A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Breakthrough for Counselor in Training

Two months ago on a Friday morning, John Horn got real.

“That was the day I remember that he broke through,” said Janet Bowden, a supervisor with the Training Lay Counselors program at the Southern California Counseling Center in Los Angeles. “We suddenly saw him differently that day.”

Horn, 28, a Reagan Republican with strong Christian views who prefers to wear a white shirt and tie, joined the six-month counselor training program held Friday mornings at the Los Angeles center on West Pico. He took the course after approaching burnout in his job as a homelessness case manager for the Northeast Valley Health Corp.

“We’ll still like you even though you are a Republican,” Horn remembered being told by the group of professionals and volunteers with mostly liberal views and diverse religious beliefs. The Training Lay Counselors program aims to help those in social service outreach positions handle the counseling needs in their jobs.

Working at the Valley Shelter in North Hollywood, Horn interviews homeless people with medical problems. To help them get off the streets, Horn often has to get details about their personal lives and problems--information ranging from their history of drug addiction to their level of job skills. When he started three years ago, he said it seemed the job fit his religious views as well as his Republican belief that the solution to the homelessness problem is not in government but in the private sector.

“It got easier, but it got more frustrating,” Horn said of his work. “After a while it seemed like the clients were giving the same answers. You get the feeling that the clients are not listening.”

In April, when the counseling training program started, Horn said he was getting burned out.

“John, I think, didn’t have a lot of experience with how to make contact with people,” Bowden said. He would get angry and sarcastic, or tune out a person who was not responsive, she said.

But in a role-playing scenario after four months of training, something changed. Dealing with another group member who pretended to be a surly, non-responsive teen-ager, Horn dropped his guard and honestly told the “teen-ager” how angry and sad he was for him.

“I had never said anything like this,” Horn said. “I guess I broke through a shell I had.”

“We all really softened toward him after that and really could see him for what he was,”--a caring person, Bowden said.

After completing the training, he said he felt confident to make a stand when with a big client--who is about four inches taller and much heavier than Horn, who is 6-foot-2, over the man’s use of a transportation voucher. Before, Horn said he might have just shrugged it off. Instead, he told the client, “I know you’re lying right now. That’s not the way you show respect to someone.”

Rather than strike back, the man had tears in his eyes as he left.

“It was drenalin, I guess,” Horn said of the incident. “In arguments you say things that you really mean.”

A few weeks later, the man called Horn from prison. He had been caught in a drug bust.

“He said what I told him made a difference,” Horn said. “And that because of it he realized his life had been a joke. No one had never told him that before.”

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