Dan Browning

Agency: Divorce Recovery (Our Family Services)

Term: Spring - 2004

I am doing my internship with Divorce Recovery, which is a program of The Family Counseling Agency. Divorce Recovery provides support groups for people who are going through the divorce process, and for their children. The groups provide education about the divorce process in addition to providing support.

My main function is to facilitate the adult support groups. One aspect of facilitation involves presenting mini-lectures about the week’s topic. Another role that a facilitator plays is to keep the conversation flowing and on topic. Facilitators encourage group participants to contact each other outside the group and establish their own support network. In addition to facilitating the support groups I work around the office where I answer phones, type, update records, etc.

I decided to do my internship in order to get more experience working in an office setting, and because it is a résumé enhancer. I decided on Divorce Recovery specifically because I plan to do grief counseling in the future. I have been working with grief surrounding death for a few years and I decided that learning about grief surrounding divorce would be a good idea. Another benefit to Divorce Recovery for me is that it gives me a chance to work with adults. Since I am an older student and have been divorced myself, I am able to work with the adult groups. Most student interns work with the children’s groups.

My first night at a Divorce Recovery group was with a Children of Divorce group. The families were all together in the same room for the first meeting. To illustrate how many divorces there are in Pima County, one of the facilitators had a trash bag full of straws. He dumped all the straws out of the bag and the young kids were excited with all the mess. The facilitator was very good with working with children. It was fun to see how excited the children got about something as simple as a pile of straws.

Seeing the straw demonstration further reinforced what I have seen from doing other volunteer work, that children are happy to have someone there for them. You don’t need to have a lot of experience. You don’t need to know everything. They don’t care if you are beautiful. They don’t ask you about your GPA. Just being there for them and giving them attention means a lot to them.

My advice for anyone considering doing an internship is to identify an issue you care about and find an agency that addresses the issue. If you have more than one issue I suggest thinking about where you might like to be in five years, or ten years. Consider your future academic plans. If you want to go to grad school, what would look good on your transcripts? Think about what age group you might want to work with. Consider what segment of the population you might want to work with. Consider whether you think you are emotionally ready to work with the people you think you want to work with.

Lastly I would say that you should be prepared to be disillusioned. The work world is very different than life at the University. There are lots of problems, but then you want to go into social work, right?

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