Posted Sept. 28, 2023, 9:26 p.m. by Captain Eela Dasca (Lt. Governor) (Lindsay B)
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 Civilian Eddie Caldwell (Media Personality Journalist) in Live from the Government Tower
Posted by… suppressed (2) 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
“Hmmm, well, for the first ten years as a psychologist I really couldn’t have imagined doing anything else, but eventually I did make the decision to train for Command,” Eela said, almost with a sigh. She paused again briefly before continuing, gathering herself. After all, how did one summarize such a complicated situation? “It was my third assignment with Starfleet and my first one where I was the head counsellor. About six months in, I was in a senior staff meeting that had been rather contentious. I had been helping with some interdepartmental issues, and at the end was feeling pretty good about the work I was doing there. As an aside, you also have to keep in mind that these were still the days where not every ship had a counsellor as standard and I had felt like I needed to prove that they really did need me there. So, after the meeting, our captain asked me to stay back and we talk. He asked me if I had ever considered command. I hadn’t at all. In fact it surprised me completely and I had to ask him to explain why he thought I would be good at it. He said that in the six months I’d been on the ship it was clear that I had a great number of skills that I wasn’t really using to their full potential. That I was a great counsellor but that he had worked with many officers over the years and he knew I was capable of more.”
“I was flattered but wasn’t really sure what to make of it and I didn’t speak of it to anyone else. But our first officer who I had become dear friends with was over for dinner one night and he asked right there if I was considering it. Well, I hadn’t said anything to my then husband so it took him by surprise. Frankly, he wasn’t a fan of the idea and pointed out that the timing was terrible. He wasn’t wrong. I was pregnant and we already had a four-year old. Life was about to get even busier. He worked away at times, and so I’d be working and solo parenting two kids. So I set the idea aside and frankly didn’t give it further thought.”
“Fast forward another few months and I was quite pregnant and…” Eela paused and gathered herself. It still wasn’t something she spoke much of, but it was a critical piece of this story. “I get the news that the Borg destroyed the New Providence Colony on Jouret IV. The colony where my parents had moved to temporarily for my mother’s work. And…” She shook her had again. “It changed everything,” she said, unable to keep the emotion out of her voice. “We were very close, and it was devastating news.”
“We think it was the stress of grief while I was also juggling solo parenting. My spouse was away when the colony was destroyed and just barely made it back before I went into premature labour with my son. Our doctor tried to stop it, but he couldn’t and I gave birth quite early. It was… a terrifying time, because we didn’t know if he would make it. But he did great and after in time we got to leave Sickbay and bring him home to our quarters. But I was not the same woman I was before all this went down. Something shifted. I was knee deep in grief, and then after a couple more months was solo parenting again and struggling to function. I was diagnosed with postpartum depression soon after and I really was not okay.”
Eela took a moment to sip on her glass of water. “It wasn’t exactly a sudden decision, but I remember sitting in our quarters with my son sleeping on my lap and I was thinking about my parents when my captain’s suggestion came to mind. I went through all the reasons he said I should consider command, and all I could think of was how fleeting life can be, that we can so easily take it for granted. I did have to wait until things stabilized in my personal life a bit more, but when I was ready I went to my captain and said, ‘If not now, when? At what point in my life will it be okay? I’m never going to be less scared to take a step like this, so I might as well do it now’. But more than that, I wanted my children to know that these sorts of leaps are the ones most worth doing and that sometimes, despite imperfect timing, it’s exactly what we need.” She smiled and it seeped into her tone. “And sometimes you need a mentor to kick you in the rear and shake you out of your complacency.” There were layers to this whole story that Eela couldn’t convey in such a public forum, but she hoped that people could understand how monumental a shift this had been for her, and her family.
~Eela Dasca, Lt. Gov
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