Photography Is Therapy

     Everyone has a story to tell.  As a counselor I spend a lot of time trying to help people examine their past.  My job is to help people.  One of the tools that I use is the past.  People do the things they do, because of the things they have done.  How we remember the past greatly influences our present thoughts and beliefs.  I believe that photographs are one of the most overlooked tools for counseling and life in general.  People are storytellers by nature.  We want people to know where we have been.  We want them to know how we feel.  Our greatest stories can be written through photographic prints.  You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words right?  Well the digital age has given us the ability to capture photos in ways we never could have hoped to do just a few years ago.  But something changed.  We stopped printing our pictures when we started taking photos with digital cameras.  We no longer have boxes or albums full of prints.  We have old hard drives full of images on old computers.  Our computers have been replaced with our tablets.  Our cameras have been replaced by our phones.  It's really easy to take pictures, but it's a hassle to print them.  So we don't.  We have become a culture that has forgotten how to write our stories.  We capture the story and unknowingly discard it.  We are so busy taking pictures with our phones, that we don't really experience that special or important moment.  Then we move on, and never really archive that photo.  We might go back and look at it again once or twice in the phone or camera, but something will come along that will keep that memory from being transferred to a print.  We are witnessing the story, and then forgetting to write it down.  Maybe your software update will go wrong and the images will get erased.  Maybe your memory card will go bad, or you'll accidentally erase the photos.  Maybe your phone will accidentally go swimming.

     Did you know that film is almost no longer being made?  Photo printing has become so inexpensive, but we only print a small fraction of what we shoot with our cameras.  I believe that printing your pictures is something that can help you write your story.

     I admit, I am guilty of not printing enough of my own photos.  I did professional photography for several years, and I loved to print my own photos.  Eventually it became too much like work to print my own photos.  It was also pretty pricey to print my own with the extremely nice ink jet printer I had.  Today I can get professional prints made for less than twenty cents apiece.  I have made a commitment to my family to print more photos, and I have been doing it.  I have to say, that it's really cool to see more and more prints on our walls.  It makes me remember the great times that we have been having as a family.  Now that we have two children, I am very excited.  I want them to see visual reminders of their stories hanging on our walls.  I want them to see that we choose as a family to visually write our story through photography.

Progressivism is Bad

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and I want to share some of the things I have learned about the concept of “Self-Help.”   So many people are focused on self-help.   Self-help has become the new buzz topic, and it seems like everyone who speaks or writes for a living wants to help you tap into your motivation to help you accomplish your goals, or dreams, or your best personal whatever you want to call it.  Self-help has become a parallel of psychology and counseling.  The interesting thing about self-help is that anybody can write about it, because they do not have to go through any educational requirements or state requirements for regulated professions.  Generally these folks have some sort of real life experience that they draw upon to deliver their content.  There’s always some sort of truth involved, and they leverage that element of truth to deliver the rest of their philosophy for their “Intellectually Licensed” material.  As long as they don’t call it counseling or psychology, they are free to say whatever they want without any worries of liability.  This is the benefit of free speech, and I am all for it.  However, the helpers usually indicate that their information is not designed to diagnose or cure anything and they cannot be held liable for your lack of success at using their intellectual material.  The problem with self-help is that none of their ideas are new.  They are repackaged versions of very old philosophies.  All of them are based on humanism. 

Leading As A Servant

     

     These photographs should not really exist.  They are of a very cute little girl at Epcot.  Every photo has a story to tell.  These are of my daughter and I’m proud of the story behind these pictures.  You probably don’t know the story so I’ll tell it to you.  I know they say that every picture is worth a thousand words, but these pictures are different.  These pictures have 108,000 pictures behind them.  Give or take a few thousand.  I didn’t really count, but I averaged the numbers.  I was a photographer at Epcot for three years between 1999 and 2002.   I took about 150 pictures per day at Epcot, five days per week for three years.  If you figure I worked at least forty-eight weeks a year for those three years, it comes out to about 108,000 pictures. 

     I worked for a company that contracted at Disney called Sharp Shooter-Spectrum Imaging.  You could never meet a more zany and diverse group of people than the group that I ran around with during those three years.  We were a band of misfits.  Now we are scattered all over the earth, but for a few short years we huddled into a room that was actually a closet underneath Space Ship Earth.  There were over fifty of us in those three years who went in to work each day to chase Disney guests for a picture in front of Space Ship Earth, as they entered the gate.  In those days we intentionally approached guests for a photo because we had the opportunity to earn money for achieving high sales.  Now Disney employs the photographers at Epcot.  While they do provide an excellent service, and they do use top quality camera gear, I think they are missing that certain “need to survive” mentality that made us good…and somewhat crazy.  You see we did this because we had something to prove.  We needed to be motivated every day, and we earned our living off of constantly being told “no” to one simple question… “can I take your picture?”  We each quickly learned about the unwritten rules and expectations of the normalcy of being rejected.  Rejection was part of the job.  But everyone had to be comfortable with being told no, because it was the thirty to fifty times that we got that “yes” which brought us our daily pay.  We each had a stake in the game because we earned a group commission in addition to our individual sales commission.  It was this group interaction that made us accountable to the team, and made us have a vested interest in each other.  But it was the ability to earn an individual sales commission that made us push ourselves mentally on a daily basis.  We had to set individual goals for ourselves to achieve the standard of living that we were expecting this job to provide.  The job was never intended to be a high-paying job, but there were a few of us who did do pretty well.  Those folks had to endure challenging conditions.  Florida heat during the summer gets to about 110 degrees when you are standing on concrete.  Eight hours of that a day can really make an impact on you.  My knees are in pretty bad shape from getting up and down on the concrete a hundred times a day.  Being told “no” about a thousand times a day to the same question can also be kind of disheartening.  (We always tried to come up with new ways to try to get people to say yes to stopping for a photo.)  All of these things combined to make a group dynamic that will stay fresh in my mind forever.

    

Why Men Don't Want to Go To Therapy

Men don’t really do therapy. Many men have a major issue with therapists. They believe they have to surrender to the therapist as the first step of therapy.  After all, men take a big risk to acknowledge that they cannot fix what is causing their challenge.  We are supposed to be capable of fixing all of our own issues.  It’s in the unwritten “man code” after all.  We fix flat tires, we mow the yard, we figure out how to get where we’re going without stopping to ask for directions.  We even have a habit of telling our wives how to fix their problems before they ask.  Admitting we can’t fix everything is against the code.  By the way, we are surprised when our wives don’t appreciate us for giving them solutions to the things they talk about.  The idea of talking and listening as an actual activity instead of a request for help is foreign to us.  We want to offer solutions to our wives problems.  It’s what we think we are supposed to do.  Actually, we are trying to protect you.  It’s just against the code to say it.  You might think we’re too cheesy.  Appearing cheesy is against the code too.

So maybe you have decided you and your husband need some couples counseling.  When you ask your husband if he will go to see a counselor with you, it’s all about how you present it.  He might need to know what’s in it for him.  It sounds kind of silly doesn’t it?  You see the need.  You love your husband, but maybe you are at a place in your relationship where you want some deeper communication or intimacy.  You are going to need to spell it out for him.  So now I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about men before going to therapy.  I’m a guy so I’m all about fixing things too.  I’m going to tell you all you need to know about getting your man ready for therapy.  This is relevant, first hand experience too.  Ready?  Repeat after me…

You Are The Therapy

     I want to do a little bit of self-disclosure for this blog post.  The most important thing I learned in graduate school was a very simple sentence.  I will never forget my professor Dr. Lawson saying, “You are the therapy.”  

     “What the heck did that mean?” I thought. 

     What he meant was that my therapy comes from my experience.   It also meant that what I learned from life would be the medicine that I would bring to people.  It stuck out in my mind because of the conviction in his voice when he said it.  At that time I had not really learned enough about counseling to know how much of a guiding principle this would be for me.  I knew that I was attending graduate school for counseling psychology because I felt God leading me in that direction.  I was also trying to hide the guilt from my past.  I was trying to keep it from my psychology teachers…I was a little paranoid.  I thought many times to myself that maybe they were on to me.  I just knew they were secretly diagnosing me.  Could they use their secret psychology powers to discover the things I had done in my previous college “experiences?”  If they found out would they think less of me as a Christian, or as a student?  Ok, that’s enough self -disclosure.  You might learn too much about me if you keep nagging me like this.  Ok, fine.  I’ll tell you.

     I became aware of a verse in Romans and it changed my life.  Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”  I was immediately aware that Paul, who wrote this passage, struggled with his own sin, and he was a prominent writer of New Testament books.  If Paul could struggle with his own life story and be confident that God was using his life to point to Jesus, then who am I to say that God could not use my life to point to Jesus?  This made Dr. Lawson’s point hit home for me. 

     Now, as a therapist and as a teacher, I draw on my life stories to normalize what people reveal in therapy and class.  I don’t want people to be paranoid about my “secret psychology powers.”  The truth is I’m at least as broken as they are.  I have days where my wife tolerates me, and my daughter is not impressed with how I push her on the swing.  But one thing I have found is that just being genuine with my wife and my daughter works much better than trying to be perfect or trying to hide behind appearing to be perfect.  Also as a teacher, I find that people relate to my stories of having stuttering problems as a teenager (up until I was about 21 really).  They like to hear that I was suspended from college (twice, but who’s counting) for bad grades.  People appreciate a humble person who has learned from mistakes, more than they respect an egomaniac.   They would much rather hear that I was broken for several years, and then made a dramatic turnaround.  So when I talk about overcoming failure in college, the story doesn’t end in me dropping out of school.   I turned from my sinful choices, and then went on to make straight A’s throughout the rest of college and graduate school.  When I think back to my days of failure, it makes my current situation seem unreal.  How does a stuttering, kid who can’t motivate himself enough to actually show up to his classes, go on to make straight A’s in graduate school?  How does he become a licensed talk therapist and then marry a speech therapist?  Because… God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.  It’s a much better, and more real story than the letters behind my name would lead you to believe.  Billy Barnett MS, LMHC.