Why I Want To Become A Trauma Counselor

When asked why I want to become a counselor, or specifically a trauma counselor, I always focus on my upbringing. I come from nothing; my family struggled to pay bills month after month and often unable to pay them, stress began to build in my household which led to high levels of trauma exposure. As I was growing up, I saw addiction swallow my family whole. As my mother’s alcoholism took over our family, my father started experimenting with drugs, which in turn, made him violent. The abuse started verbally and psychologically, but soon progressed to bruises covering my mother’s skin. This ended years later when my mother refused to take it anymore and begged my brother and I to call the police. After this episode, my mother quit drinking
When you are a homeless kid, people look at you differently. At this point in time my school knew the financial difficulties my family had, but questioned if anything harmful was going on. I would be questioned on a weekly basis as to if my family was a “safe environment”. My biggest fear was being taken away from my family, so I lied as best as I could to my teachers and lost them as a support system as well. No longer feeling comfortable at school, I soon took refuge in my brother, clinging to him with all belief that if my parents (or any adult) could not take care of us, at least we had each other. To me, he was the hero my parents could not be, but it was not long until he would also succumb to drugs use. At this point I felt like I had lost everything, but I swore to myself I would never follow my family’s footsteps, I became my own support system, the caretaker of my family, and a parentified
I always had pushed myself to be “the person I needed when I was younger” but I decided maybe if I could get into the right field, I could change the world for a child, or teenager, or adult that felt like their world was no longer worth living for, or perhaps their world was full of too many struggles and too much pain, maybe I could change that person’s world. I decided to follow the field of counseling because I want to be there for someone else this time of need, for a kid/teenager/adult much like myself who never felt like they would catch a break. I want to be their support system. This may not be “changing the world”, but after completing most of my undergraduate degree in psychology I have learned there is much more going on in a person’s brain than just the physical world around us, so maybe if I could help, through therapy, to change someone’s perception of their world, maybe that is