(bright music) - Hi, my name is Gina Garuba, I'm an outpatient counselor for Geisinger Marworth.

(bright music) I think there's several factors that are in play when choosing to do this sort of work.

I mean, I've always been a helper.

I've always been that person that was willing to help other people.

I kind of make jokes sometimes, a lot of times they would treat me like the fixer of all the kids and everything.

They're like, "Well, yeah, go ask Gina," you know?

But I always did enjoy, you know, also being encouraging to other people, being a role model, trying to model good behaviors and good values.

You know, also choose, you know, this disease is in my family as it is in a lot of people's families.

And you know, I believe with a lot of people get concerned about stereotypes and things like that is I really wanted to put a general face on it that it could happen to anyone.

Because I came from a good family, you know, we had a good family.

It's just didn't understand it, we didn't know what it was.

First and foremost, when I am starting my day the most important thing is looking at what's your patient caseload for the day?

What are you looking at?

And when I say caseload, it's the people that you're going to treat.

Every morning we do have what's called an outpatient huddle where we get together with our supervisor.

And what we do on that is just look at the patient caseloads for the day.

Do we have any difficulties with anybody and identifying who is going to be seen.

So the sessions usually run about an hour dependent on, you know, what the client needs.

Looking at various things in their life like how much are they using, how often, what's the pattern of that, what services would be best?

So basically that first session would be built on that.

So seeing patients throughout the day and that's basically how individual counseling goes.

(bright music) I'm a huge football fan, I love to go to Penn State Games.

So, you know, how does my organization afford me?

And, though it's on a Saturday but they we're gonna go down there.

I mean, I request the day, usually I'm not denied.

(bright music) (peaceful music) You know, most folks that are coming for counseling they're already feeling a level of shame or embarrassment.

And to be able to share with them that I understand what it feels like to be raised in a home where maybe the messages were not as clear as they would want them to be or they didn't get their needs met.

So I understand that, and I also, you know, look at, you know, how I was able to grow through that.

And I believe, you know, all the opportunities that I've gotten through the field the career of being a substance abuse counselor has really helped me heal that, right?

Because people do get sober, people get sober, stay sober, families do recover, there is a lot of help out there.