues.

At Magee Counseling, we have eight therapists total, and they all specialize in something different, which is great.

We treat a variety of mental health issues from anxiety disorders, mood disorders, eating disorders, addiction issues.

Counselors tend to take the whole human experience into consideration for treatment purposes.

We want to see our clients thrive, so we are often cheerleaders for them as well.

Somebody that's interested in getting into this field really important to possess three of these qualities unconditional positive regard towards your client, accurate empathy and genuineness being real with them.

Hearing somebody and actually hearing somebody and actively listening to them is so powerful.

So you want to be able to connect with them and be authentic.

The client and the therapist work together to come up with the best plan forward.

Well, might work for one client, might not work for somebody else.

I went for my undergraduate.

Well, it's university.

I studied psychology.

I loved it there.

It was so much fun.

From there, I applied to get into graduate school, and I entered into the Master of Science program at the University of Scranton.

If you're interested in pursuing a counseling degree, you want to look for a graduate program.

That is crap because it's going to enable you to become licensed without the license.

You won't be able to bill insurance companies and from start to finish, from undergrad to becoming licensed, it was about a nine year process.

Once I got my license in 2009, I got into private practice.

There's a lot of flexibility if you want to be in private practice.

It is recommended that every counselor be very self aware and do work on themselves.

Very important to know our blind spots so that we don't bring it into the therapy room.

When I was five months pregnant with my first child, I very suddenly lost my father to a brain aneurysm.

He was very young.

He was only 56 years old.

Huge trauma in our family.

Such a loss.

He was my best friend.

Becoming a mother and then losing a father at the same time was.

It was a lot.

The treatment approach that my therapist used with me was something called EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.

It's an evidence based trauma informed therapy.

I did find healing through using EMDR and because of that experience, I thought it was essential that I bring it to my own clients.

Now take a breath and let it go.

And what's coming up for you now?

From a very young age.

Oh, I was in elementary school.

I'd be on the playground and kids would just come up to me and talk to me if they had a problem.

And we talked about it and came up with solutions.

And it always felt so amazing to be able to help somebody.

Yeah, I knew from a very young age I had this calling to be a therapist.

So what did you think?

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