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AAADC |
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A brief history of AAADC. During that time, I was working fulltime during the day and attending evening classes at the University of Bridgeport, majoring in Business Administration. In that year, I chaired PHH Homequity's most successful United Way campaign in the company's long history. The United Way campaign had been conducted during a period of severe downturn for the company. People were concerned for their jobs and income, yet they gave generously anyway, and during the campaign that included auctions of personal services, and even a chili cook-off, company morale was temporarily higher than it had been in years. During a luncheon to celebrate the achievement, company president Harvey Auger gave a speech, and then fielded questions. One person wanted to know, "how do you deal with the stress of running a company with a significant loss of business, and, with the exception of this campaign, a demoralized workforce frightened for their jobs?" Harvey smiled. "In my time in Vietnam, I learned that to maintain sanity, one needs to maintain faith in people, faith in the future, and trust that one's own best efforts will be sufficient. Those lessons have served me well and I hope to inspire others merely by living out those ideas on a daily basis." (It had been rumored that Harvey had a gruesome time in Vietnam, but I never got the chance to ask.) Another person asked, "As you transitioned from the military to the private sector, you earned a degree in psychology instead of business. Why?" Harvey paused, and then spoke slowly. "As a business leader, I try to surround myself with the best people from every field. Those fields include accounting, finance, customer service, legal, insurance, and especially, data processing. For many business questions, I can always hire and turn to another expert with an MBA. But the real challenge from my perspective, is to enable these very different people from very different backgrounds, to work together in the best ways possible. To achieve that goal, I can see nothing better to study from an academic perspective, than psychology." My mind was made up on the spot. I had already enjoyed the few psychology course I had taken, and so added psychology as my second major. Four years later, in 1993, I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Bridgeport. My Bachelor of Elective Studies degree included concentrations in both Business Management and Psychology. During the time between Harvey's speech and graduation, much had changed in my life. No longer with PHH, I was by then owner of a successful and growing consulting company. My wife and I were also blessed with our first son, Zachary, who was just past his second birthday. Shortly thereafter, my father would begin a long, and eventually unsuccessful, fight with cancer. All of these changes were cause for me to reevaluate how I wanted to live my life, and be remembered by my children. While my business activities were honorable, I did not feel that I had done enough to directly cause good in the lives of others. I then began studying psychology and human resource management on a graduate level, while working fulltime during the day. During the last year of the three years I studied for the masters degree, I moved from New England back to Cherry Hill. This was to enable me to visit my father each evening during the time he had left. During this time, I was studying how to counsel others experiencing grief and loss, while living through the worst experience of my own life. I learned that counseling can not eliminate stress and grieving, but that by embracing and focusing on the grieving process, the pain can be lessoned, and the time for grieving shortened. The years of study at the University of Bridgeport prepared me well for the challenges of counseling practice. By studying the counseling approaches of Rogers, Bandura, Garfield, Frankl, and Adler, I gained tools to help my clients. Appreciation for these approaches in no way detracts from my appreciation and appropriate use of the research of the better-known "giants" of the psychological field such as Freud, Jung, Ellis, and Skinner. As a counselor, my mission is to provide my clients with perspectives, skills, viewpoints, and support that enable them to successfully take responsibility for resolving their personal challenges, and then finding joy and meaning in each of their own lives. In 1996, I was awarded a Masters of Science degree in both Counseling and Human Resource Management from the University of Bridgeport. Within months, I founded AAADC, which was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in New Jersey. My income as a business executive enabled me to contribute to the development of AAADC, and enables AAADC to focus on counseling as opposed to fund-raising. (Copyright 1996 Leon Roomberg, All rights reserved.) Note: |
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