Mentors and the Audacity to Claim Them

I've been talking with my clients lately about mentors, encouraging them to internalize those they admire. It's occurred to me that many people feel too diminished to claim a mentor and that they believe you have to have someone's permission to establish him/her as your mentor. My vote is that we claim them, leave them alone if this is appropriate, but learn from them and internalize them, use them for the rest of our lives.

Here is a partial list of mine and as usual I will return to fill out the list.

Vija Lusebrink

Vija is one of the founding practitioners and theorists of art therapy. I was fortunate enough to have her as 1 of my 3 teachers in graduate school (in a class of 13). She co-developed The Expressive Therapies Continuum with another teacher of mine, Sandra Kagin, in 1978.

Don Juan Matus who very humorously has been give a Facebook page for his quotable quotes!

Diane Topping

John Bradshaw

Christine Page

1986

I am remembering the Challenger Disaster. I was living and working right next door to NASA in January 1986 and helped process the emergency psych patients that avalanched our hospital in response to the event. Among them were engineers from NASA, members of astronaut's families and others who lived in the same small community.

In April 86 Jean Michel Jarre did his Rendezvous Houston concert, "a live performance... amidst the skyscrapers of downtown Houston...For a period of time, it held a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history... is remembered for being the concert which celebrated the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster...

One of Jarre's friends, astronaut Ron McNair, had been killed in the disaster. He was supposed to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum"--wikipedia

performance clip on right of page

documentary

some of the performance