Grayson Best
University of Texas
Austin (30.2° N, 97.7° W)

featuring Ashley Hamm, Hamm Counseling, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Ashley Hamm is a licensed professional counselor, certified health coach, and a registered health coach-specialist who has started her own private practice called Hamm Counseling while balancing her work at a behavioral health hospital as a mobile assessor. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Rice University and a Master of Education in Counseling from the University of Houston. From discovering how she wanted to become a counselor to learning how she started her own firm, my interview with Ashley was an eye-opening experience that showed the nuances of following a career in counseling and how unique each path can be. In our talk we discussed her personal background, the diversity of the mental health field, as well as some advice to those interested in counseling.

Ashley didn’t always know she wanted to be a counselor. She first wanted a career in theater and followed that passion for a few years. It wasn’t until her mid-twenties when she visited a career counselor that she realized her desire to help others in counseling. She explains that she noticed, in hindsight, how “there were always these little hints that I might go down that path.” She had even considered majoring in psychology but wasn’t set on her choice until her talk with a career counselor. At first, she was concerned that it was too late for graduate school when she had no prior counseling experience; her career counselor, however, explained that there are always still plenty of options. After that, she soon started studying counseling at graduate school at the University of Houston.

While in graduate school, Ashley volunteered at a crisis hotline. She avidly recommends this experience to get a feel to see how driven you are in the field. She explains that it can be very draining, either from getting tough calls one after the other or working too many hours. This was her first experience with therapist burnout, a state of emotional fatigue from working as a mental health worker. An important factor is recognizing when burnout is happening in order to properly take care of yourself. You would never want your emotional exhaustion to affect your work, so it’s important to be self-aware in this setting. When it comes to dealing with therapist burnout there are multiple methods to go about it; Ashley feels that “a lot of self-care should be preventative” and “be part of your daily life.” She recommends having a good life routine and healthy habits as they can go a long way in preventing a burnout. That being said, she still occasionally feels a burnout every now and then where she resorts to confiding in a trusted friend for support.

Even after her experience at University of Houston, Ashley had a lot to learn. She was given the experience to work as a licensed professional counselor intern under some supervision. Her supervisor checked to make sure her practice was ethical and that no situations outside of her competency level arose as counseling can be a very intense field. Because this process takes two to three years to get your required hours, it was a huge learning experience for Ashley. She explains how, on top of learning all the modalities and techniques of therapy to effectively help people, she also needed to learn about all the reasons someone might go and see a therapist, as there can be many individual cases. Even though she learned a lot in graduate school, actually practicing therapy taught her the most as there were many times she found herself talking to supervisors for help on certain situations.

Many sought-after jobs aren’t initially available to new graduates as they require work experience. The options she found for herself after her internship were positions such as working for psychiatric hospitals or community centers. It was not the intimate one-on-one experience she was expecting. She was not in the private practice setting she had anticipated and was instead helping people in crisis. This extreme setting was stressful but eye-opening as she was learning a lot dealing with such individuals. She explained how she was grateful for the experience, but it was a process to get used to the idea of working to her own private practice.

Personally, I found the most insightful aspect of our conversation to be her private practice. It’s relatively new to her and is still being established, so she has a fresh perspective on how to go about it. She started planning for it about a year ago, starting with a lot of personal research. She taught herself about marketing and running a business on top of many other little details that would come up in this practice. Struggles like attracting clients and advertising yourself to them can be tough, so Ashley has opted to work part-time at a behavioral health hospital to help compensate for a smaller-than-perfectly-sustainable clientele for her firm. This allows her to have a smoother transition between working under someone to having her own business as opposed to dropping everything and hoping for the best. The most informative part on how to start your own private practice was when she explained how it is best to talk to people who have already done it. She says it was somewhat intimidating at first, but she learned to build out relationships with other people in the field, which gave her a broader knowledge of what to expect.

Ashley’s passion for learning and helping others makes her look to one future possibility in the mental health field: technology integration. Ashley has an interest in having video sessions with her clients. Technology integration is something that could potentially really change counseling and make it more accessible and comfortable for people. Ashley explains how there are plenty of scenarios where someone can’t attend counseling. Apart from scheduling, there are plenty of mental health reasons to keep someone from counseling, such as being too anxious to leave the house. Video sessions would allow for such people to have access to previously unavailable counseling. She acknowledges how, in this territory of the field, it is unknown how technology will overall affect results, but she generally views it as a positive as it brings more access to people who need it.

If there was any one conclusion to this interview I could draw, it’s that the mental health field is far more diverse than one can imagine. There are plenty of opportunities at every point in the field, no matter your experience level. While they may not be the immediate job you want to jump into, the experience of working through the field is necessary to establish a professional grasp of what you want to do and to know what to specialize in. It’s definitely a field that requires a true passion to help others in order to learn and develop. The more effort and passion someone puts into this field, the more they’ll get out of it.

Highlights from the Interview

Did you always want to become a professional counselor, was that encouraged of you?

One thing that was probably pretty influential to me was that my mom was a teacher and my dad was in the army reserves, so I was raised with a sense of doing meaningful work, contributing to the community. I always knew I wanted to do something that was meaningful, but I really didn’t know I was going to become a counselor until basically my mid-twenties. I always loved learning about the mind, and I always found people really interesting. In college I took some psychology classes, thought about majoring in it but I didn’t. Actually I had a career in theater for a couple years before I went to grad school for counseling. When I look back, there were always little hints that I might go down this path, but I didn’t really know until I visited a career counselor and they helped set me on the right path. They helped clarify where my interests were and clarify some myths about it. I had in my head that it was too late to change careers and doubts like how would they ever accept me to grad school when I don’t have any prior experience. They helped me see what was possible.

Was there any main person besides the counselor that really influenced you?

As a kid my mom was very influential. Being a teacher she was always trying to supplement my education. Throughout the summers she would always make sure we were reading extra books and learning. So she helped spark a curiosity and a drive to continue to learn, which is really useful as a counselor. You can never learn it all when it comes to mental health or therapeutic techniques. I’m really grateful to have that curiosity about learning more from her.

What led you into the position you are in now, where you have your own firm and you work part-time at Westpark Springs?

I went to grad school for counseling at University of Houston, and right out of grad school I worked for a year at a psychiatric facility. It was called a partial hospitalization program, and it’s basically a step down from an inpatient psychiatric hospital, so it’s for people who maybe if they don’t get any support they might end up in a psychiatric hospital, so it was our job to give them some therapy and support. They would come all day long and do therapy all day long; sometimes they would stay several weeks in our program. It was for people who had pretty significant mental health issues. Then I got a job with a hospital employee wellness program, and I did that for about four years. I did counseling for the hospital employees and got trained as a health coach, so I would help people change their health habits to help them get healthier. I did a lot of work with stress management. Finally, I decided to look into opening a private practice. I think it was something that was always in the back of my head, something I eventually wanted to do, have a private practice, have a little more freedom to see the kind of clients I want to see, and pursue the areas of specialization that I’m interested in. About a year ago I started planning the private practice, doing a lot of learning. There’s a lot of learning you have to do about marketing and running a business that I had to learn from scratch basically. At the same time I have been working at the mobile assessment job with Westpark Springs to help me supplement my income during this transition period.

When you said you learned the business side from scratch, did you have to take a class or is this all your own research?

My own research. Just a ton of reading on the internet and listening to podcasts and reading books and talking to other therapists and learning from what they did. I joined a bunch of Facebook groups for therapists in private practice, and that’s been really useful. I could learn from whatever questions that people are asking in these forums. So I’ve had to figure it out a lot on my own.

Do you think there are any misconceptions about your field?

I think in my head, I thought when I went to grad school, I thought that I would graduate and get to go out into the world and get a job where I sat in an office and people showed up for therapy sessions. Like a traditional idea of going to therapy. And really a lot of the initial jobs for people right out of grad school are not that. A lot of it, a lot of the jobs available right when you graduate grad school are working for things like psychiatric hospitals or community centers. Places like that where you’re not quite just sitting one on one or getting deep into someone’s issues, you’re really kind of helping people a lot of times in crisis or trying to help people with very chronic and severe mental illness. So that was an eye-opening experience for me; I had this idea that I would sort of be in a private practice type setting where just people are showing up and coming to therapy. The jobs that were available to me were these—a little bit more, I would say—high-stress jobs, where you are dealing with some pretty intense situations. Which I’m grateful for, I really am glad I had that experience, but it’s sort of a little bit of having to work your way up to that idea I had of someone just showing up to your office for counseling.

How did grad school prepare you?

I went to a two-year graduate school program. Some programs are longer, some are three-year programs, or if you’re a psychologist there are longer programs. I did two practicums where I actually worked as a counselor under some supervision. So you do have the opportunity in grad school to start being a therapist, and then after grad school you’re classified as a licensed professional counselor intern, which means if you practice therapy you have to be seeing a supervisor weekly, to make sure you know you are practicing ethically and there aren’t any situations that come up that are outside of your confidence level. That was a huge learning process. It’s just a lot to learn to become a therapist. If you think about it there are so many different reasons people go to therapy so there’s a lot to learn in terms of all the different things people might need to see a therapist for, and then there’s all the techniques and modalities and ways you can help people so there’s a lot to learn and a lot of it is—grad school I felt like I got all the foundation and all the background, but the practicing therapy a lot of it you learn as you do it. You just kind of have to get out there and sometimes muddle your way through it and talk a lot with your supervisor when you get stuck and eventually you get better.

Have you ever experienced therapist burnout?

It is inevitable. I’d say that probably most therapists experience burnout at some point. Just the nature of hearing people’s stories all day, hearing—just encountering people who are suffering over time, that is going to wear you down a bit.

Do you have your own self-care tool kit?

I think a lot of self-care should be preventative, that it should be part of your daily life. So I try to do a lot of that kind of thing, making sure I have good routine and I have some healthy habits in place. Also when I am feeling that burnout coming on, I have a close friend that I sometimes talk to. She is a social worker so she has a similar career and understands, so that sometimes helps. Just talking to somebody. Sometimes just not over-scheduling myself. Making sure that if it’s been a rough couple of days, maybe just having a day where I don’t have a lot on my plate, and I can just chill out. I think that’s really important for people in a mental health career to have the ability—when you do notice the burnout—to have the ability to scale back a bit.

In your type of work, you’re one-on-one with a patient, there’s not a lot of technology involved. Do you think it could be shaped by further innovations of technology?

Yes, that’s something I’m interested in for my private practice. I’m hoping to offer video sessions; it’s something I think is really useful in the mental health field. I can think of so many scenarios where someone might be not able to come to counseling. If you even think about for mental health reasons, maybe they have some anxiety that makes it difficult to leave the house, to be able to have a video session allows them to experience therapy that they really need, in a way that, in the past, they wouldn’t have had access to. So I think that using technology is really great for the mental health field. It’s something I plan on offering in my private practice. I do think it has to be used with caution, because it’s such a new thing, there haven’t been—maybe our ethics guidelines are trying to catch up. Trying to decide what are the ethical parameters of using technologies. It is sometimes a little bit scary to venture into this territory where we haven’t thought through all the consequences of using technology. Personally I ultimately think it’s useful and brings more access to more counseling to more people. I see people a lot of times in crisis because they have let things accumulate and haven’t sought help. I see the importance of making more people aware of the usefulness of getting mental health treatment and making it more accessible to more people so that’s what I think technology can really be useful for. Some people may have privacy concerns, they don’t want to be seen walking into a counseling center, and doing a video session or even like a texting session might be something that feels a little more private and makes them feel a little more comfortable reaching out to somebody and talking to somebody.

Any advice you’d give to students interested in the field?

I would say one thing I wish I did when I was thinking about getting into the field and thinking about going to grad school for counseling, I wish I had actually gone in and interviewed a counselor or maybe interviewed a couple of different people in different mental health fields. Just to get a better picture of what is their day-to-day actually like, what do they love about their career, what mistakes did they make that I could maybe learn from, things like that, talking to somebody who is doing the work is actually very useful.

I think we all get a little nervous when we’re reaching out to somebody we don’t know, and asking them for something, but in my experience people have always been really happy to talk to me. So there’s no harm in asking, so I would encourage people to do that, to, you know, look someone up who has a career that you want and kind of talk to them and kind of see what their experience has been like. That would be my recommendation.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)