Back in my young, innocent and "linearly-minded" days, I initially set out to be a doctor. (Although Dr. Seuss did have me giving serious consideration to running a zoo at one time.)

I went to undergrad at Indiana U in Bloomington. This was not my first choice of school but it was the only one my Dad would pay for when I decided to hitch a ride back from Montana with a guy my parents didn't know the summer before college was supposed to start. Ah, youth. At any rate, my Dad, once he resumed speaking with me upon my return home (3 days later), told me that I could kiss St. John's College in Annapolis goodbye. (I really wanted to read the classics in their original Greek and Latin.) My only option, he said, was our state school. So uncool. But, it was an offer I couldn't refuse and it, like every major event in my life, put me exactly where I needed to be to get where I am today.

At any rate, I was a freshman aiming for pre-med when my grandfather had the first of what would be MANY strokes. I got to see first hand while visiting him, a large Greek construction worker suddenly half-paralyzed and unable to speak, that we were (and are still) much better at prolonging life in its quantity while neglecting to fully consider its quality. 

While none of us were comfortable accomodating my grandfather's pantomimed request that we smother him with a pillow in the hospital, I couldn't see myself being a doctor if that meant having to prolong someone's life against their will.

Welcome to my first career crisis. 

I was still a helping preofessional at heart, so I opted to do the next best thing. I decided to study psychology so I could help people deal with the fallout of medical crises.

Through another strange series of events I ended up pursuing my graduate degree in Gerontological Counseling through the Univ. of Notre Dame. I had been a volunteer at a local nursing home all through high school and loved it so gerontology was a natural draw. I was accepted into the doctoral program with a full ride scholarship even though I had only applied for the Master's program. When the graduate director called to tell me I was accepted I asked him how that could be. He looked down at my application, laughed and said, 'Well, I guess you are right! You applied for the Master's program. Well, we still accepted you to the PhD program. Do you want to come? And by the way, it won't cost you a penny."

Let's just say, it didn't take me long to decide.

When it came time for my community-based training, the geriatric hospital I was to work at had stopped accepting students, leaving me with no place to work with older people. The next best alternative was a local rehabilitation hospital. The professors figured that I could at least work with some stroke patients, who tend to be older, so that is where I landed.

Little did I know my own mother would be one of those stroke patients in that same hospital 20 years later. Same floor. Same medical director. Many of the same co-workers. Yes, it was eerie.

While working in rehab (and mostly with younger people as fate would have it) I  found a perfect melding of my love of medicine and my chosen field of psychology.  I completed my speciallized training with an internship through Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago. In fact, during that time, I lived for several months with the very same grandfather who put me on this career path before I decided to make my home hin the Chicago area permanently.

Although this was to cap off my doctoral training, I didn't complete my PhD so you can't call me "Dr." The short, but far less entertaining, version is that my advisor failed to make tenure and the Geriatric Counseling program at Notre Dame was terminated as well. The combination made for a ridiculously high bar to jump to get my disseration completed so I got licensed with my Master's degree and took a job as a psychotherapist in a Pain Management program in Wheaton, IL. I also met my husband that year so I had a double reason not to go back to South Bend. (Let's hear it now, "Awwww, she did it for love....")

After ten years of working in pain management, I discovered life coaching while on a protocol development team for a wellness center the hospital was hoping to open. Health care was already undergoing massive changes that made it very difficult for me to work in the way I believed was most beneficial for my clients, so I had been wrestling with burnout for quite some time. Coaching was like a breath of much-needed fresh air. Everything I was learning led me to believe coaching would allow me to serve my clients more effectively than I could through the medical (pathology-based) model under which the field of psychology currently operates.  That, and getting sick of working on that protocol for four years straight, led me to jump ship.

I got trained through Coach U and embarked on my next career, establishing my first company, Wellspring Coaching, in 1999.  

Over the next 10 years as a coach, I provided support and guidance to individuals facing very difficult life transitions such as the loss of a significant relationship, forced or chosen career changes, coping with ill, debilitated or otherwise unavailable significant others, facing the impact of alternative lifestyles and gender identity concerns on relationships, transitioning to the "empty nest" (including those who wished for but did not have children), dealing with "sandwich generation" issues, significant illnesses and bereavement. 

And, like any good web-based personal development professional, I got all hip with the web. Unwittingly, I ended up with a blogging, Facebooking, experitise-declaring "avatar" who was living one version of my life while in the real world just as I was finding myself coping with two recently disabled parents (living in two different States and none of them mine) and contemplating the anticipated loss of my best friend. 

Suddenly life was getting very, very personal. And it was kicking my butt.

For a while I got very good at bleeding in public. I took my blog readers along with me through my Mom's stroke, my Dad's heart surgery, and my anticipatory grief for my friend, Michael, and that was okay for a while. The thing is, there was always a lag between where I was emotionally, and what I was sharing publicly. So, I'd put up an emotional post, because I had reached a point where I had dealt with it enough that I could share it, and then people wanted to help get me through it. The lag just made for a weird dynamic. And, as someone who was supposed to be helping people, I was never sure how much of that stuff to share anyway, even though I received a lot of encouragement to do so.

Years have passed since the heyday of my existential angst but the truth is I have never really felt comfortable again proclaiming myself as an expert in dealing with these issues. That's kind of funny, actually, because personally I'm really doing very well with them in my own life. While the issues have not gotten less complex by any stretch, I'm doing far better in increasingly challenging circumstances than I ever would have believed possible. No one will ever be able to tell me that old dogs can't learn new tricks because somehow in my 40's I seem to have undergone a fairly radical personality change (although I can still pitch a good old-fashioned Greek fit if the situation requires it).

It's just that I can't tell you that anything I have done will get you where I've gotten to (assuming you want to).

I'm also not saying that it won't. It's just that I can't promise it. I know what it has taken me to get here and I can't wish that on anyone, even though I would do it all again in a heartbeat (and do, every day).

As a result, I had to hang up my coaching hat.

And yet, I'm still here.

And so are a whole lot of people that I care about who have been following my journey and who tell me it has helped them to look over my shoulder and read a note or two from the road as it were. After all, we're all heading the same place in the end.

That is what No Safe Distance is. A chance for you to look over my shoulder and see how I'm getting along with things you think might be in your future as well (if you aren't already in the thick of things yourself). It's going to evolve as I do so I hope you bookmark this place and my blog so you can see what's underway if it turns out you find my perspective and insights useful.

As we go, you'll find a little kaleidoscope of things to explore as my writing and my photography will end up dove-tailing here. I'll pop up videos on occassion and try to turn you on to some of the sites and resources that I have found particularly useful when I've found myself in a predicament that I needed help finding my way through.

Just grab a cup of tea and meander. You'll find many remnants of my coaching life still at my blogs so there's still plenty of good old-fashioned self-help information there. But moving forward, you'll get a lot less of Laura the variously-credentialled expert and a whole lot more of Laura, the woman.

And as my mother would say, that's the story on that.


Laura Young
(630) 750-2365 (Chicago area)
Laura@nosafedistance.com