Originally Posted by EndGameNYC

I was never an "insider" when I was in graduate school. I took my first externship off-campus, in a residential treatment program in the South Bronx, rather than work in the on-campus clinic. This raised a few eyebrows among the faculty. I wanted something different than what I was learning at the university, and that's what I got. Without knowing it until it became obvious to me, I also brought a different perspective to the program that some students seemed to either envy or take offense to. Or maybe they just thought I was crazy. Though I never sprinted through those halls of learning waving high my banner of individuality, not even knowing that I had a banner to wave, the differences, at times, created a great deal of superficial competition that wasn't always pretty. Psychologists-in-training were supposed to act and think in certain ways, but I never got the rule book.

(This also may help to explain your coworkers' sour response to you, and perhaps with other people in your life. We're often too quick to take the "blame" for there being something wrong with us when in fact, we're provoking some problematic feelings in other people by daring to be who we are. Envy is often about wanting something for ourselves, wanting success, wanting something -- or feeling that we deserve that something -- that other people have without making the necessary sacrifices and putting in all the hard work to get there. We don't appreciate their struggles, so we trivialize their accomplishments. Better and easier to demonize those we envy than accept the fact that we do little or nothing to improve ourselves.)

In opposition to this, many of my professors, some of whom became voluntary mentors, appreciated my individuality and my willingness to take risks. We are, after all, talking about work that involves helping people who are often in extreme distress, or who find themselves completely lost in life, most of whom are otherwise successful in life by most objective measures. It's not about giving people tools or advice around avoiding or shedding pain; it's about introducing people to themselves so that they may learn acceptance and bring themselves to a better place in which to succeed as human beings. And the work is also painful. So I learned early on that "going by the book" was the worst thing I could possibly do.

A graduate faculty in itself does not necessarily have to be experienced as oppressive or stifling. Cannot on its own extinguish the flames of creativity, and doesn't necessarily force us into a certain predetermined mold that discourages individuality. I found that when I'm learning and working within a given structure or discipline, it is then that my interests, skills and capabilities present themselves to me in a very real way. I mean, we can't often just practice what we love to do on our own, and without a realistic point of reference. This is perhaps similar to the way that you need a certain amount of structure in which to write or otherwise create.