Posted Sept. 26, 2023, 10:54 p.m. by Civilian Eddie Caldwell (Media Personality Journalist) (Sage Pennington)
Posted by Captain Eela Dasca (Lt. Governor) in Live from the Government Tower
Posted by Civilian Eddie Caldwell (Media Personality Journalist) in Live from the Government Tower
Posted by Captain Eela Dasca (Lt. Governor) in Live from the Government Tower
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻(snip)
“Did you come to benefit from mental healthcare before or after joining the field yourself? I’m curious because there’s a way people who share a line of work speak that’s different from how they might speak to others.” Eddie asked.
“Oh, during and after for sure,” Dasca said without missing a beat. “I joined Starfleet at seventeen and pursued psychology right away. Both my undergraduate and Masters degrees are granted through Starfleet Medical. When we’re in training, every mental health professional has to go through their own counselling to help them understand how they think, their biases and dig at any issues that might later be triggered by a patient’s issues. Awareness is key. The more aware you are of something, the more you can take steps to ensure it doesn’t interfere with how you work with a patient. But for me, I needed help after a really stressful and difficult time. I was going through a lot and not coping, nor did anyone expect me to be able to shrug it off and carry on. But at the time I was the head counsellor for our ship, so I had support from other therapists, including my assistant counsellor. And there is indeed a difference in how we communicate with each other in sessions. We re trained to dig deep, to be able to identify things clearly. That doesn’t make it easier, and it doesn’t mean we won’t be avoidant of difficult things, but I grew up with a scientist mother and a herbalist father. Being curious and digging deep were a part of my upbringing, so at least for me personally I’ve always been very self-aware, even if I can still be a difficult patient. The difference is I know I’m being difficult,” she said with a throaty chuckle. “But sometimes that’s just where you are at and that’s okay. We’re all allowed to struggle, to have low moments, to just have days where you don’t want to do what you should for whatever reason. It’s a part of being alive in a universe that is complicated and rarely straight-forward.”
~Eela Dasca, Lt. Gov.
He nodded thoughtfully. The Lieutenant Governor’s lengthy answers were solid gold. “Curiosity and deep digging have a lot of applications. Any particular reason you pursued Counseling?”
-Eddie
Eela allowed herself the time to think despite the quiet it would produce in the recording. She had actually asked that they not cut out the pauses because even though it might make for a faster listening experience, the pauses were authentically her and if she was going to show up truly as herself today then she wanted everyone to know what that was, not some fabricated version. “I mean, I’ve always been fascinated with the mind, but there wasn’t a point growing up where I thought, ‘ahhh, I want to be a therapist’. I did gravitate towards healing though. My father was a herbalist and I spent a lot of time in his shop watching and listening to his conversations with people. He was approaching things from a medicinal perspective, but his first inclination always seemed to be the internal world of the person he was talking to. What they were thinking, feeling. What was going on in their life. And then my mother was a forensic anthropologist. She was a very pragmatic woman but she paid close attention to the tiniest of details. She always said that people left clues about their life sometimes where and when they least expected to, but that those could be the most valuable. I think by the time I took a psychology class at Starfleet Academy, it was primed to want to explore the workings of the mind. I took that class and it just felt like an amalgamation of everything I had experienced growing up. When I talked to support staff about what path I wanted to take, psychology seemed a perfect fit. And I apparently was right since I got two degrees in it,” she said with a light laugh.
~Eela Dasca, Lt. Gov.
“It certainly sounds like you took to it like a duck to water. In all your time training and in practice, did you consider any other paths? I guess you must’ve considering you took on a command post.”
-Eddie
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