As you can see by the letters after my name, I had some education under my belt before I discovered Ubiquity University and the School of Wisdom Studies, where I am working on a doctorate. My primary masters degree was in Clinical Psychology, and I have been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for over three decades. In November, I will be 60 years old, and though I have loved my coursework at Ubiquity, I think I have so far been most impacted by Mary Francis Drake, DMin, in her courses on the Wisdom Mission for Women from midlife to elders. I’m looking forward, though with trepidation, to my next decade. My goals and visions may change, but my pursuit of wisdom will never fade.
I danced with the idea of returning to education for a doctorate for over a decade. I had an opportunity to pursue more education in the late 1990s and decided to get a second master’s degree (in school counseling) instead of pursuing a PhD. This was, in part, because of misguided vocational counseling through worker’s compensation. However, I think I also stood in ambivalence at that time.
Each year, I researched doctoral programs and discovered I didn’t necessarily want or need more education in psychology, but I did still feel incomplete. My research led me to Wisdom Studies at Ubiquity University, and at last I felt in alignment.
Wisdom in my life is a priority as I teach and share my work with the world. In 2021, my 80-year-old mother said to me, “Alane, you should just do it.” My mom, born in 1940, had imagined she might one day be a biochemist solving puzzles to help the world. As a girl of the 1950s, she instead tutored my father through microbiology and advanced chemistry classes (her passion) and supported him through medical school by working in a lab while pregnant with me. I think she spoke up (out of character for her) because at 80, she saw herself in me. Will I continue to live my life with these regrets, succumbing to my upbringing with limits for girls and women? No. I have a mission to change the world and earning a doctorate in Wisdom Studies will support my mission, lending deeper insight and greater credibility to my work.
I had a variety of counseling jobs throughout my teens and during college, but my first legitimate mental health job was working for the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), not too long after graduation from Wesleyan University in 1987.
At SFDPH, I was a “Disease Control Investigator” at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Disease control investigators work in many different areas of public health, but my specialization was sexually transmitted diseases (“sexually transmitted infections” in the modern vernacular). We received intensive training on all the medical implications of each disease. I was trained as a safer sex expert and HIV pre- and post-test counselor. I spent half of each workday in the field trying to track down all the sex partners of the patients I had counseled and interviewed in the clinic. I would obtain the name, address, and ideally a phone number, of each of the patient’s partners, as well as an estimate of when they last had sex with the infected patient. If the patient I interviewed didn’t do a good job of informing their sex partners that they had been exposed to gonorrhea or chlamydia or syphilis, and if those sex partners didn’t show up for testing and treatment, it was my job to find and inform them.
Since we were a free clinic, we treated mostly very low income patients including teens from the projects, homeless folks, and sex workers. I was a naive young woman from Oklahoma who had grown up on a farm, and I suddenly found myself venturing into housing projects and neighborhoods that were controlled by gangs and riddled with crack houses. I thought the job was great fun, and I loved my coworkers as well. Andrew, a gay man, who was one of my best friends at work, taught me how to put a condom on a banana with my mouth. This was no small feat because I’m a lesbian and had only ever had sex with women.
Another coworker/friend and I developed a provocative show that we took on the road, demonstrating how to use safer sex practices. We would perform it on stage in the San Francisco bars, both gay and straight, preferably after midnight, the time when many people were on the verge of exposing themselves to HIV and other STDs. Being out in the field, whether teaching about latex in the bars or venturing into scary neighborhoods to find the unknowing sex partners of our patients, I felt like I was helping people and saving the world in small ways, one scared kid or strung-out homeless prostitute at a time.
I was an activist starting in childhood and picked plenty of fights with authority figures and institutions throughout my life. I’m not sure how that happened growing up in rural Oklahoma. But I think it began with parents who taught me that right is right and good people fight for the right. The danger of defining right in a place like the Midwest or Bible Belt of the US is that the definition can become dangerously narrowed and conservative. Blessedly, human rights had priority in my household, and so I planned to be the first woman president of the United States—one who would make the world infinitely better. A wonderful mentor and politician for whom I worked and wrote position papers in my early twenties told me law school would be toxic for me. She said, “Alane, law school is about thinking inside the box of those who went before, and that’s not you. Your gift is thinking outside the box and changing the rules as well as the world.” I imagine she, too, had regrets about her own path. Nonetheless, it was the right advice for me, though quiet change had never been my style. And now we might finally get a woman in the White House, thankfully not me.
My next step was that SFDPH job and AIDS activism which led me to graduate school in Clinical Psychology. My first jobs were again in public health, but in the San Francisco Department of Mental Health (SFDMH) this time. Once again, I found myself on the front lines of many crises in our city. These were crises of individuals, but they were caused and profoundly impacted by poverty and racism–the same culprits I came to realize were at the roots of my STD/AIDS work. A young white woman, I worked three years for SFDMH as an African American Service Specialist in the “African American Cluster” of the city. (We had four clusters where staff were carefully trained and monitored for cultural competence: African American, LGBT, Homelessness, and Asian, our largest constituent populations.)
Once again, I loved my work, though the pressure was intense. We were underfunded and the severely mentally ill of our city were not a high enough priority to the power brokers. Often patients who needed to be hospitalized or living in a residential treatment facility were discharged prematurely and left to fend for themselves, generally on the street, an impossible place to stay well, much less maintain medication compliance.
It was one of these clients who helped me change my life:
On Friday, Nov. 1, 1996, five minutes after the clinic security guard had left for lunch, I was doing paperwork in the staff room at the San Francisco public mental health center where I was a therapist. Suddenly a loud, aggressive voice penetrated the wall of the conference room next door. As things escalated, I decided to intervene with the intern who was seeing Susan, a client I knew and supervised. I knocked and entered the room to find the tall, muscular, schizophrenic woman looming over the 5’3” inch intern like a linebacker.
As I walked between the two women, the agitated client turned her wild gaze on me and lunged across the room. She grabbed me around the neck and began to strangle me. The intern grabbed Susan’s arm with both hands, trying to drag her off me. I rasped out, “Get help,” and the intern ran out the door. In that moment of distraction, I realized I might die—so I used a self-defense move that loosened Susan’s grip on my neck, but only because she looked away for a moment. I broke away, ran around the circular conference room table and out the door. We all locked ourselves in the staff room and called 911.
We heard Susan throwing furniture around the conference room for several minutes, and then, stillness. As the supervising clinician, I decided to walk out into the hall and check on the client. Susan was standing in a doorway, and I asked her if she was okay now. In response she lunged at me again. As she grabbed at my neck, I said, “Susan, don’t hurt me again.” Her face fell, crying, “Oh, Alane, did I hurt you?” and she wrapped her arms around me in a hug, weeping. Her hallucination had told her I was her mother and to kill me.
Almost 48 hours later, playing golf with good friends, I developed an unbearable twinge in my upper back. I couldn’t stand to swing the club. The twinge worsened, and by Monday it was clear that I had an injury from the client’s assault. Thus, began a long journey of physical and mental health issues. I had two severely pronated discs in my neck, and as I was healing, I went back to work against medical advice. I had 87 patients on my caseload, and so did all the other therapists in the clinic—who would care for my clients?
From being back at work and feeling so vulnerable physically, I developed post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating mental illness that forced me to change my life completely. I could no longer tolerate being in the mass of humanity that was San Francisco. I had flashbacks many times a day and developed severe anxiety.
I became the patient.
I needed a change, a dramatic change—to go back to my roots to find healing. I left my wife of seven years, moved north to a rural community, and brought an unmanageable horse no one wanted to California (from my family in Oklahoma). Living in a small studio, converted from a one car garage, I began to climb my way up from the abyss. My horse, a hard luck rescue I called M’ijo, and I spent hours in the open spaces of Northern California, healing each other.
Doctors will tell you that my two injuries, the severely pronated discs, and the PTSD, are of a nature that they will be a part of my life forever. My acute healing journey was four years long, involving extensive health care from a team of both allopathic and holistic doctors and therapists. I carry the echo of those injuries with me daily in the stiff neck that needs ongoing care, and the memory of the profound vulnerability of someone trying to kill me with their bare hands.
It turns out that living with a horse in the SF Bay Area costs way more than worker’s compensation pays. Even though I kept a few clients in my small private practice, I couldn’t pay M’ijo’s bills, and mine as well, on such a small income. So, I started offering a little bit of horse training and riding lessons here and there to help support us. The thing is, now that I was a therapist, it was different than when I helped people with their horses as a teenager. I realized the struggles of many of my horse training clients were rooted in their family dynamics, difficult childhoods, and relationship issues…and what they needed was a combination of mental health support and leadership training to be successful with their horses.
I began to develop what I thought was a unique technique for personal growth with the horse as the vehicle for change. One day a client told me that an internet search brought up the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association, an entire professional organization with training and certification for my work. I promptly joined and attended my first “Untraining.”
Untraining means learning to think outside the box, letting go of the rules about how to work with horses and the rules about how to practice psychotherapy. I was first untrained in 2002, many years ago, but it is my lifelong practice to unlearn, to soften my gaze, to view the world holistically, and to allow the horses to lead me and the people we help into depths of authenticity and clarity none of us could have imagined were possible.
M’ijo was just the first of my rescue horses. I have since rescued over 30 horses, healing their hearts, minds, and bodies and finding them meaningful work that fulfills them. Many of them comprise our Heart and Mind Equine herd. As with M’ijo and me, the horses and our clients travel parallel paths of growth and recovery. The healing journey changes us, both human and horse, as we untrain ourselves and each other.
I love working with our child and adult clients and their families. I am touched daily by the extraordinary ways the herd impacts these people, opening their hearts and minds to new possibilities for living beyond their wildest dreams. The agitated defiant young teen who can’t get along with peers and has been kicked out of four schools, sits peacefully on the ground in the warm sun with our pony’s hoof in her hands.
The overwhelmed working mom who says her husband is like the terminator, always coming after her with his needs, learns from the horse she names Vulnerability that meditation and self-care are how she can become the kind of wife, mother, and professional she longs to be.
The couple struggling to cope with one partner’s depression, admires a horse’s grounded energy, calling him their anchor, then becomes frustrated when he won’t move with them— Anchor teaching them that strengths and liabilities are often one in the same, and the perspective is what changes.
It is in team building that the herd excels in untraining. Horses cannot live alone—they only know one way to exist, in a herd–a team based on trust, respect, integrity, and interdependency. Hence, they are experts at it. They embrace healthy clear communication, honor leaders and followers equally, and are always grounded in the present moment. They do not prevaricate, manipulate, equivocate, or placate.
As my equine assisted therapy and team building practice grew, I became friends with a group of horse loving therapists in my community. After helping one of them with a problem she was having with her horse, she followed me to the parking lot and told me I was a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). I thought she was rude, but she was 20 years my senior and so I was respectful. At my befuddled look, she asked if I had ever read the book by that name. I said, “No,” and she said, “Look it up.” That horse buddy was Elaine Aron, PhD, the author of The Highly Sensitive Person, who has sold over two million books, translated into over 18 languages. She said she thought HSPs would do well in equine assisted work and suggested we start creating a curriculum together.
I met Elaine and began the journey of becoming an International Consultant on High Sensitivity, one of the top professionals in the world on the topic, over 15 years ago. I am now the leading international teacher on highly sensitive youth and their parents. I lead retreats, teach masterclasses, host an online community, and speak as an authority on highly sensitive topics. You can see a bit more about my work on my website.
In 2019, as Elaine and I were leading a retreat together at 1440 Multiversity in Northern California, an employee of YouTube and Google asked me if I would like to do a Talk at Google about highly sensitive people. It’s like a Ted Talk, and it will be on YouTube for the rest of time (yikes!) It was a challenge for this little introvert HSP from Oklahoma to go on the big stage, but I did it. It was part of my mission, to reach every sensitive youth in the world (and all the parents, teachers, and healthcare providers who encounter them.) If sensitive youth are honored for their gifts rather than shamed for them, the world will have no more troubles. Sensitive youth are the wisdom keepers of every generation, but our modern world, especially in western cultures, shames sensitive kids, and demands invisibility.
There is only one negative aspect of being highly sensitive. It is the tendency to find the modern world overwhelming. Otherwise, it’s all good stuff. One is born with the innate trait and it means their brain works slightly differently than the majority. They process deeply, notice subtle stimuli, and have stronger emotions, especially empathy. Brain scans have documented the trait in 20+% of humans (and evidence of existence in over 100 other species.) It is too large a number to be an illness or disorder, yet it is also a minority. I suspect the numbers are far higher among Ubiquity students and faculty! That’s why I feel so at home here. I look forward to continuing my journey and becoming friends with more of you, my cohort.
Whether I am face to face with an individual client, mentoring families and teams with the horses, or giving a Talk at Google with over a million views on my specialty, sharing experience, strength, and hope with humanity drives my work. I strive to live and work from a deep well of wisdom, and I am wise enough to know that I can only be effective when I continue to dip into that well, opening my heart and deepening my knowledge and compassion.
