JM: I find that to be a very hard question. Probably I would speak about Alfred Adler's concept of social interest and being connected with other people. And social interest is defined in terms of that word "gemeinschaftsgefuhl." It's not directly translatable from German, but it's an interest in the welfare of other people and a desire to do good to contribute to the welfare of other people to seek connections between myself, and actually not only other people but the world around me, the environment and all God's creatures.

JM: Well, I'm kind of a systemic person and I would have to go back to my earliest learning experiences in my family and probably my parents as being very different role models very different. My mother was a very humanitarian and truly caring person; I don't think I have ever met anyone who had as much empathy and compassion for virtually everyone as she did. She was a special education teacher in inner-city schools in Oakland, California, and she was absolutely intolerant of any person at any time, in any way, denigrating anyone because of race, gender, ethnicity, or any particular factor. If they did, whether they were in her class or school, or in our home as guests, they were reprimanded. There were words you would not use in our house; there were things you would not say about other people in our house. She was a very strong role model, not only philosophically, but also in terms of being an activist for change. I have a brother who is severely and profoundly developmentally disabled. My mother kept him at home until he was 17. At that point, the neighbors got together and signed a petition and took it to court, and the judge ruled that he had to be removed from the neighborhood and put in an institution. With five children all under the age of 10 but she went to college; in two and a half years she got a bachelor's degree and started teaching special education in order to find ways to be able to help my brother because the systems weren't effective. She saw that right away. But when he was placed in the institution, she immediately started going there regularly, organizing groups, organizing activities to help the residents, etc.; I went along on her weekly visits; no one else in my family would go. So, I was schooled in seeing that you don't accept the status quo; wherever you are, you find a way to make things better for other people and you get other people involved. You're an activist for the rights of other people, and that's your role in life.

JM: Yes; particularly for people with disabilities. Of course, this led me directly, I think, into becoming a vocational rehabilitation counselor, which was my first professional identity and one that I truly cherish. But the other side of the coin in my role modeling was my father who was a Nazarene minister and probably on the scale of 1-10 for bigotry, was probably an 11 or 12. He taught me to hate and fear anybody who was different than me, and fortunately I got to make choices about which of the two I would rather follow. Of course, that person I would rather follow would be my mother. I'm also aware every now and then of my reactions to people and I say, "Oh, that was something I was taught as a child from my father." Is this the reaction I want to have right now to somebody? No, I don't choose to do that, but I understand how strong parental influences are on people I work with, and people I see. They're products of what they have learned. I guess part of becoming an educator, at least for me, was trying to figure out how to teach adults in particular to think in another way. How do we help people learn that they don't have to be bound by early learning, but they can indeed change across the life span?

JM: Well, I suppose that's how I ended up being in the counseling field and certainly in education, but I have to say I am a rehabilitation counselor. My original interest is working with and on behalf of people with disabilities. That's a life-long interest; it's what led me into aging. But I learned at one point that I can't do everything in life so I didn't continue my work in rehabilitation and I became very involved with aging. But it's still there.

JM: Well, they're probably in three areas. Initially, I was very, very active in rehabilitation counseling. I was involved in state leadership and started to be involved in national leadership. Through my work in rehabilitation, what I found was that working for a state agency I was continually reprimanded (probably not as often as I recall, but it really made an impression!) for working with people over 50, and over 60, and over 70. My initial interest in aging came because I saw a lot of value in my clients that the people I worked for didn't see. Somewhere between working with people who are disabled across the life span and going into work in gerontology, and working with, and on behalf of older people, I would say I'm probably best known for the work I've done in gerontological counseling. I was in the right places at the right time and able to gain national visibility through networking with other people, and through working at ACA. That was just kind of a fluke; there were an awful lot of people who were interested in older people and working on behalf of older people who were doing so at a local and state level. I just happened to be doing so at a national level. Also, I have written a lot and published articles and grants, which has helped increased the visibility of that particular part of the profession. I'm sorry that it hasn't carried through. Having national grants on aging that were conducted out of ACA, with funding from the Administration on Aging, gave us money to bring counselors and counselor educators together to talk about the problems of older people and to begin to impact training programs, and at the height of what might have been the gerontological counseling movement, we were able to start a new division in ACA, get criteria for a National Certified Gerontological Counselor credential approved by NBCC, and we got specialty accreditation standards approved by CACREP. The division — the Association for Adult Development and Aging — has continued, but NBCC eventually dropped the specialty because of lack of interest; they only had two hundred people who got the specialty credential. CACREP will be dropping the Gerontological Counseling accreditation because only two programs have gotten accredited in 12 years. On the other hand, our population is aging.

JM: In about 15 years, we'll have 1 in 5 people over the age of sixty. So I think we are being short-sighted in letting go, but there doesn't seem to be a strong national prevalence on behalf of counselors to try to create change. APA (American Psychological Association), on the other hand, does have a strong gerontological counseling network through its committee on aging and is doing very good things in terms of promoting the field.

JM: I think it's unfortunate. Every now and then I think about what I had hoped to do to affect that situation. One of the things about professional leadership is, I believe, that you do what you can do, and you move on; and you help other people move in and take responsibility, and come in with new goals, energies and ideas. I think there are people working in ACA right now who certainly are taking the organization in directions that people believe it needs to go and this just hasn't been their priority.

JM: What challenges? I guess having an education and the credentials to get people to be able to listen to me was a challenge.

JM: I don't take my education, either my Bachelor's degree or my Master's degree for granted. Currently, 50 to 60 percent of people go to college, but when I went in the late 60's, the percentage was not that high. Nobody else in my family has gone to college. None of my three older sisters did, and my father spent a good amount of time laughing at me for trying to get a good education because after all, it wasn't going to do me any good. I was supposed to get married and have children. I guess the women's movement in the 60's was a major freeing influence for me in that I wasn't bound by the traditions of the past in terms of becoming a housewife, and making education and professional activities second I my life; they did become a primary thing. Education was one of those. Another thing is that I had helpful people along the way to encourage me in different ways. Family influences, which weren't necessarily all positive but challenges to overcome, and learning for myself that I didn't have to be bound by a dysfunctional family background. I don't think anyone else has to either. That's an encouraging perspective for me as a counselor to realize first that change is extremely difficult, but second that you can change—anybody can change.

JM: My mother got a degree, but nobody on my father's side ever did.

JM: Yes. She was in her early 40's.

JM: Yes she was—in many different ways. And being the youngest child, I think allowed me to break out of the family mold. My three sisters all got married when they were 17 and they all married sailors. Two were divorced by the time they were 19 and they all had kids. Family patterns being the way they are, you think that I would have followed.

JM: No. When you're the youngest, you get to observe what's going on and make decisions about whether you want to be that way.

JM: That's true. I lived through them.

JM: I would say I had a very significant experience as a child. I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I I told you my father was a Nazarene minister—I didn't tell you that my mother was Jewish. By rabbinical law that makes me Jewish. Of course at that age, I had no idea what that meant. I remember my best friend, Geri, who lived about a block away. When I went over to her house, her father—who compared to me was a very large, very mean man, very abusive man—I have a very vivid recollection of him walking toward me shaking his fist in a very angry voice saying, "Get that God*** little Jew girl out of my house right now," and having absolutely no understanding of why this man hated me and what it meant being a little "Jew girl" since I was a Nazarene. I didn't know what that meant. The question was never fully answered, but I learned a lot from my mother about the Holocaust—not about Judaism as a tradition or religion—but Judaism as something that I should be very cautious about and that I should hide because there were people in the world who literally would not want me to live if they knew I had Jewish blood. And, because of that awareness, it has always been unfathomable to me that people are willing to kill other people because they think differently, they believe differently, their skin color is different...the whole phenomenon of hatred just baffles me completely. And even though I haven't chosen to be an activist for that on a global scale, in my own way, I think I can make a difference in terms of helping people who really are in some way or another treated with discrimination and disrespect. My attraction to people with disabilities and older people are in large part because I really feel they are devalued, and under-valued for absolutely no good reason. As an aside, my friend Geri got pregnant when she was about 15, left her baby with a sitter one day and ran away. I didn't hear from her again until a few years ago. She contacted me through Classmates.com and was afraid I always thought poorly of her for what she did. I let her know I was sure her father was abusive (in multiple ways, including sexually abusive) and even as a child I had some understanding of her need to be free of him.

JM: In my early work as a counselor, I was working in a disabilities setting. The problems I encountered were that the administration thought that some of my work with people with severe disabilities was inappropriate for the state agency, and was in fact wasting their money because they didn't think these people had vocational potential, which I disagreed with. And they thought that older people didn't have significant potential. So, working within a bureaucracy of an administration that had set guidelines and rules... It just seemed extremely difficult—I don't have set guidelines and rules for people. I think you treat people as individuals and find out what their strengths are and you work from those strengths to try to find out what's right with people, not what's wrong with people. I didn't do well in that type of a bureaucratic setting, and when I got into higher education, I found a different level of politics and, certainly, more freedom to do what I could do without people giving me negative feedback, and telling me I was wasting time and resources advocating for a particular group of people in a particular way.

JM: Well, if I think about the field of multicultural counseling, I think it has come light-years from where it was. In my counseling programs there were no required multicultural courses. I just happened to be in a specialty area where I learned a lot about disabilities, and a lot of that information is transferable to virtually any minority group. So, I think I had an early education in multiculturalism before the field got educated in multiculturalism, if you want to define it that way. I think the field has come a very long way. In some ways, it's like a pendulum. In some ways, I think it's gone too far and multiculturalism is seen as the single organizing force in counseling by some people, and they want to beat it over the heads of the rest of us and say, "Whatever you do is never going to be good enough, and you will never be multicultural enough, you can never be sensitive enough for us," and I resent that. I think that's somewhat misguided. And it's doing what I've always found offensive, which is denigrating other people because of their beliefs and their efforts.

JM: No, it's not very multicultural at all.

JM: Well, I would like there to be some balance. I am certainly in favor of every counselor being trained in multicultural issues, being supervised and work with people who represent all different kinds of diversity—racial, ethnic, spiritual, disability, obesity—whatever it happens to be. I think counselors need to be trained to work with all kinds of people. Certainly, as the United States becomes more pluralistic, we're moving away from terms like majority/minority and we're really getting to where we need to be, which is we need to respect diversity among people. I think counselor training needs to emphasize that and it is totally consistent with what we learned from pioneers like Carl Rogers and C. Gilbert Wrenn. Each individual is unique and worthy of respect, caring, and valuing, and should be prized for who and what they are.

JM: I think they — I should include myself here! WE need to go to courses and workshops. I think we need to understand documents like the multicultural competencies and some of the similar writings in the field. We need to do some reading in current professional association journals. We need to talk to colleagues about their experiences and perceptions. We all need to challenge ourselves through exposure to different ideas and opinions — we all need to be open to self examination and change at all points throughout our lifespan.

JM: I think the counseling field is struggling with its same usual internal, political problems. Whether we are a profession, or whether we are a group or a group of groups, or whether we are school counselors, mental health counselors, rehabilitation counselors? It seems that we continue to struggle with that year after year after year after year, and I guess to me, professional identity remains a major issue. Working cooperatively rather then competitively with other mental health professionals, including psychologists and counseling psychologists is a major issue that isn't being well addressed in the field. I think we are slowly moving forward and if we could come to terms with our turf issues and our identity issues we could move forward more quickly.

JM: What needs to change? Well, one of the things that needs to change in the context of what you're talking about with multicultural issues is that we need to come together on the fact that professional advocacy has a dual focus. It has the focus of advocacy for the profession and professionals, and advocacy for the clients. I said my education was important to me. I believe that if I'm not appropriately educated and credentialed, no one is going to listen to me when I speak on behalf of clients. So, I am a very strong advocate for the counseling profession and its credentials, and for our professional identity and ethical counselor education and supervision. I am also concerned that counselors need to be trained in how to be advocates for clients. What I find is often people who promote client advocacy think that advocacy for the profession means that we are self-serving and we really shouldn't engage in it. I just think it has to be a two-pronged effort. And if I were to make a change, I would probably have more recognition of that.

JM: Right.

JM: Right.

JM: Well, I think that working with older people is fun. I think the older people, particularly in the United States, are changing. We are having more people who are increasingly well, and more well for a longer period of time. There are many roles for counselors in working with well older people. The fears that they have of older people being infirm and frail, and dying on them probably aren't going to be real. The prejudice and bias against working with older people really is increasingly less relevant.

JM: Yes. I absolutely do. We developed a set of gerontological counselor competencies through one of the national grants on aging in the 1980s. I think these competencies are still relevant, and they dovetail with the multicultural counseling competencies. Not surprisingly, there is some overlap between the competency statements. Older people have been a minority, in the United States and worldwide.

JM: I think about the body of knowledge out there—there are some ways that older people are different, and their needs are different, and there's a base of knowledge. I think there are certain skills in working with older people that need to be taught. There is who the older person is—but certainly there are subgroups of people who have different needs and there are certain approaches that work better and more effectively with them and those need to be taught. Primarily attitudes would be the big area. I think that all counselors need self-awareness training and all counselor educators too. The worst biases against aging and older people that I have found have been among counselor educators, and because counselor educators don't promote work with older people, students don't seek to work with this population...

JM: Areas of competence—well, what the aging process is all about, developmental tasks and challenges of later life, what retirement is like, what transitions are like, a lot about loss because older people experience a lot of loss and counselors would need to know what that means, and how you work with people who experience loss and multiple losses. And, of course, wellness; how can we help older people become more well? How can we help everyone be more well?

JM: Oh, absolutely, about the last twenty years worth. My work in aging and my work in disabilities grew out of both—concern for people being as optimally well and healthy as they can in every area of their life for as long as they can, regardless of whatever limitations they may have—be they disability, age, race, whatever.

JM: That's true. That's true.

JM: Pardon?

JM: People just aren't attending to what they need to be attending to in order to live long and live well. The medical profession has done a wonderful job in extending the number of years of life that we have, but quality and quantity are different. And quality of life... I think everyone should have as high a quality of life as possible. You only get to go around once; you might as well do it well. And, if I was not attending to wellness, I've just seen so many people with disabilities and so many people who can't do the things that they would like to do because they have made poor lifestyle decisions... they do catch up with you in later life...

JM: In terms of wellness?

JM: Okay, the profession as a whole... I think the profession, as a whole, needs to be better known by the public in general for who we are and what we do. We are moving much to slowly in advocating for ourselves. I would like the profession to embrace a philosophy of wellness and to understand that one of the things that defines our profession as unique and distinct is the concern that we have for optimizing development across the lifespan of all people. It's not what the social work profession does, it's not what the psychology profession does, it's what counselors do. We can do it and do it well if we focus our efforts. We advocate for people, we are inclusive, we do things that other professions don't do. Then we stand around and say, "Well I'm just a counselor." "Just a counselor" can't do much." We need to stop doing that.

JM: I think mental health and wellness go hand-in-hand. When we're talking about one, we're talking about the other.

JM: No, that's mental illness.

JM: Right.

JM: Get well trained and stay well trained. Go to professional conferences and network with people, and keep learning what's new.