- Email: [email protected]
Never Turn Your Back on a Wave
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Behavior Therapy 43 (2012) 712 – 714
www.elsevier.com/locate/bt
Never Turn Your Back on a Wave Antonette Zeiss Department of Veterans Affairs
This article reviews the intersections of personal and professional life development for the author. She offers perspective on three important life lessons that have guided her in this rewarding life path. First, be responsible in fulfilling and seeking professional opportunities. Second, be nice—respectful, warm, collegial, collaborative; treat others with the respect you want to receive yourself. Finally, “Never turn your back on a wave”—face the challenges that life presents, forthrightly, with energy and enthusiasm, and enjoy a full and fulfilling career and personal life.
Keywords: women's issues; gender differences; women in VA health care
Life in Graduate School (and Before) I DID NOT FEEL significant difficulties as a female graduate student in the 1970s. I began graduate school in clinical psychology in 1972 at the University of Oregon (U of O). I attended as a married student; my husband, Robert Zeiss, was also in the class as a graduate student in clinical psychology. I was at the U of O until August 1976, when I left for an internship; both my husband and I did our internships at Louisiana State Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana, in 1976–1977. We completed writing our dissertations during the year and took orals on the same day in May 1977. We did it with an infant in arms—he held her while I did my orals; I held her during his. Yes, she was born during my internship (January 1977), and it all worked out fine. The internship site was extremely supportive, the pregnancy was easy, and she went on academic job talk travels with me as well as to the dissertation orals. Address correspondence to Antonette Zeiss, Ph.D., U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20420; e-mail: [email protected]. 0005-7894/43/712-714/$1.00/0
At the same time, the messages around me were ambiguous. There were no female faculty in clinical psychology at U of O, and women considered for positions were not hired. I perhaps did not feel this as strongly as I probably would have because I did have a wonderful female faculty member at Stanford University—Dr. Eleanor Maccoby, where I was an undergraduate and where I worked for 6 years after graduating, before beginning grad school. I did not know her personally at that time, but she was my first teacher for Intro Psych in 1963; she had recently adopted children and spoke openly of being part of a dual-career professional couple and of raising children. She presented a positive, optimistic picture of the importance and pleasure of combining marriage, child rearing, and a productive professional life. In later years, when I got to know her well, I found this was totally real and honest—she is an exceptional person, but as my first psychology model, she made it look like combining these roles was the most natural thing in the world. I am endlessly grateful that she was there and that I had the chance to learn from her—learn psychology, and learn abut living a full, rich life as a professional woman. I also had male mentors who were completely supportive of me and who were clear that they had positive expectations about my professional path. Dr. Walter Mischel was my faculty member for abnormal psychology at Stanford, and I started working with him on research projects during my sophomore year. While I stayed at Stanford after graduation, I worked for him and for Dr. Albert Bandura. At the U of O, my primary professor and dissertation advisor was Dr. Peter Lewinsohn. With all three of these men, I felt totally supported, respected, and challenged to do the best work I possibly could. I never had any messages from any of them suggesting that my career options would be limited by my gender. Rather, I felt that each had very high expectations of what they expected me to attempt and to accomplish.
advice for the future My classmates at U of O were equally supportive. The class size changed over the 4 years I spent there, but was always roughly half women. Men in the class were exceptional—Russ Glasgow, Ricardo Munoz, and Manuel Barrera among them, as well as my husband. The women were excellent also, including Liz Klonoff and Mary Ann Youngren, as well as Lynn Abramson briefly before she transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. We were a close class, and I felt mutual support and warmth from both men and women in the class.
Cultural Expectations in Early Career Despite all of that, I did find that our decision to have a child was a surprise to many classmates and faculty. I became pregnant in the spring of 1976, while applying for an internship and completing the collection of my dissertation data. No one was critical, but this decision was unusual at that time and I think many were uncertain what to think. Some women were wonderful—this seemed to them like a liberating decision. Others seemed unable to connect to the news, or they assumed I was stepping away from plans to have a career. That was not true; I fully expected to continue on the career path I would have pursued without a child, and my experience at Stanford watching Dr. Maccoby made that seem like a perfectly reasonable path to follow. I was 31 already (given the 6 years working in research at Stanford before starting grad school), and it seemed like time to have a baby. My husband was completely supportive and completely a coparent; I appreciate deeply how committed he was to our having a family and to supporting me in a way that was not completely typical then (or perhaps now). I have absolutely never regretted that decision and I am thrilled to see how many women come to ABCT with their young children, finding that completely compatible with setting out on an exciting career. I did not have a lot of experiences with being treated differently in my early career because of my gender. The experience that stands out was starting as a new faculty member at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1977 and finding that another woman who had been on the faculty before me had told the women graduate students that they could choose either to have a career or a personal life, with relationship and family. Obviously I presented a very different model—one of the reasons I chose to go to ASU was that they fit my job interview visit around time to breast-feed and take care of my daughter, and faculty had expressed enthusiasm about my having a daughter. I am sorry that there were women at that time who had not had the models, support, and encouragement I had. The
713
other faculty member was a good person and a psychologist, and she was perhaps closer to the prevailing culture of the time in the conclusion she had drawn about what was possible for her and other professional women. I am very glad that I was either oblivious to the messages or able to challenge them because of the support from my husband and mentors.
Balancing Motherhood and Career I think that motherhood helped me keep priorities in order. While our daughter was young, my husband and I made sure that we had time for each other as well as for her. I can tend toward letting work take over my life—I love my work and I can find myself drifting toward longer and longer days, more and more weekend work, and so on. Being a mother kept that at bay—I absolutely knew my daughter and our family was the top priority and the greatest joy of my life. While she was young, we took real vacations (mostly camping and visiting family), and we spent weekends doing fun things together. We ate together every night, we read to her every day, and we were involved with her day care settings and then school. As she grew, my time with her changed—hopefully appropriately to allow her more independence—but our priority to support a strong family never changed. In high school when she became very involved with horseback riding, I spent time almost every day driving her to the stable and preparing for riding events, and many weekends were spent at events (with her telling me what to do and despairing of how awkward I am around horses). I also worked hard throughout all this time and built a career that has brought me great satisfaction. I remember writing up my dissertation for publication, in those days before personal computers, holding her while she lay ill and feverish, sleeping against my shoulder. She came to work with me some weekends and read or played while I finished a task, and then we would go on to do something for her. I was not active in professional organizations until my daughter became a young teenager. I had joined AABT (now ABCT) and APA in grad school and joined other organizations as my interests matured (e.g., Gerontological Society of America), but I did not get involved in committees or run for office until my daughter was becoming independent. I don't know if this would have been different were I male. I know that many women decline opportunities to participate as committee chairs, or even members, and are reluctant to run for office even when enthusiastically invited. I have not seen this same reticence in male professionals. I wonder
714
zeiss
if perhaps women are more likely to feel concern about protecting time for family and nonwork interests than men are. If so, I don't think it is a bad thing—I actually find it admirable and I am glad to have worked hard to keep balance in my life. Now, with an adult daughter in her own career and family, including our much-loved grandson, I am again having to work on how to balance a very high-commitment professional role with keeping time for aging parents and to watch my grandson grow.
Mentoring and Networking I have spoken before about the advice I try to pass on to women students, in earlier parts of my career, and to colleagues, in my current role. This comes down to three lessons that perhaps also would work for men, but seem to resonate especially for women. All of these come from my mother—only one as explicit advice, but all as part of the approach to life she embodies and that I treasure even more as I grow older and hopefully wiser. All three are deceptively simple sounding, but living them is a continual challenge, and in my own life I see each as contributing enormously to my professional accomplishments. First, be responsible. That obviously means fulfilling any professional responsibility you accept, fully and effectively. More than that, it means looking for opportunities to take responsibility. Women can too easily step back, wait in the shadows to be invited, and miss out on chances to take leadership roles. Wherever you are professionally, there are tasks around you that need excellent attention and people who are eager for volunteers to join them on important tasks (and “joining” does not mean being told what to do). Step up to the plate—clearly, proactively, and enthusiastically, whenever there is an opportunity that fits your interests and skills, and fits with your personal priorities. Second, be nice. I have been criticized by some women who understand this to mean “be submissive.” I absolutely do not mean be submissive. To me, being nice means being respectful, warm, collegial, and collaborative. Treat others with the respect you want to receive yourself; I have found it to result in the reciprocity I want in almost all situations. This is completely interrelated with another great piece of advice: “Be the change you want to see in the world”
(Gandhi). Don't wait for the world to change and for women to have opportunities you dream of. Approach the world with warmth and collegiality and discover that in being what you hope others will be, you make that response more likely. Finally, the explicit advice from my mother, which was a concrete lesson every summer day we went to the beach: “Never turn your back on a wave.” She meant it concretely—if you try to run away from the wave because it looks big and scary, it will knock you down and roll you. Turn and dive into it, enjoy its power, and find your own power as you throw yourself into its challenging, potentially dangerous, but ultimately exciting onrush. This turns out to be exceptional advice for how to approach the world in general. I am very glad I threw myself into the wave of professional psychology and now into the many waves of trying to change mental health care delivery in the United States. I am also glad I threw myself into the wave of loving an exceptional man, who has supported me throughout an almost 40-year marriage, and loving my daughter and now her husband and son, who are the great joy of my life every day, even though I see them only every few months. I wish for all women a full and fulfilling career and personal life, and I believe it is fully possible and worth every effort it takes. Antonette Zeiss, Ph.D., is the chief of mental health of the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system. She was previously the deputy chief consultant in the Office of Mental Health Services, Department of Veterans Affairs. After working as a faculty member at Arizona State University and Stanford University, she has worked in VA since 1982, previously at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She moved to the deputy position in VA Central Office in 2005 and was appointed as the chief of mental health for the VA system in 2011. She is a Fellow of APA Divisions 12, 18, and 20, and Charter Member and Fellow of the American Psychological Society. She is former president of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy; Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology; and Section II (Clinical Geropsychology), APA Division 12. She is former chair of the APA Committee on Aging and a current member of the APA Board for Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest. She has received numerous awards, most recently, an APA Presidential Citation for her contributions to psychology and mental health.
R E C E I V E D : March 8, 2012 A C C E P T E D : March 8, 2012 Available online 16 March 2012
Behavior Therapy 43 (2012) 712 – 714
www.elsevier.com/locate/bt
Never Turn Your Back on a Wave Antonette Zeiss Department of Veterans Affairs
This article reviews the intersections of personal and professional life development for the author. She offers perspective on three important life lessons that have guided her in this rewarding life path. First, be responsible in fulfilling and seeking professional opportunities. Second, be nice—respectful, warm, collegial, collaborative; treat others with the respect you want to receive yourself. Finally, “Never turn your back on a wave”—face the challenges that life presents, forthrightly, with energy and enthusiasm, and enjoy a full and fulfilling career and personal life.
Keywords: women's issues; gender differences; women in VA health care
Life in Graduate School (and Before) I DID NOT FEEL significant difficulties as a female graduate student in the 1970s. I began graduate school in clinical psychology in 1972 at the University of Oregon (U of O). I attended as a married student; my husband, Robert Zeiss, was also in the class as a graduate student in clinical psychology. I was at the U of O until August 1976, when I left for an internship; both my husband and I did our internships at Louisiana State Hospital in Pineville, Louisiana, in 1976–1977. We completed writing our dissertations during the year and took orals on the same day in May 1977. We did it with an infant in arms—he held her while I did my orals; I held her during his. Yes, she was born during my internship (January 1977), and it all worked out fine. The internship site was extremely supportive, the pregnancy was easy, and she went on academic job talk travels with me as well as to the dissertation orals. Address correspondence to Antonette Zeiss, Ph.D., U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20420; e-mail: [email protected]. 0005-7894/43/712-714/$1.00/0
At the same time, the messages around me were ambiguous. There were no female faculty in clinical psychology at U of O, and women considered for positions were not hired. I perhaps did not feel this as strongly as I probably would have because I did have a wonderful female faculty member at Stanford University—Dr. Eleanor Maccoby, where I was an undergraduate and where I worked for 6 years after graduating, before beginning grad school. I did not know her personally at that time, but she was my first teacher for Intro Psych in 1963; she had recently adopted children and spoke openly of being part of a dual-career professional couple and of raising children. She presented a positive, optimistic picture of the importance and pleasure of combining marriage, child rearing, and a productive professional life. In later years, when I got to know her well, I found this was totally real and honest—she is an exceptional person, but as my first psychology model, she made it look like combining these roles was the most natural thing in the world. I am endlessly grateful that she was there and that I had the chance to learn from her—learn psychology, and learn abut living a full, rich life as a professional woman. I also had male mentors who were completely supportive of me and who were clear that they had positive expectations about my professional path. Dr. Walter Mischel was my faculty member for abnormal psychology at Stanford, and I started working with him on research projects during my sophomore year. While I stayed at Stanford after graduation, I worked for him and for Dr. Albert Bandura. At the U of O, my primary professor and dissertation advisor was Dr. Peter Lewinsohn. With all three of these men, I felt totally supported, respected, and challenged to do the best work I possibly could. I never had any messages from any of them suggesting that my career options would be limited by my gender. Rather, I felt that each had very high expectations of what they expected me to attempt and to accomplish.
advice for the future My classmates at U of O were equally supportive. The class size changed over the 4 years I spent there, but was always roughly half women. Men in the class were exceptional—Russ Glasgow, Ricardo Munoz, and Manuel Barrera among them, as well as my husband. The women were excellent also, including Liz Klonoff and Mary Ann Youngren, as well as Lynn Abramson briefly before she transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. We were a close class, and I felt mutual support and warmth from both men and women in the class.
Cultural Expectations in Early Career Despite all of that, I did find that our decision to have a child was a surprise to many classmates and faculty. I became pregnant in the spring of 1976, while applying for an internship and completing the collection of my dissertation data. No one was critical, but this decision was unusual at that time and I think many were uncertain what to think. Some women were wonderful—this seemed to them like a liberating decision. Others seemed unable to connect to the news, or they assumed I was stepping away from plans to have a career. That was not true; I fully expected to continue on the career path I would have pursued without a child, and my experience at Stanford watching Dr. Maccoby made that seem like a perfectly reasonable path to follow. I was 31 already (given the 6 years working in research at Stanford before starting grad school), and it seemed like time to have a baby. My husband was completely supportive and completely a coparent; I appreciate deeply how committed he was to our having a family and to supporting me in a way that was not completely typical then (or perhaps now). I have absolutely never regretted that decision and I am thrilled to see how many women come to ABCT with their young children, finding that completely compatible with setting out on an exciting career. I did not have a lot of experiences with being treated differently in my early career because of my gender. The experience that stands out was starting as a new faculty member at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1977 and finding that another woman who had been on the faculty before me had told the women graduate students that they could choose either to have a career or a personal life, with relationship and family. Obviously I presented a very different model—one of the reasons I chose to go to ASU was that they fit my job interview visit around time to breast-feed and take care of my daughter, and faculty had expressed enthusiasm about my having a daughter. I am sorry that there were women at that time who had not had the models, support, and encouragement I had. The
713
other faculty member was a good person and a psychologist, and she was perhaps closer to the prevailing culture of the time in the conclusion she had drawn about what was possible for her and other professional women. I am very glad that I was either oblivious to the messages or able to challenge them because of the support from my husband and mentors.
Balancing Motherhood and Career I think that motherhood helped me keep priorities in order. While our daughter was young, my husband and I made sure that we had time for each other as well as for her. I can tend toward letting work take over my life—I love my work and I can find myself drifting toward longer and longer days, more and more weekend work, and so on. Being a mother kept that at bay—I absolutely knew my daughter and our family was the top priority and the greatest joy of my life. While she was young, we took real vacations (mostly camping and visiting family), and we spent weekends doing fun things together. We ate together every night, we read to her every day, and we were involved with her day care settings and then school. As she grew, my time with her changed—hopefully appropriately to allow her more independence—but our priority to support a strong family never changed. In high school when she became very involved with horseback riding, I spent time almost every day driving her to the stable and preparing for riding events, and many weekends were spent at events (with her telling me what to do and despairing of how awkward I am around horses). I also worked hard throughout all this time and built a career that has brought me great satisfaction. I remember writing up my dissertation for publication, in those days before personal computers, holding her while she lay ill and feverish, sleeping against my shoulder. She came to work with me some weekends and read or played while I finished a task, and then we would go on to do something for her. I was not active in professional organizations until my daughter became a young teenager. I had joined AABT (now ABCT) and APA in grad school and joined other organizations as my interests matured (e.g., Gerontological Society of America), but I did not get involved in committees or run for office until my daughter was becoming independent. I don't know if this would have been different were I male. I know that many women decline opportunities to participate as committee chairs, or even members, and are reluctant to run for office even when enthusiastically invited. I have not seen this same reticence in male professionals. I wonder
714
zeiss
if perhaps women are more likely to feel concern about protecting time for family and nonwork interests than men are. If so, I don't think it is a bad thing—I actually find it admirable and I am glad to have worked hard to keep balance in my life. Now, with an adult daughter in her own career and family, including our much-loved grandson, I am again having to work on how to balance a very high-commitment professional role with keeping time for aging parents and to watch my grandson grow.
Mentoring and Networking I have spoken before about the advice I try to pass on to women students, in earlier parts of my career, and to colleagues, in my current role. This comes down to three lessons that perhaps also would work for men, but seem to resonate especially for women. All of these come from my mother—only one as explicit advice, but all as part of the approach to life she embodies and that I treasure even more as I grow older and hopefully wiser. All three are deceptively simple sounding, but living them is a continual challenge, and in my own life I see each as contributing enormously to my professional accomplishments. First, be responsible. That obviously means fulfilling any professional responsibility you accept, fully and effectively. More than that, it means looking for opportunities to take responsibility. Women can too easily step back, wait in the shadows to be invited, and miss out on chances to take leadership roles. Wherever you are professionally, there are tasks around you that need excellent attention and people who are eager for volunteers to join them on important tasks (and “joining” does not mean being told what to do). Step up to the plate—clearly, proactively, and enthusiastically, whenever there is an opportunity that fits your interests and skills, and fits with your personal priorities. Second, be nice. I have been criticized by some women who understand this to mean “be submissive.” I absolutely do not mean be submissive. To me, being nice means being respectful, warm, collegial, and collaborative. Treat others with the respect you want to receive yourself; I have found it to result in the reciprocity I want in almost all situations. This is completely interrelated with another great piece of advice: “Be the change you want to see in the world”
(Gandhi). Don't wait for the world to change and for women to have opportunities you dream of. Approach the world with warmth and collegiality and discover that in being what you hope others will be, you make that response more likely. Finally, the explicit advice from my mother, which was a concrete lesson every summer day we went to the beach: “Never turn your back on a wave.” She meant it concretely—if you try to run away from the wave because it looks big and scary, it will knock you down and roll you. Turn and dive into it, enjoy its power, and find your own power as you throw yourself into its challenging, potentially dangerous, but ultimately exciting onrush. This turns out to be exceptional advice for how to approach the world in general. I am very glad I threw myself into the wave of professional psychology and now into the many waves of trying to change mental health care delivery in the United States. I am also glad I threw myself into the wave of loving an exceptional man, who has supported me throughout an almost 40-year marriage, and loving my daughter and now her husband and son, who are the great joy of my life every day, even though I see them only every few months. I wish for all women a full and fulfilling career and personal life, and I believe it is fully possible and worth every effort it takes. Antonette Zeiss, Ph.D., is the chief of mental health of the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system. She was previously the deputy chief consultant in the Office of Mental Health Services, Department of Veterans Affairs. After working as a faculty member at Arizona State University and Stanford University, she has worked in VA since 1982, previously at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She moved to the deputy position in VA Central Office in 2005 and was appointed as the chief of mental health for the VA system in 2011. She is a Fellow of APA Divisions 12, 18, and 20, and Charter Member and Fellow of the American Psychological Society. She is former president of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy; Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology; and Section II (Clinical Geropsychology), APA Division 12. She is former chair of the APA Committee on Aging and a current member of the APA Board for Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest. She has received numerous awards, most recently, an APA Presidential Citation for her contributions to psychology and mental health.
R E C E I V E D : March 8, 2012 A C C E P T E D : March 8, 2012 Available online 16 March 2012