Welcome to Headroom, where we discuss all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm your host, Jim Owens, a licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College. While this podcast does not constitute psychotherapy, it does introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life. So let's get into the Headroom today and let me introduce you to one of our mental health counselors on campus, Curlada Eure-Harris. Welcome.

Thank you, Jim. Glad to be here.

Thanks for joining. And so let the listeners know a little bit about you. Who are you? How do you describe yourself to people when you introduce yourself?

Well, I like my name now, and I help people remember it by saying curla. Da da da da. Oh, yeah, it's like curl, like the curl in your hair and la da da da da, like the song in your voice, in your voice.

Have you met anyone else with your name before?

You know, I did meet a student a few years ago who said he had a grandmother in Puerto Rico who had my exact name, and it was spelled exactly the same, but she was no longer alive. And I thought that was really odd because my father made up my name to be part of his name, Kurt, part of my mother's name, Admiral, and L in the middle for love. So that was a real phenomenon. But for a long time, people would call me other names. And finally, LCC hired a business profess with a name people used to call me, and I had to go meet her. And I said, you're the one they've been looking for.

Okay, so it is a unique name. And that L for love in the middle. I can't help but think there's some kind of connection there to you being a counselor.

You're right. I hadn't thought about that. Thank you. Because one of the gifts I used to say that I have is what was given to me by my parents more than anything else was unconditional love and acceptance. And I grew up in a world where my peers accepted me, accepted me, but their parents didn't. So I couldn't come to their homes. And I became very popular at school, kindergarten through 12th grade. But as I went forward and my parents said, well, we don't have money and we don't have resources. They did have resources because they had connections. But I said, well, I want to grow love and I want to learn more about unconditional love. And that's a lifelong learning process, because the more you think you have, the more there is to learn.

Yeah, well, it's apt that you've been a counselor at a college for however many. I don't know if you want to share how long you've been.

Over 30 years.

Yeah. And part of your job has been to help yourself learn more about unconditional love, but to spread that as well, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, I always. My main desire is for people to feel validated in their own existence and to search themselves for their value and to unapologetically pursue the development of their value to humanity and to themselves and to their family. And it kind of fits in with LCC's mission to be able to not only get quality education, but to develop personal skills so that you can take care of your family and yourself and your society and as a global citizen. So OCC wants people to develop themselves and value themselves and contribute themselves.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

How do you see your role as a mental health counselor here for three decades? You could have chosen to do a lot of other things in those 30 years, but you've decided to stay here and keep working at this.

Yeah, I did.

What's the drive?

What's been, you know, I was a multilingual multimedia Spanish German instructor on the east coast and they didn't have enough full time positions. And my father had continued to say, keep going to college, keep going to college. And every time I did some college, I said, well, I want to apply that to the marketplace and see what I can do with it. So finally, when those jobs weren't available, I accidentally ran into a counselor and I said, well, what is that? What do you do? And they were saying they support good educational experiences for students and teachers. I said, wow, I'm still young enough to become that. And I tried to combine it with multimedia and I found this work. And after six months in the field, I said, I have enough satisfaction to last a lifetime, but I don't want this to be the lifetime. And so you never know because when I was in studying for it, I said to one professor, I'm not sure I'm in the right field because I'm not really comfortable with the things I'm learning. And so do I need to be comfortable to be a counselor? And the professor said, no, otherwise I would have gotten out of it right away.

What was it that was uncomfortable in that learning?

Well, listening, paying attention to people's feelings? Number one, I was a thinker and I listened to people's thoughts. That was the main thing. And I just felt I did all the raw shaw and the testing and all of that and the analysis and that Wasn't a problem, but I think it was mainly just learning how to face to face with people and listen and grab at the important stuff and support people to go where they need to go.

Got it. That's interesting.

And I said it would take me 10 years to apply empathy to my work, and it did. To really feel comfortable with empathy growing

into your feeling capabilities, you could foresee that that was going to be a skill set you didn't really have at the outset. It was uncomfortable to have to work through it. But you said, I can see that I can work at this and I'll have it.

Yeah. Because, you know, counselors are all different types. I mean, you have some counselors that are really great with technology, and that's their strong suit. Some counselors are really heavy with empathy, and that's their strong suit. And we have all different kinds of therapy theories. So it'll take. You know, a counselor can find themselves in the field by picking up a theory that's more like their personality and then grow from there. And I believe in lifelong learning, so I never rest on my past knowledge. And when I'm in front of a client, I basically say, okay, I'm gonna allow the client to guide me to where I need to go and how I need to be with the basic skills of empathy, support, confidentiality, and emotional safety.

Yeah. Wow. What a journey for you to push yourself through a program like that. It must have been challenging. But as you were sharing, I'm curious about. You made a comment in there, and this is what counselors do. We listen for little things. And this is one I heard you said you made the assessment, I'm young enough to do this. You don't have to say what your age was at the time you made that decision. But do you think a lot of students at LCC and elsewhere do that calculation in their head? Am I young enough to go back to college, or am I young enough to do this?

Well, it's a good question. You know, I guess if I found that I was trucking around for a long time and not finding a niche, you know, I don't know why I said it that way, but, you know, that was then and this is now. And I have a younger daughter who says, this is whoever's living. This is your generation. It just so happens some of us come from some other additional generations, but we still have to utilize the tools today. And the tools today are very different than when I started out. Today it's jobs change and careers change, and you can be almost Like a Renaissance person. So you can be very diverse, and it's not one credential or another or one skill or another. I mean, you can come up with a creative combination of who you're going to be and how you're going to do it. So many open it so many ways to be okay.

I mean, obviously, if we go way back in human history, we have the idea that you inherit the family business or whatever, you're going to be a farmer because your family was farmers or something. But now we have, well, you can go into a specialized career and you can have a second career. We call that an encore career. You know, people do a whole 25 or 30 years in a profession and then switch completely. And that's one of the unique things about lcc. I know we have students here who are doing an encore career. I've counseled them. I know you have people who've come and said, for example, I've had students who were really successful in business and in financial success in their career, and they came back to school because they wanted to now become a paramedic or a nurse or something, or counselors, something a little bit more in the helping profession. Have you seen that?

Yeah, it's not about age anymore. It's about, are you alive? And is there something you also want to aspire to? And I know I get to this issue with a lot of students who talk about their parents, and especially when students are saying, well, my parents want me to be this or that or they want me to figure out what I'm going to be. And I'm saying, if you feel too pressured, your parents are still alive. They can still do the things that they aspire to do. You don't have to feel obligated to do what they still want done. So, I mean, that's today, anybody's young enough. Especially since neurology has said there is no ending point for what it is you can grasp or learn. They used to say, oh, well, it's too late. And then they expose someone to something, and all of a sudden they see these neurons light up and they're like, where did that come from? And it looks like the body's capable of grasping, learning, picking up and developing whatever it is that's in front of them.

So, yeah, did you. You probably learned. And we're slightly different in age, but you probably learned in psychology classes. They probably told you. The thing they told me, which was, the brain is done growing at around early 20s. That is such an old farce. That is not True. Your brain is myelinating up through your mid-20s, which means it's getting that fatty surrounding on the neurons, the cells which helps the electrochemical signaling happen quicker. That's true as a teenager, your brain isn't myelinated, it doesn't move as fast. When you're a young adult, it's moving faster. But you have long term potentiation, you have neuroplasticity both functionally and structurally your whole life. You can keep learning the whole time outside of brain disease, but outside of that you're learning.

Yeah. And that neuroplasticity is talking about you can adjust, you can change. Now we do not change because somebody wants us to. And if we are going to make changes, it's got to be deep within side our own raison d'. Etre. You know, we've got to personally be motivated and desired with no other alternative. And we can't be changed and we don't usually succeed. Well, if we're changing too many things at the same time. So if we get focused on something that we really desire to be about, we can get there inside ourselves. Not because of any, you know, but push people. Can't push people there. So, you know, there's still in relationships that, you know, that issue of I'm going to make them be like I want them to be or, you know, and that's still a fail. Fail the initiative.

That's not a grand idea.

I mean today there's more motivation to learn how to accept oneself. The parts you like, the parts you don't like, the parts that used to work in the past but don't work today. And the fact that you may have to learn, you know, add some new parts that you didn't know anything about which is, could be emotionally painful and discomforting.

But there's some level of discomfort we need to get comfortable with. Right.

There's at least accepting of. Accepting of accept discomfort and say that's not. I'm not gonna make that the biggest deal.

Yeah.

It just comes with the territory of being human.

Yeah. We'll get into some, maybe more concepts for specifically about mental health and well being. But one of them that strikes me now is when you were in your graduate program, you had to become accepting of being uncomfortable. I have a little motto in my house. We have a bunch of mottos written down on the wall. And one of them is get comfortable being uncomfortable. But what it really means is just get used to that. That's going to be part of your experience in life. And you need to Pursue what you're passionate about, even if it's distressing. Now there is a point at which something is so distressing you become incapable of moving forward or something like that. And you have to reassess and maybe start in a different direction or get some more resources.

And that's okay, right? That's okay. Yeah, I really, I used to say the foundation of my work was being holistic. You know, the classic spirit, mind, body that you have your brain, your understanding, your logic, you have your physical being and what you're capable of doing. And then you have that woo woo territory, that intangible, intuitive, instinctive territory, instinctual territory that people call spiritual. And it's not really connected to religion or anything like that. It's just connected to the fact that I could get ready to walk down the hallway and say, gosh, I think I need to take a pencil, but I won't need a pencil. And when I get down the hallway someone asks me, do you have a pencil? And I'm like, how did I know that? I didn't intellectually know that. Something about my energy force field, my spirit knew that before I got there. You can call it whatever you want. Just like how could a 95 pound woman lift a 2 ton truck off of her son, right? She would say I don't have the power, the muscles to do that. But adrenaline would just shoot up and all of a sudden she's doing something that she physically is incapable of doing. So those things, that's that territory. So I used to say that's the world. Then I, in 2003, after 15 years of research, I love to tell the story how I went to the Science and Museum or the science of industry. The museum, I'm sorry, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago more than once. And in 2003 they had an exhibit, what was to be a permanent exhibit of the outcome of this research called the Human Genome Project. And I used to go on the Smithsonian Institute website and they would talk about it and you could just look up human genome and you would find what it said and it said that they checked our, they were trying to find out how many human being species there were and what was similar or different. They went back 3.5 million years through fossils and they said all we could find all across the world and all back in history that far was one human species. And that is the evolution of the same hooven species that exists today as Homo sapiens sapiens. And the reason why we say sapiens sapiens is because we're developing the frontal lobe more than the emotional brain. And so they said when they found this out, and they said, but they could never find any one of US that was 100% duplicate of the other, whether we were identical twins or fraternal twins or anything, brother, sister, mother, father. And so they said that each one of us was at least 99.99% or 99 cents out of a dollar exactly genetically the same, and that each of us was less than a penny uniquely different genetically. So I started using that in my counseling to validate us to say, aren't there times, Carlotta, when you are compelled or motivated or inspired to want to do something that you don't think you can do, that you don't think you understand, that you have no model for, but it keeps compelling you to give that a try. It's uncomfortable feeling because you're all alone. Nobody can say, you're right, you're wrong. And if you tell some people, if they don't know how to do it, which they probably won't, they won't encourage you. Well, that's what I bring to the table as my 100% unique self. And that's the place where I feel like I need to have courage. I feel like every one of us has our place of courage to become uniquely us.

It's kind of like leaning into the 1%, maybe leaning into that part of you that's individual validate that you are so unique. There has nothing, never been anyone like you. Your experience that you're having is unique. It's similar to other people's experiences, but it is totally novel. And you are at the vanguard of it. And you're going to discover what's one foot forward as you take that step.

Exactly.

It's kind of exciting.

Yes. I mean, you know, it can be freeing, you know, and really exciting and passion filled. And it does take our courage to be uncomfortable.

I was gonna say an anxiety filled. Because we like certainty. We like to know what's gonna happen. We like to see if it's already been tested.

Yes. That's why it requires courage.

However, we also like novelty. We also like someone's.

We don't like to be always predictable.

Yes.

And we like to, you know, be unique unto ourselves. We want people to say, yeah, you count Jim, you count Carlotta. We don't want to say, well, you don't count because everybody else does, but you don't. We don't want that.

I think we hear a lot, and I know I won't speak for You. But I bet you hear the same kind of stories I do of students saying when they get in our office, shut the door, and they'll say, I'm the only one struggling. I look around campus and everybody else is smiling. They get a backpack slung over their shoulder, and they're just looking forward into their future. And it's like, nah, they're hiding that. They're hiding their fear and anxiety. And we don't want to feel. Feel so different from everyone else for lots of. Probably lots of good reasons. We want to fit into our group. We want to be accepted in a group.

Exactly.

But we are never going to be the same. And part of our journey in life, I guess you'll say more about this is to encourage that. Right. To be brave and explore who you are.

Yeah. I mean, we want both, and we can have both. We can have the fit and we can have the set aside. I mean, don't we admire people who are celebrities or special people? And if you look around at the folks that are admired, they're not exactly the same as anybody else. You know, they may have the same profession, they may even go to the same designer, but they don't even, you know, do the same things exactly the same way. But we still admire them. Well, we can say we're just like that. You know, we can look in the mirror and say we're like that ourselves, and we just have to accept that. We don't want to accept it for ourselves, but we will accept it for others.

Yeah, I think it's partly like, if everybody else has already validated that when the person's a celebrity, well, they got millions of people who love how distinct they are. I remember my wife and I were just talking about Prince the musician the other day. We were listening to him, and I said to her, when he came on the radio, he was different. He was so. I mean, he dressed differently. His music was different. He was a phenomenal musician and songwriter and producer. He could do it all. And I just thought, man, the courage to do that. But he's been heralded as a musical genius and obviously wildly popular. But few people would have the courage to walk into school looking like Prince or writing music like Prince. Took some courage to do that. Once it gets validated from the outside, I think it's easier. And that's one of the jobs, I guess, of counselors. I know we do both. We tell people, hey, your experience is really common. It's okay that you're having it. It's been had before. Lots of People are having it now and then also the other side of that, which is validating. Well, this is your experience, and you didn't expect to have this in life. And maybe nobody else is having it exactly the way that you are. But let's. What are our options here? You're going to experience it.

Yeah. Because people don't like to hear, well, you know, you're having the same experience as everybody else. Because they'll say right away, oh, no, mine is different. And I want to tell my story about my way and my experience. And it's not exactly the same as my brother, my sister, my friend, my neighbor, that other student or whatever. You know, they'll say that if we were trying to claim the same. So you really hit a lot of numbers. But the catch is, even though we look at somebody and say, oh, wow, when they look in the mirror at themselves, do they say, oh, wow? You know, you hear about all of the lack of confidence that the people we admire have.

Yes.

And the challenges that they have. I mean, you know, they go through human experience just like the rest of us, no matter how validated they are.

Yeah, that's very true.

So validation doesn't erase the human experience from us.

No. For all the lauding that they can get, whether they're a musician, actor, whatever, celebrity, sports athlete, they still have to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and go, awesome. I get to be me again.

Exactly. And just like we do.

Yes.

And if they don't do it, you know, somebody's pumping them up to go there, or they use something, you know, to get the. I mean, they do. Hey, you know, so we're all human. And so when I talk about the fact that we are genetically the same more than anything out of another, well, that's because, you know, there is no human race. There's a human biological species.

Yeah.

I used to say race for the longest time. Like, I say, well, why don't you say, why don't you talk about the human race when they talk about all the others? I'm like, wait a moment. Then I said, no, no, no. I love biology. I loved it. I was an ace in the lab. And if I had known what to do with it back then, I would have been into biology. But this is close to it. I get as close to it as I can through counseling. So then I go to, well, what helps to explain the human experience beyond biology? And that's when I go to Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist. And in grad school, we don't study him much. He's never one of the main characters. Because they're basically wanting us to talk about experimental psychology and pathology and behavioral psychology. But Abraham Maslow went all over the world to validate that all cultural experiences have a common human experience. Motivation of needs.

Needs, basically.

And motivation, yeah, we all have the same basic biological and experiential, really holistic needs. Spirit, mind, body needs. And if we don't have those needs met, then we are motivated to focus time in there and meet it. And so I go back to the biology and talk about how in the first six years of life as a human being, we're connecting with our outer world after we've come out of the womb. And even while we're in the womb, we're actually connecting to what has been said, the father's emotional umbilical cord. That's why when folks are having babies, it's really interesting that not only do our brains capture all the wisdom of the world, even though it's not all conscious, but there's something about the energy, the life energy of the two parents and the cells that the two parents contributed that connect that baby to those parents, no matter where they are or not. And so while the mother's going through the physical umbilical experience, the father is going through the emotional umbilical experience. And so, you know, we, you know, the child's developing connections and eye hand coordinations and bonding and all of that. And the reality is that no parent ever 100% fulfill all of the needs of that offspring. And what I like to look at it as happening, as long as the developmental experience of that child is not so damaged that they say, lock me up and throw away the key because it's going to take me forever to socialize in this world. The child all of a sudden gets up to the point where maybe they're motivated in their life or their career or their avocations to make better or to address whatever was missing for them. So when people are trying to figure out careers, think about what more you wanted in life. That's one thing. But then every seven years our body rebuilds itself. And so we can go through that redevelopment, re change, reevaluation every seven years. So what are these basic needs that we have to have and that we're motivated to fulfill if we don't have them? Well, there's the biological needs of air, nutrients that we call food, water and human touch. And they used to report that babies in hospitals, when we usually 90 some percent of babies used to be born at home with midwives in their family space. And then when they started moving out of that into buildings, they used to put babies in cribs and babies started to die because they were never touched. And then they realized they had to pick them up and all of that and hold them. So we need human touch to live. So a hug every day is good. You can, even if you don't want to hug and touch the person, you can like wrap your arms around their energy, force field their life energy and just hug the space that they're around. And if you push, you're going to feel, you know, they're going to feel something and that's their life energy. So you got that at the bottom. Then you want predictability. As we were saying, you know, like we. And predictability is considered safety and security. We want to have some things that we're grounded with. And the older we get, the more our brain is conditioned to form these file cabinets, I call them, they're actually theoretically called schemas. But the more we repeat something, the more it becomes automatic. And so the brain. So we get these predictabilities in these comfort zones and it doesn't matter whether we grew up and like them or not. They're going to be comfortable and we're going to tend to go back to what we're familiar with. And so that's why we can't make it. We don't usually succeed at making a lot of changes at once. We just have to learn to accept the comfort zones we have and then minimize those that aren't working for us and add more or maximize. Like be a continual learner.

Yeah.

And then we.

Let me jump in there.

Go ahead, please, because I'm jumping into.

That's fascinating. No, no, but we're unfortunately, we're out of time, but I want to segue that in. Thank you for coming on the show and I want to encourage people who are listening, if they want to continue this conversation with you, they can make an appointment to do that.

That's correct.

You are a mental health counselor at LCC and you will see students who are currently enrolled and they can go to our website to learn more LCC Edu Counseling and learn more about the biology and the basic human needs of mental health and well being.

That's correct.

So I appreciate you coming on and I encourage everyone one too. You know. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend.

Thank you.