Throughout my career as a social worker I have worked with many interesting people. Some of the children that I have worked with have had to over come a tremendous amount of adversity in order to survive. I am always amazed at a couple of things. One, how cruel one human being can be to another and two, how resilient the human spirit is. Many of the stories can break your heart, but an equal number of them can give you faith in God and make your spirit soar.
Now that I have been in the field for several years I have decided to go back to school to get my doctorate. I am hoping that I can use my front line experience to help people in a therapeutic setting. One of the reasons that I have held back for so long from pursuing my degree is that I knew it would take time to complete the case study research that is required to obtain your PHD. I knew that I would not have the time to devote to this case study research when my children were little. I was not going to become one of those people whose children suffer while I am out saving someone else's. It can become a challenge to have the energy and patience to deal with your own children's issues when you spend the day dealing with children with behavior and mental health problems.
My employer has been gracious enough to allow me to complete some of my doctorate studies during my regular work time. As long as I obtained releases of information from the clients involved, I could use some of the cases that I was familiar with to complete my case study research. This turned out to be a wonderful thing for me because the research was easy. The interesting thing was that it because very healing for the two families that I did the case study research on. With each family I interviewed as many family members as I could find. I researched back into several generations to discover when child abuse and or mental health issues began. In both cases I found that the abuse went back as far back as I could go. I found one journal of the great great grandmother of one of the children I was working with who had been severely abused. The great great grandmother wrote about being hit with a switch and then locked into a closet for hours. Seeing the time lines of the pattern of abuse was added motivation for the young people that I was working with to put an end to the abuse and learn different ways of dealing with anger.
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