Cultural Identity Self Analysis

This is a class that I thoroughly enjoyed and I know much of this has to do with my own personality and life experiences. I have always been the type of person that easily recognizes the needs in others and steps up to anyone that is receptive of help. When I look back at my life and the family I was born into, I can see exactly how my own cultural identity would lead me into the role of a helper. As a child I lacked much of the positive nurturing that parents give to their children and although this was confusing to me, I didn’t act out in a negative fashion, but I would constantly seek out things on my own to fill the voids that I felt personally. For instance, I went to every church in the city I grew up in testing the waters out. To this
Somehow I was able from a young age to separate myself from those bad times and find good things that I would see and other people would speak of or that I read about. So I feel like my cultural identity though I lacked certain things, was still intact. All of that turned into wanting to help myself feel better and it came as I grew older taking shape through “guidance counselors” in my school, who actually were trained social workers, and also teachers who led me in positive directions. That’s where the groundwork for me receiving counseling began to be laid. My own experiences in individual counseling and being able to forgive others are what I credit as saving my sanity by the time I was well into my mid-twenties and beyond. It is possible to grow up lacking many things and if you don’t fall into the rut of blaming everyone else for what they lacked to give you early in life, you can understand it, accept it, and work to overcome and repair that and let those feelings of animosity go. In short, that is what my story is and what also led me into this field. Individual counseling was truly my freedom, it works. I believe that many people at some point in their lives will experience a time when they need some help, especially in the spirit of the world
However, the end result is for those folks that do not have more advanced mental health issues that want to put the time and effort into helping themselves, they hopefully can be helped in a much more expedient way and this is a wonderful thing. All we can do as helpers is offer people the tools to help themselves and the rest is up to them. I do believe that many people find positive result from counseling and over time are successful in overcoming their issues and making necessary changes. For me personally, my interest has been in the crisis related fields, more specifically domestic violence and suicide. I could see myself working in a DV shelter, a crisis intervention intake or something on that order. I know that I have no interest in working with children in any capacity and neither do I have interest in working with the elderly or with males. It’s very clear to me why I gravitate toward the crisis line of behavioral health and it began with the circumstances I grew up in. I knew even as a child that there was a better life to be lived than what I witnessed from my family of origin. I yearned for that for a long time before I was old enough to understand my situation and seek out the right