“Thanks for the amazing and rewarding internship experience!”
Betty (far left) with her mentors and friends.
Working with the Richmond Public Health Mental Health Promotion and Counseling team last year provided me with a valuable opportunity to work with a great team and to support children, youth, and families with a variety of challenges, such as anxiety, parent-child relationship, and social difficulties.
I am currently working on my M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy through Trinity Western University, and was an intern with the Mental Health Promotion and Counseling (MHPC) team from January to December 2012. The MHPC team was gracious in taking me on as an intern. My thanks to Chak Au, Phoebe Tsang, Rosamond Chan, Mary Low, and Barbara Aronchick-Zachernuk. Special kudos to my direct supervisor Phoebe, a very knowledgeable and experienced child and family therapist.
From what I observed during my internship, I believe our generation is at the midst of a transition that families have never had to handle before. For the first time in human history, our generation faces the rapid development of technology and the transmission of an incredible amount of information. Our families, community, and society struggle to make and maintain connections in this new era, while being busy with work, school, and extracurricular activities. Connecting with each other becomes as easy as clicking a button but the art of maintaining close relationships can be more elusive and challenging than ever before.
As professionals, we work with families that include technology-savvy youth and less technology-savvy parents. Adding to the mix is the multicultural setting —often with families with members who have varying fluency in English. Children and parents may not understand each other due to language barriers. We also work with a wide variety of family compositions where members of the family may not live or interact with each other. In short, families have become more complex than even twenty years ago. In my internship with MHPC, I met many families that struggle to find a way to make sense and understand each other in this new environment, while facing the challenge of anxiety, ADHD, and other difficulties.
My internship with the MHPC team gave me a chance to serve the families in my community. I also received excellent supervision from Phoebe and support from the MHPC team. They taught me not only how to be a good therapist who works well with families but also how to be a person with a serving heart to support her community. I am in awe of the amount of work the MHPC team completed this past year—they helped and supported many families by providing child and family counseling to individual families, a winter/spring parenting workshop series, a summer parent-child relationship group, and a fall/winter mindfulness group for children with anxiety. I did not realize that such a small team can do so much work, and I can only imagine how many more families in Richmond can benefit from the team’s work should it grow.
As I end my internship, it is from the depth of my heart that I say “thank you” to the MHPC team. I want to thank them for supporting me to grow into a therapist with eyes that see the needs of my community, a heart that wants to support the families with those needs, and the skills that can help foster the actual changes. I would also like to say “thank you” to Richmond Public Health. Without your support of the MHPC team, I would not have been able to have such an amazing and rewarding internship experience. Through the MHPC team, I truly saw how VCH’s People First strategy is accomplished—the well being of the members of the families is of high importance and taken seriously, and the wellbeing of staff and interns is also carefully considered and addressed.