Nancy Brown talks about treating pregnant teens, depressed adults as social worker
Associate professor Nancy Brown of the College of Social Work addressed an intimate audience in the Gressette Room of Harper College Wednesday night, discussing her paths to success as a counselor and therapist, as well as a friend and mother.
Brown said she is prone to fantasy, imagining conversations to ameliorate all the world’s issues, from Kim Jong Un’s Napolean complex to Lindsay Lohan’s fall from childhood grace.
She arrived at her clinical successes, she says, by being an active listener in other’s lives and by constructing her personal reality in a positive way. According to Brown, the key to helping people is by avoiding having expectations and by trying to understand the person’s reality.
While everyone constructs their own personal reality in their heads, Brown said she believes that it is important to “construct a reality that you can work with.”
Growing up with parents who did not graduate college, she had her first “paradigm shift” when she was 22, feeling out of place at a party for musicians from the Juilliard School. There, she had a conversation with a woman who told her she was lucky to have such a different experience, for she could compare those experiences and the ones she is soon to make.
“That meant that it wasn’t my actual background that mattered, but how I interpreted it,” Brown said.
From there to a stint correcting papers of doctoral students while getting her undergraduate degree, Brown worked with many different cases. She’s served as a counselor at a hospital, a psychotherapist for pregnant teenagers and addicts and as a family therapist. Brown said constructivism and post-modernism have been revelatory in her understanding of how humans construct their own realities and their own separate truths.
“The brain, like the eye, has a blind spot,” Brown said.
It is this blind spot that the brain automatically fills in, keeping one safe in their own thoughts and their own ideas of their self. To initiate change, one must evaluate oneself in a different way and construct a new meaning from their experiences.
In trying to help others, Brown said she follows the same guidelines.
She said it is paradoxical, but to help someone more one must free oneself of expectations and not try to help them.
“When we believe something is possible, we live the life to achieve it,” Brown said.
To understand others, a person must remove themselves from what they think they know, and they must understand that they are not the expert on anyone but themselves, she said.
In her own work, with clients ranging from pregnant adolescents to depressed physicists to abusive mothers, Brown said she has employed some alternative methods of therapy, at one point “scheduling” a time of day for someone to be depressed so that they could get through their work day.
Brown concluded her lecture with pulling out a mock Oscar, “thanking the Academy” for her opportunity to speak and thanking the audience for listening. For someone who has seen so much pain, Brown’s comical spiel echoed her own advice: one must find the silver lining in any situation.