Dr. Rea Anne Scovill

I grew up in the dunes by Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana, the oldest of three children, born in 1944 near the end of World War II. My dad worked as an engineer and middle manager at US steel as the provider for our family. My mother was a stay-at-home mom who cooked, gardened and sewed beautifully for us. My two brothers and I attended a local school with steel worker and farm worker kids. Although my folks tried to create an ideal fifties family, my mother’s emerging mental illness gradually tore us apart. My father, brothers and I have each worked throughout our lives to overcome the impact of this, each in different ways.

I found support in our community church, from my teachers and in Girl Scouts. I came to believe that, despite any personal challenges, I had what I needed to live a constructive life and help others.  I made a commitment to use whatever I learned from my own challenges to help others cope with the realities of human existence. This began my life-long journey to transform my grief about my own family and find peace.

I went to Swarthmore College in hopes of finding a route to express my goals and found myself overwhelmed by a workload I was not prepared to handle. Since I lacked the confidence to change schools, I just studied all the time to catch up and survive. I majored in English literature because I enjoyed it and thought I might teach; I couldn’t find something that really spoke to me. I taught in the Philadelphia public schools to support my husband and me while he went to graduate school and then we moved to his job as a professor at the University of Iowa. There, I began studying psychology and qualified for a teaching assistantship in the counseling psychology doctoral program.

Just before I began this program, I found myself overwhelmed by the ending of my marriage. For half my young life I’d counted on my belief that once I left my abusive mother I’d be able to create a healthy, positive life for myself. I worked hard in school and in my marriage for this. I found myself to be terrified and angry that I had to raise my two-year-old son entirely alone, without any family support or friends in my new community. I began to have panic attacks night and day, and frequent insomnia, for which I refused medication.

The inappropriate treatment I received helped to energize my desire to change the mental health field drastically. I have since felt very lucky that I didn’t get addicted to the valium that was offered to me. I didn’t take seriously  an old-school therapist’s warning that I was “a dependent personality who would always need a man to support me financially.” I didn’t heed her advice that if I didn’t tell my fragile mother off for what she’d done, I could never heal, as I went home to visit. My mother took her life two weeks later.  She’d been treated by a psychoanalyst for ten years with no evident improvement.

I turned to prayer with renewed appreciation and guzzled the information from my science-based counseling program like a thirsty weed. Through teaching myself how to stop my panic attacks, I developed skills that I shared with clients for forty years. I combined the learning principles discovered by BF Skinner, the personality concepts described by Eric Berne and the observations of therapists like Albert Ellis to form a program to heal myself. I applied these and gradually left panic attacks behind  after five years, greatly reduced my insomnia and was able to function as a calm, loving mother to my son.

I worked three jobs to support my son and me in Chicago. I trained with the Theraplay Institute and provided therapy to children at Head Start centers around the city. I taught a class at a secretarial school in self-development. I marketed classes for the Dale Carnegie course. All these jobs grew and stretched me to be less socially anxious, more confident and even more determined to help others with the skills I’d learned. I found my first full time job in Indiana, near where I’d grown up, at a mental health center serving two counties. There I was a liaison to the schools and provided therapy to families, kids and adults. I developed a relationship-based behavioral program for kids that proved easy and effective. It’s included in the parenting chapter of Claim Your Own Mental Fitness.

From there I went to another center where I developed an in-house class for adolescent boys too mentally and behaviorally disordered to be managed in a school setting. I worked with other agencies to develop a system to improve mental health services for high-risk families and continued to see clients with a wide variety of mental health and interpersonal problems.

My second husband, son and I moved to the Seattle, WA area in 1985 to immerse ourselves in the wild, unspoiled natural world there, hiking, camping and walking on the beaches. I worked part-time for a community mental health center in Tacoma and part-time for six group-homes for abused and/or neglected adolescents. I found humbling admiration for their staff, who, with inadequate pay or support, gave so much of themselves to these needy and often abusive kids. They truly demonstrated the power of mental fitness and love.

Finally, I was able to begin my long-wished-for career in private practice in 1988. I focused on serving adults and adolescents who could make direct use of my hard-won skills to heal. I balanced this work with tending my grandchildren and engaging in many hands-on activities. It was satisfying actually to see and touch the results of my work in my gardens, home remodeling projects and crafting.

As a therapist I greatly enjoyed my clients and the personal growth I found through working with them. I had particular affinity with those suffering from anxiety, especially panic attacks, and with adolescents struggling to become someone they could respect and enjoy. I learned new skills for treating post-traumatic stress and discovered how to apply the stages of grief more broadly to help clients resolve anger and trauma. I worked with five women who had  multiple personality disorder and learned things about our human functioning that I might never have imagined. It always felt like redemption to help my clients take charge of themselves, enjoy their lives and form relationships free of the neglect and abuse that hurt everyone in my family.