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GET TO KNOW ME
MY INSPIRATION
I used to stand out in the fields on the West Texas farm where I grew up and try to imagine all the lives that seemed so far away and apart from mine. I wondered about all those people far up in the sky beyond the jet contrails. I wondered about the First Native People who lived in the land before me and sometimes I could almost see the tall untouched prairie grasses rising up connecting me to the past. I wondered about the people, Black, Brown, Native, poor, and maybe sick who I heard the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preach about on the TV and radio. I was young, but I heard and wondered about all of this.
EDUCATION AND FINDING MY PATH
This inspired me to seek out the only way I knew of helping people then: the church. I studied and dived in head first because of the sense of purpose in serving others. For several years I became a young preacher and devoted listener to others' hopes and fears. However as college continued, I discovered an entire field devoted to listening and helping others help themselves – professional psychology. I worked as an assistant director for a student ministry for a while and I volunteered for a crisis hotline and still remember those overnight shifts answering calls from people who were in crisis and sometimes just very lonely. I loved them.
I graduated from Texas Tech University (1980) with degrees in philosophy and psychology and went to work taking care of developmentally disabled and often mentally ill adolescents and young adults. There, I practically lived with them in homes dedicated to helping them gain as much independence and wellbeing as they could.
These were very happy times for me and showed me that I wanted to make this my lifelong work. So, after lots of efforts, considerations and some good luck, I ended up at the University of Nebraska where I earned a masters degree in professional counseling (1985) and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology (1989).
During my graduate training, in addition to generalist professional psychology and scientific foundations and methods, I gained extra training in several areas including three years of interdisciplinary experience in health psychology working with medical patients and their resident physicians on stress and mental health issues; family counseling, career counseling, consulting for individuals and agencies regarding developmental disabilities; providing psychological care for veterans, residents of nursing homes, and people with neurological
diseases.
FAMILY AND EARLY CAREER
My family has always been my foundation in life. So as I neared graduation, I only looked for jobs within a day drive of my parent’s home in rural West Texas. I sent an inquiry to the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and it was love at first site. I was fortunate enough to be hired as a new faculty member psychologist to help serve the departments of psychiatry, pediatrics and family medicine.
CAREER AT OU
I did many things at OUHSC and loved working there. I served as coordinator of behavioral medicine training for the department of Family Medicine, seeing many patients and consulting with and training the physician residents. I also consulted throughout the Children's Hospital for the Department of Pediatrics and served as a clinician and teacher in the department of Psychiatry.
However, after my wife and I had our two daughters, I needed to seek a better work life balance. So, when an opening for a faculty in the counseling psychology program in Norman was available, I took it. I spent a total of almost 30 years as an OU professor where I taught about every class related to counseling and psychological assessment, served as director of the OU Counseling Psychology Clinic for 17 years, and served a stint as Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology for three years.I got to see countless amazing students graduate and become mental health professionals.
PRIVATE PRACTICE
I started private practice as a part of the faculty practice plan at OUHSC in 1989. In 1991 I opened an office in NW Oklahoma City and moved the practice to Norman in 1994 where in various offices around town I served private patients for the next 20+ years. My practice served all ages for most mental health or behavioral medicine concerns. I worked with kids, adolescents, adults, parents, family and couples. I also provided psychological testing. Stress and adjustment concerns, depression, anxiety, childhood and other traumas, family and relationships, careers, educational concerns and issues in coping with acute or chronic medical conditions made up most of my patients. Most weeks I saw 10-12 patients over these years as my “side job” to my OU career. I could never imagine being a professor and teaching and not being active practicing what I taught. I felt my practice enriched my teaching and my teaching enriched my practice and kept me always up to date in my field. I have so many memories of the people I served and the honor it was to know them and be with them through both difficult and hopeful times.
OKLAHOMA HEART HOSPITAL
In 2010 I was invited to join Oklahoma Heart Hospital as the chief psychologist for the south hospital campus. Given my OU career I was only able to begin half time while continuing my other work. Then in 2014 I retired from OU and devoted full time to Oklahoma Heart Hospital. There I saw patients every day, all day throughout the hospital to assist with emotional adjustment to medical concerns and to assist the physicians in providing mental health care for heart patients who happened to also have mental health needs. Stress, depression, anxiety, trauma and substance abuse have all been linked to higher risks for heart problems and poorer recovery during heart treatments or rehabilitation. So in addition to being roving bedside
counselor in the hospital, I also covered the emergency room for mental health crises, provided an outpatient clinic where I followed and counseled heart patients and taught psycho-educational stress management and wellness groups for their cardiac rehabilitation program. There were often desperate needs, but very great rewards and joys as well. Though coping skills were often the main thing patients needed from me, many also just needed full devoted supportive listening and many appreciated exploring deeper issues of life and death and life’s mysteries and meanings as they lay ill and often facing their mortality. In this work, I had the pleasure to collaborate and get to know many physicians, nurses, and chaplains, whom I loved working together with as a team.
FIRST RETIREMENT AND LOOKING FORWARD
In 2017 I “retired” in order to cope with my chronic back pain. However, OU called me again to serve and I returned to assist them in program transitions until 2020.
After a year of rest and welcoming my first granddaughter into the world, I am ready to start counseling again.