For some people, a “bucket list,” or a list of life goals, contains big adventures like parachuting from a plane or climbing a mountain. Beth J.’s “bucket list” included becoming a team consultant at Walk-In — and now she’s done it.
Her path to Walk-In began about 20 years ago, when Beth was an attorney practicing family law. As she worked with families going through high-conflict divorces, she noticed that the adversarial court system was hard on the families emotionally. “I was drawn to the emotional aspects of divorce,” she recalls. This led her to become a guardian ad litem, representing children involved in court cases.
“I really worked hard to make parents feel heard, and to help parents better understand how harmful their conflict is for a child. I often recommended that parents go to therapy. But I still felt like I was part of a system that was unhealthy for families,” Beth says. So she went back to school to become a marriage and family therapist.
Beth volunteered as a counselor at Walk-In from 2012-2016, while she was first starting out in her new profession. Providing free, no-appointment, anonymous counseling services as a volunteer was “one of my favorite experiences as a counselor,” Beth says. “A lot of my growth came from there.”
In the time since then, Beth has worked with individuals and families at a large local agency, where she was a counselor, supervised new clinicians and spearheaded programs on topics ranging from trauma to mid-life transitions.
After opening her own practice last year, she decided the time was right to come back to Walk-In as a team consultant.
So, every two weeks, Beth leads a team of counselors who run an evening clinic on Zoom. She supports the team during the clinic and leads the team consultation at the end of the clinic. During consultation, counselors give feedback to one another on how best to help their clients.
Team consultation was a highlight for Beth when she was a counselor at Walk-In, and it still is now. “I like sharing what I know, helping a clinician think through how to look at a case. Newer counselors have a lot of innate wisdom, too, and I’m learning still.”
The issues that clients face are quite varied, which makes the work especially interesting at Walk-In, Beth notes. “I like the element of not knowing who will come to a clinic. We are pushed to think on our feet. And it is amazing how one session can be really helpful.”
And the quality of the services provided are high, Beth notes. In one instance, Beth referred an acquaintance to Walk-In after the loss of a loved one to suicide. After a session at Walk-In, the young woman called Beth to say the session was “so helpful, and was one of the best conversations she had,” Beth says.
“I really respect the work that Walk-In does. It fills a very big need – which is never out of date — and it’s innovative,” Beth added. “It’s impressive that there is a clinic where clients can come in for free and be completely anonymous. At the same time, new clinicians volunteering there can obtain the clinical hours they need for licensing requirements.”
As another way of giving back to the community, Beth will soon be providing supervision for free to marriage and family therapists who volunteer at Walk-In. (See article about supervision for volunteers.) So if earning a therapy license is on “your bucket list,” volunteering at Walk-In Counseling Center may be in your future.