Personal statement for doctoral candidacy

Autobiographical Statement

My path to becoming a therapist has not been a straight one: There have been both barriers and detours. At the time that these roadblocks occurred I was frustrated and discouraged, sometimes to the point that I decided that I would simply pursue another career altogether. Now that I am back on the path to becoming a therapist, however, I am doubly glad. Glad both to be heading in the direction of the career that I have long wanted to pursue. And -- although I recognize that it sounds contradictory -- glad that my path has not been a perfectly smooth one. As I will elaborate below, I believe that I (like any other aspiring therapist) have benefited from the experiences that I have gained along the way.

A brief summary of my personal history is important to understand why my professional life has taken the course that it has. Along with my family, I immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1979. I thus began to attend school in this country when I was twelve, completing my undergraduate degree in 1988. At that point I wanted to continue my education. I was accepted to the master's program in psychology at Cal State Los Angeles and was very excited about the chance to attend the program and learn more about what shapes human thought, emotion, and behavior. However, my father did not allow me to study this field. His reasons for this arose from the beliefs that he brought with him from Iraq: Psychology was not accepted and still is not accepted in my parents' culture, which is that of Armenians living in Iran.

I wanted to honor my father's wishes for me because I knew that he had my best interests in mind. I also, to some extent, shared his concerns about psychology as a profession. While I believe that the fundamental tenets and practices of psychotherapy can be employed to help people from a very wide range of individuals, it is also clear to me that it is rooted within a specific Western European philosophical tradition. Psychotherapy, for example, makes certain assumptions about the relative importance of the individual vs. The family and culture and social norms vis-a-vis religious ones. There is nothing either wrong or right about such assumptions; rather, it is simply imperative for a clinician to be aware of the underlying structures that shape the practice of psychotherapy and determine, first, if these structures mesh with the individual's own preferences as well as serving the needs of the clients.

Despite the reservations that my father had about the profession, and despite my own nascent understanding of the ways in which psychotherapy is based in certain cultural and historical traditions that may make it of greater use to some populations than to others, I decided to continue my education in 2004 by studying psychology. When I received my Masters in Counseling in 2007 it was the greatest day of my life. I then applied to this PhD program and I was accepted and am now in my third and final year of formal graduate education.

Since returning to school to study psychology, I have been especially interested in the field of addiction assessment and treatment. I have had three years' experience working with two very different client populations -- both of whom have struggled with addiction and dependency issues. The first group of clients were patients at a Methadone clinic. The second group was individuals who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and who also were working through addiction issues. The two groups were very different in terms of how they had come to be addicted and in their drug of choice as well as in the specific problems that they faced because of their dependence on alcohol and drugs. However, it was also clear to me that there were a number of key similarities amongst all of these clients in terms of the dynamics that were being played out in their lives because of their dependencies and addictions.

Each of these clients, it became increasing obvious to me, was acting out essentially the same story. By "story" I do not mean that the ways in which they understand (and enact) their lives are somehow false, fiction rather than fact. Rather, I am using the word in what might be seen as an essentially Jungian way: Each person's biography can be seen as a narrative, a story that the self tells about the self and to the self. It is the most fundamental story in each life. Too often the story that people tell themselves about their own lives is one filled with shaming and negative elements; far too often such negative stories lead an individual to become to depend on alcohol or drugs to help them overcome their shame, depression, and other negative feelings about themselves.

The subjects of the research that I am currently proposing are skilled in disparaging their own lives, their own selves. The subjects of my research are three Armenian women (all of whom are in their forties) who have a history of addiction. The core of the work that I will do with them within the context of the clinician-client relationship and that I will write about will be molded by my understanding of the strength of narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is an essentially democratic and egalitarian in nature: It is a collaborative, cooperative process between the client and the therapist. The clinician who uses as her or his primary school of thought and tool understands that the problems that each individual faces (which include both addiction and the underlying problems that push a person toward addictive behavior) are shaped by culture, by history, by politics, by society. From these different sectors come influences that provide the limits of the ways in which we think about our own lives.

The basis of narrative therapy is similar to the ideas behind the larger model of postmodern theory: There is no single true way to tell a story, no single possible presentation of a single set of facts. Rather, there are different ways of interpreting and understanding a collection of events. This idea is a very powerful one for both therapist and client and lies at the heart of what I believe to be the curative power of therapy: We can tell the story of each life in a way so that the protagonist of the story becomes the hero of that story.

That transformational process is precisely what I wish to help effect for each of the three women that I will be working with. They have each created a story of their lives in which their addictions become inevitable and irreparable: They are very much not the hero of their own lives. Beyond that, there is only a single way of casting their own story, one that cannot be shifted or changed or re-imagined.