ACADEMIC AND

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

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cockerha@etsu.edu

VitaeCommentary

This section of the portfolio examines and reflects upon the professional experiences that have augmented my education to originate the conditions leading to my present level of professional capacity. I take great value in having worked within a variety of intensive therapeutic and educational environments that combined to provide significant insight and practice in helping people grow and learn. It’s quite an opportunity to have worked with some remarkable clientele as well as influential mentors and quite close colleagues. My attitude toward this kind of work has always been to learn as much as possible, to work with the most difficult people (so that the neurotic become easy!) and to provide the most enlightened kind of management. Being that they are therapeutic and educational, whenever possible I’ve been able to benefit from, or facilitate, situations where people experience a sense of mission and transformation, an atmosphere of caring and love, and freedom with responsibility. That, in itself, is an excellent preparation for this profession.

I remember the inspiration given by Dr. Richard Morgan at Mitchell College. I was considering majoring in biology, doing well in those courses, but I became fascinated with psychology. This was the early 70’s and the human potential movement was in full swing with a blossoming interest in humanistic psychology contrasted with the inexorable science of behaviorism whose dialectic engaged the rebellion of youthfulness. I became enamored with self-help psychology and avidly read any new offering with intense curiosity. Dr. Morgan held a class that was really an encounter group and I discovered group processes. My math teacher taught us how to meditate. A comparative religion course opened up worlds of possibilities in understanding the further reaches of human nature. I did gestalt therapy, primal therapy, logotherapy, and a major research project on Ruth Loevinger’s levels of ego development. I worked as a substitute teacher and participated in a volunteer project at the regional state psychiatric hospital. MC was a phenomenal educational experience that is a story in itself. Please see my reference to the Mitchell College experience.

Then I transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill, majoring in psychology and became completely enmeshed in the almost eclectic offerings of a national university. Taking the usual courses in abnormal psych, sensation and perception, educational psych, etc. I also became fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism and took all that UNC had to offer. There was a course in parapsychology that only accepted about 10 or so seniors and graduate students but I managed to convince the professor. It involved a major project and I was able to complete a field experience with Dr. JB Rhine who started the Parapsychology Dept at Duke University and then began his own institute, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Humans. He was attempting to design replicable experiments with animals that could demonstrate the existence of psychic phenomenon. It was a fascinating experience. Loisa Rhine, his wife, was also a major figure in the literature, having collected an enormous library of anecdotal information in her quest for personal accounts of psi. She spoke to our class, expressing horror that the man who wrote the movie, "The Exorcist", found this incident in the annals of her collection yet blew the incident way out of proportion and almost affected the collective psyche of a nation at one point in time. Chapel Hill is the most advanced little town…I learned Tai Chi, how to perform hypnotherapy, and encouraged a chicken egg to use psychokinesis for hatching, only later to learn that someone had tampered with the experiment. I tutored reading at a local elementary school and counseled my first suicidal person although I wish it could have been a friend in high school who committed it, near that same time.

Getting a job was not so easy. I started the ball rolling by taking the merit system test in Georgia which is required for most state jobs including mental health and human services. Meanwhile I went to visit my cousin in the foothills of NC and earned a little money working tobacco. This is definitely a racket. A few years later I was to rent a house that had a tobacco allotment. The landlord let me pay her 10 cents a pound and I got some farmer to grow the tobacco while I just footed the bills and we split the proceeds from the federal crop insurance. A drought was declared yet we had a pretty crop of tobacco. In America we put a portion of the population on welfare and a government controlled economy based on an addictive but legal drug with the highest death rate and put another portion in prison for addictions to other substances declared illegal. At any rate, the hours became long one hot summer day and we were sitting at an old country store near Mitchell River, down the road from Mountain Park, below the Blue Ridge Parkway. Suddenly we got the idea to start our own general services company and called it APB – the All Purpose Boys. We made brochures and passed them around town, getting a lot of work actually, at least thru the summer. We painted houses, cleared fields, buffed floors, washed windows at the town library among other tasks. It was many years before I got paid a salary as much as we were earning with APB. But I kept looking for something in my field and ran into a friend who lived in Boone and was the recreation director for the town of Blowing Rock. He got me a job as an Assistant Recreation Director. It was a temporary position that eventually lost its funding but I did receive a letter inviting application for a position as a mental health technician in a psychiatric hospital in NW Ga. I interviewed and got the job, moving to Rome, Ga, sister city to the namesake by virtue of having seven hills in the downtown area.

The experience at NWGa Regional Hospital was outstanding…with a few rough spots. My first day on the job I was given a task by the director. He assigned me to a unit working with an individual living in a dual diagnosis residential unit for persons who were mentally ill and cognitively challenged. This person would sleep all day and remain awake at night which interfered with his programming as well as other residents and especially staff (of course!). I was to keep him awake all day after staff fed him breakfast and had him out of his bedroom. I just tried to talk and kept nudging him. After a fairly short while, he just took his fist and punched me right in the nose. Luckily I was not seriously hurt but my first day on the job certainly got my attention. Actually though, I had an excellent supervisor, Mary Ann Norton, who was a social worker. My job was in the social work department…I had a caseload and worked with parents, spouses, and other relatives of patients but I also had responsibility as member of the interdisciplinary treatment team to conduct treatment with clientele in the hospital. I was so excited…I couldn’t believe I had a real job counseling people with problems upon whom I could have some, hopefully positive, effect. And my boss gave me almost complete autonomy to complete my work. I was ecstatic. I was used to jobs as a teenager where typically adult bosses treated one with disdain and usually absolute authority that was exercised at the slightest opportunity.

A major transformative moment came with the introduction to Marc Gold who had developed a highly efficient behavior modification system and literally performed miracles. He traveled to facilities for people with very serious difficulties in cognition and encouraged them to give him their "worst" so they would escort someone who had an immeasurably low IQ down to the front of the audience. He would then proceed to teach the individual how to put together a bicycle brake as fast as a staff member could figure out how and complete the task. I learned that intelligence was not a factor in learning behavior. If one examines the tenets of behaviorism, there is no mention of learning variance based on IQ. In fact, animals are routinely used to prove that the mechanisms of behaviorism are truly learning functions. Factors of physical disability, motivation, and cognition offer greater explanatory value than intelligence for differences in learning rates perceived in many activities of humans. Add this to the fact of Jimmy Carter getting elected president and Roslyn’s championing of mental health services when he was governor of Georgia before becoming President…the federal and state government poured lots of support so we had a full complement of disciplines represented. I became a psychologist and ran treatment teams that opened up the world to people with problems. We actively trained them to function at increasingly higher levels and developed community resources for them, places to live and work in the community. We de-institutionalized…where before people lived isolated lives locked into wards, we created a continuum of services placing people with problems into the least restrictive environments. We stopped over-medicating chemical restraints and were able to enforce medical prescriptions as a treatment team rather than simply at the mercy of that one specific discipline.

This was almost as part of a movement, a national initiative to upgrade mental health/mental retardation services. These two areas of disability can be conceptualized together even though their services eventually go in different directions. They did have concurrent movements that began in the same place, large centralized state institutions. This process continues today, even in Tennessee as evidenced by the Master Plan, a second wave of de-institutionalization initiated by the state of TN, as well as the federal court case that puts the state institutions for the mentally retarded under federal control. But overall, these series of initiatives constituted a systemic change in US mental health services and were instigated by the compassion of a liberal social awareness in addition to the science of psychology. The locus of service delivery evolved from centralization and the consequent isolation to community and normalization. There was a real sense of purpose and clarity of goal in teaching people how to reach their potential in the least restrictive setting, and conceived as lifelong learning in a developmental process of gaining additional skills for moving along this continuum of LRE.

My colleague, Marion Wingfield, encouraged me to attend State University of West Georgia, a regional state university located nearby, that had a Master’s degree program in Psychology. He helped me re-arrange my work schedule and we often commuted together to classes. The program at WGC was well-known in the field of humanistic psychology. For me, it was a perfect match. The program was highly experiential and, at that time, was emphatically existential-phenomenological. We focused on symbolic interactionism, still delving into the extremes (Fritjov Capra was a faculty member) but much more directed toward the creation of psychology as a human science, the counseling/consciousness realm of human experience. We bracketed and reflected while basing on a solid and traditional philosophical perspective. I interrelated much of my educational programming with activities at the psychiatric hospital. I also interacted in coursework with a group of managerial personnel in Atlanta receiving master’s degrees from WGC but from a division specially set up for people interested in organizational psychology, called Learning Lab. That inspired me to become a better manager since, as a team leader at the hospital, I directed a group of clinicians and staff. To learn that the most effective management inspired democratic, participatory leadership and organizational development could include human relations and personal growth experiences was astounding and served as a fundamental premise to back subsequent managerial situations.

And maybe that had something to do with leaving NWGRH…a person was promoted to managerial positions with whom I did not particularly like, not my direct supervisor but one who controlled activities of staff not under my direction but affecting my job. I had been there for several years…it was time to leave. I headed to North Carolina and became an instructor at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. I taught psychology courses but also consulted with a facility for people with cognitive challenges as well as operated a recreational program grant funded by the Association for Retarded Citizens for people in similar circumstances. Talk about a fun job…getting paid to recreate. We went dancing, bowling, played basketball, softball, football, shopped, camped, and went to the beach, a first for most. It was a blast! During my consultation, I worked closely with a friend of mine having similar interests in psychology. We spent time designing behaviorally oriented programs and would make the most remarkable progress teaching clients. I remember one young man who had lived at home all his life until he started becoming a serious management problem. This was before P.L. 94-142 and a number of parents kept their children at home since schools often refused to provide service. This young man had no verbal skills, few self-help skills…he couldn’t dress himself, feed himself, toilet himself, bathe, etc. He would pinch anyone who came near him and constantly made a repetitive, bleating sound that was particularly aggravating. My colleague, John, and I designed and implemented programs that helped this young man, within a year, go out to eat in restaurants with his parents (and peers) as well as sitting at job training earning money for his work, probably never verbalizing but living peaceably with friends and family and going to work with some recreation and continuing ed! Now, most of these services are provided in public school where a few professionals there disagree with inclusion, often misinterpret the law, and even lack the skills of behavioral training, allowing students to waste time repetitively attempting to mouth useless academic information when there is a universe of possible behavioral skills available to teach.

One weekend, I had gone to a cabin in the mountains and had grabbed a Sunday paper. Perusing the want ads, I saw a position at a community college in Western NC as a psych instructor, teaching classes but also coordinating an adult day activities program. I was able to get the job, always wanting to move to this part of the country. I enjoyed Charlotte but I prefer smaller towns and rural areas. I love the altitude, the views, the climate, the people…the Appalachians are wonderful. These small mountain communities can be difficult places to make a living, though, and back then it was even tougher. Jobs were scarce and at that time, the population had been growing less and less each decade even during the explosive world population as youth would mature and leave for better jobs in the piedmont and cities. But I had some great experiences there. The local mental health association was very active and we were able to get "Eve" of the book popular back then entitled, The Three Faces of Eve", to speak to our group. We also organized a mental health run as a fund raiser and had the entire community involved. We started a marketing association for persons with disabilities that united all the sheltered workshop facilities in the region for that essential element of their operations and also opened a crafts store and while participating in local craft and music festivals. I was asked to "give away" one of my students who was marrying and had no one fulfill the paternal role. I attended another wedding of another employee at the college held outside; afterwards, the bride and groom rode away on horses for a honeymoon in the mountains. I climbed some mountains and slipped down a few, too.

Partly the result of ending a bad relationship, I decided to move to Baltimore when my brother-in-law offered me a job paying a lot more money than I was accustomed. It was an exciting job, revitalizing a development company that had built most of the Catholic schools and churches over the years. A number of years ago, a church that they had recently built had a terrible accident when the roof caved in and people were seriously injured. It proved that the lumber was defective, not the construction, but the damage was done. After sufficient time the next generation was ready to invest and become more active. My major accomplishment was producing a real estate analysis of Baltimore County. But I also learned a lot of woodworking skills from my brother-in-law, Jim. They had a huge shop with all kinds of commercial grade tools and equipment. I found the hobby quite enjoyable and made all my Christmas presents as well as other items. However, Baltimore was really not my kind of place. I did live in the county, not the city but decided I preferred more southern climes, choosing to return to NC and purchase a business from the money saved while working in Baltimore. I had stayed a couple of years but just didn’t get very attached to the place, then took a vacation when I decided to stay in Mayberry…I mean, Mt. Airy, NC, a town claiming to be the model for the TV show.

Oftentimes, when I describe my professional history to others, I claim to have been a male stripper. This usually produces howls of disbelief until I explain that I used to operate a furniture refinishing business. The company sent trucks around the region to Charlotte and Greensboro/Winston-Salem to refinishing shops and remodeling projects, process the furniture or architecturals like doors, windows, stairs, etc., and return to the shops or projects. We had a warehouse full of antique doors and other items that were bought and sold. The business was a partnership and we decided to sell when made an offer. I was beginning to miss being in education/psychology so I got married and moved to Nashville, TN with plans to finish my graduate degree. Unfortunately, while we were on our honeymoon, the house burned down. It was a major tragedy although nobody was hurt. After cleaning up the mess, I decided to build a new one. I had always imagined maybe building a shop or garage or some sort of project like that but was able to choose at this point to devote the time and energy in constructing a house completely on my own. It was an extraordinary challenge. I made a lot of mistakes and had to learn a whole lot along the way but, in using this as an example from my life, I often insist upon taking advantage of every learning experience because you never know when something learned becomes quite useful.

I found a position teaching people how to build houses. It was considered a trade or proprietary school and located itself in one of the projects near downtown Nashville, a reputably dangerous area. The school was surrounded by a 20 ft fence and syringes or gun shells were often found at sites along the perimeter. The instructors there felt a real sense of mission and accomplishment in teaching skills to people who were used to hustling for a living. Most of my students were African-American yet the racial differences rarely interfered with relationships. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching there but this type of school came under attack because some schools in a few cities just recruited anybody to sign on the dotted line and required no attendance or work. There were very high loan default rates but my contention was…what do you expect? These persons are very low income. At least they, as a group, are paying a certain percentage for their services. Nevertheless, my semesters there were productive, enjoyable teaching encounters with a multicultural twist. I must admit that I didn’t really encounter another culture so much as a people with more color in their skin who watch the same TV I do, sit on couches and at tables that look like mine, and cook in similar pans…the similarities far, far outweighed the differences such that the small classes encouraged closer communication and the enjoyment of completing tasks together. But seeing the writing on the wall, I looked about and encountered some educational specialists who had received contracts to teach college courses to state prison inmates.

Educational Corporation of America had a number of operations ongoing, related primarily to organizational training/development and business colleges. Branell College in Nashville, owned by ECA, provided the curricula for several types of programs. In fact, Roy Nicks, former president of ETSU, was a principal in this company. I became an instructor at Nashville Community Service Center, a minimum security facility with inmates getting ready for release/parole or with short, nonviolent sentences. My apprehension vanished quickly and soon I begin to really enjoy teaching there. It’s actually a great place to teach. I never had a single behavior problem and if I did, I could have just called a guard. In prison, the predominant emotion is not fear (even in maximum security), it’s boredom. Going to school is an enormous privilege so generally the student-inmate is quite motivated. Most prisons have entire faculties of educators because there is a clear relationship between recidivism and educational level. Graduation ceremonies are major events with families in attendance and even refreshments. And faculty get a free lunch!

An important assignment was being selected to be on the Drug Task Force that was given responsibility to investigate drug crimes in this prison. I remember the new warden pounding his fist on the table and proclaiming he was going to do everything humanly possible to rid his prison of drugs. I was also at the meeting a year later when he threw his arms up saying he didn’t know what to do…in a totally controlled environment, it was impossible to eliminate drug use thru interdiction. I found it quite interesting that they didn’t try treatment and education. Another related experience at the prison was assisting Allen Murray, the Director of Counseling, in a research project on substance abuse treatment. He had developed a program using nutritional supplements and cranial-sacral therapy to treat substance abuse addiction. His concepts were very intriguing and were able to engender some results but he was a lone crier in the darkness of treatment options in prison. Our society panders to punishment in prison, not rehabilitation.

During this period of time, I became aware of a couple of wilderness programs recently started in the area and made a visit to Camp E-Sunalee, an outdoor therapeutic program run by the Jack and Ruth Eckerd Foundation. I enrolled as a volunteer, enjoying the experience so much that, when I saw a job opening at another program called Three Springs, I was hired as a family counselor and decided to leave the prison situation, pondering the possibility of getting to people before ending up there. This program accepted teenagers with emotional problems and used an outdoor environment to provide challenging experiences as well as intensive counseling opportunities. The experience was absolutely tremendous. We were able to transform youth with troubles into leaders ready to make much better decisions in life. There’s no better place to learn intensive counseling skills. I eventually became a unit director at the camp, responsible for hiring and supervising the counseling staff, social work department, maintenance and operations, working under the program administrator. Three Springs was founded by Mike Watson who got 7 kids and another counselor to go camping therapeutically and started a small, for-profit program in 1987, I believe. By 1992, he had become a millionaire, operating wilderness schools and treatment centers all over the Southeast. The company grew rapidly and continues to expand. I still have associations with many of these counselors and continue to admire their dedication to helping people with problems. Let me tell a few stories.

My first day on the job at 3Springs saw a family counseling session go for 14 hours. It was a major event with family members hurtling out frequently to the restroom with faces drenched in tears and heads shaking. Occasionally a counselor would break and furtively reveal progress to the director. Once the entire party trooped outside and met with a larger group of boys, discussing very emotional issues with shouts and anguished crying. I had stepped right into the middle of this; the youth was to become a member of my caseload. But I loved it! Being an avid hiker/backpacker, the act of counseling out of doors was environmentally enticing. Every nite, all across America, youth are sitting around a campfire engaged in intensive counseling. And at any given moment of the day, someone would call a huddle. At 3Springs, an impromptu group counseling session is termed a huddle and when the word is pointedly mouthed, a group of about 10-12 boys and 1-4 counselors form a circle to discuss whatever issue is evoked. A stick is used which is passed around giving permission to speak and this is facilitated by one of the youth usually. That’s another remarkable observation made about these types of programs…it was at first unbelievable to me that discipline was meted out by the youth rather than the staff. Now the counselors did have to approve what was eventually inflicted but I was certain the kids would not invoke serious punishment. Wrong! Give a group of teens a little power and they go all the way…Lord of the Flies has some validity here. But the antithesis must put faith in the eventual ability of human groups to operate in an adaptive and possibly moral manner. Most of the time the process worked extremely effectively in teaching or internalizing appropriate behavior. It’s magnificent to see how the us vs them attitude was de-emphasized, allowing counselors to work with youth rather than constantly having to assume the "guard" role. Many features of wilderness programs are quite beneficial for youth with certain types of problems.

In-service training for counselors and teachers was continually on-going and assertively comprehensive. Staff members were constantly being sent to conferences and workshops, not only for training purposes but also for marketing. Educating the public about wilderness programming was essential. And it pays to possess competent caring professionals in order to stay in business and grow. Wilderness programs remain a relatively recent treatment mode and operations depend upon referral from informed human service professionals and educational specialists. Program effectiveness and safety considerations were always of utmost concern. My experiences there were filled with such significant therapeutic quality. We were able to spend the time and utilize so many powerful techniques that one literally could know almost everything about a person. The closeness that can be obtained from facilitating this depth of relationship is remarkable and that can be often extended to family members as well depending upon their degree of expression. It’s quite a growth experience for staff, too. We would occasionally remark that we’re not sure if the kids were getting anything from this but we definitely were! The mentoring relationships between staff members were deep, demanding, and transformative…we easily worked 70 to 100 hours per week. I was being mentored for home office in Alabama and decided to work closer to my home near Nashville…the two hour commute to 3Springs was no fun and I didn’t want to move south.

YES, Youth Emergency Services is a non-profit, community agency that operates several educational and therapeutic programs for children and youth. Hired as executive director, it was an opportunity to have a direct impact on the overall character of a facility and reify my own direction in helping people with problems. The program initially was a group home facility which housed children and youth co-educationally on a diagnostic/evaluation basis. We had a contract with the state of Tennessee to provide short term residential and assessment services to those who were abused or troubled and facilitate return home, to foster care, or additional treatment. Let me tell you…it can be an exciting job…not only because of managing a houseful of teenagers from both sexes but also thanks to some people who don’t take lightly to interfering with their familial right to abuse or even molest. We were shot at, firebombed, threatened many times over the phone, and had to call the police on too many occasions! But most of the time, we had tremendous community support and the experience was very meaningful to the kids as well as the counselors. Many did not want to leave because of the caring and love demonstrated by a stable, competent staff. People in the community were constantly helping out by making donations. Free meals were weekly, especially holidays. Cracker Barrel had their home office in Lebanon with an officer on the YES board and kept us supplied, even used us for test marketing items! Fundraising was a necessity. We were a United Way agency but also did town dances, gospel sings, fair booths, road blocks, golf tournaments, casino nights, and raffles (yes, I know they’re illegal but not if the DA says it’s OK). I went on the circuit, speaking to groups to inform them of our services and take donations, thanks very much.

These kinds of community agencies really struggle to operate. State funds are very limited and communities can provide only so much assistance. I sought grants and managed to establish new programs that met some real needs. With state funding, we created a network of foster care homes throughout middle TN that meant securing and training foster parents and creating major support systems. We also were funded for a program termed family reunification services. Our counselors were referred youth exiting residential treatment programs such as wilderness programs, psychiatric facilities, or substance abuse counseling. We participated in discharge procedures and then became family counselors for over a year, supporting the individual as well as the caregivers as needed. Similar to family preservation, we budgeted a general time for each client and gave family support in communication skills, behavior management, access to community resources, and educational consultation as part of a wraparound or continuum of services. YES also received various grants that assisted in capital improvements and costs of operations. The programs expanded and were able to really help some people in need. But it was a constant struggle. In discussions with the executive director of the community mental health center in that area, we developed a plan to unite the two agencies. I was anticipating the cost savings from duplication of services as well as the excitement of working at a CMHC, a long time goal of mine. My board agreed to give the go-ahead so I became county director of a multicounty CMHC.

Talk about excitement! What a fast paced, always behind and running experience! There is too much need and not enough services…we generally could only fight fires in this, another situation where the general public in TN probably does not realize the difficulty imposed by poor state funding. But there was some good done too. Besides the basic service of clinical counseling, individual and group, several programs erupted from the CMHC. We operated a summer therapeutic program for kids who were already in regular counseling. A day program for those who were chronically mentally ill was held on the facilities and operated with a system of vans running throughout the county. A therapeutic day care program for children with diagnosed mental illnesses was conducted along with an interesting prevention program. We had two rooms, side by side and connected with a two way mirror. Parents with children having problems were in each room with each family observing the other for 30 minutes, alternating with facilitated discussions to give feedback and advice from the observations. Fascinating conversations! But perhaps the most exciting episodes occurred during crisis calls, the ones where police need a mental health professional to talk with someone going psychotic. The forensic cases can become like something from TV.

During this period of time, I became close associates with Krister Harnack who was a faculty member of Somerset College in Kentucky and just completing his doctorate in psychology at Vanderbilt University. We decided to begin our own wilderness program. Splitting his teaching load, I also became adjunct faculty with Volunteer State Community College, teaching child and developmental psychology as well as continuing ed courses in human relations for several area businesses. Krister had begun a mentoring program that matched students from the local public schools with college students at Somerset. We design a training program and wrote a monthly newsletter, receiving operational support from the college and the community. Unfortunately, a tragedy occurred…Krister was out hiking one day and had stopped to take his own picture at an overlook. He evidently fell off and was killed in the accident. He had been missing for several days when his car was found and authorities organized a search. The community was stunned and came out in significant support for his relatives and friends. I finished his courses and stayed on at the college until someone could be found to replace him. For myself, this tolled another major change.

Another colleague taught at East Tennessee State University and had won contracts with several school systems in the region to conduct psychological assessments. This entailed individual psychological examination and report writing based on referrals to consider intellectual, behavioral, and related cognitive characteristics for special educational purposes. Since he was also program coordinator of the Department of Human Development and Learning, he offered me the opportunity of a faculty position as well as referrals for private practice…and in the beloved Appalachian Mtns. My wife and I jumped at the opportunity and have been here every since, living in a cabin up on the side of a mountain with a grand view, crystal spring water, and a climate that needs no air conditioning. She teaches math for Science Hill High School and grows blueberries among other delicious items in our garden. We love it here!