From Journalist to Therapist
“Nobody told me there’d be days like these.” That’s a phrase I thought about a lot during March of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic began ravaging like a global wildfire. I’m a marriage and family therapist now, but at that time I’d been a television news producer for more than 25 years. I could sense the spreading sickness might just become the biggest news story of the last 100 years. I had no idea I would wind up sitting on the bench for it. On March 13th, just as America was entering lock-down freefall, a newsroom layoff pushed me out of a job and into a new world. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined by the time the World Health Organization declared an end to the pandemic I would be in an entirely different job as a couples therapist.
Almost any veteran journalist will tell you that, as much as you might love the news business, it doesn’t love you back. Starting around 2010 I could see that cost-cutting measures meant newsrooms across the country were no longer willing to pay for experience. Over the next decade, journalism jobs were cut and salaries were slashed. The adage I heard when I first started in this industry rang true:
“There are two kinds of people in news. Those who’ve been fired and those who will be.”
When the ax fell in 2020, and I was once again thrown off the industry merry-go-round, I decided to stay off for good. As I scrambled about, looking for employment for the next two years, I asked people who knew me what they thought I might be good at. Two of my closest friends said, “we think you’d be a great marriage and family therapist.” At first, it sounded like a left turn. But my friend had just graduated from an MFT program, and knew what the job required. “In a session, it’s kind of like you’re interviewing someone and helping them make sense of the story of their lives,” he said. “You’ve already got the interview part down!”
ABC to DNC, and Everything in Between
He wasn’t wrong. I did have experience. In college I majored in television production, with a minor in history. One thing I love about the news business is the notion that journalism is the first rough draft of history.
The twists my career eventually took me in made me feel like I had a front row seat. The first political gig I remember shooting was with Senator Ted Kennedy back on St. Patrick’s Day 1991 while I was still at Emerson College in Boston. (Note the green tie & matching green carnation.)
After graduation I landed a job on the assignment desk at the NBC station in Albuquerque, NM. A few years later, I became an investigative producer and continued covering politics whenever possible. By 1998 I accepted a great job at the ABC station in Atlanta, GA.
WSB-TV appreciated my interest in politics, and I was tapped to be the field producer for both the Republican NationalConvention and the Democratic National Convention for the 2000 campaign. For the next decade I alternated between investigative and political coverage, hitting the campaign trail in 2004 & 2008 to cover the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. For someone who loved both news and politics I was like a kid in a candy store, day after day, every election cycle
Career Highs and Marriage Woes
By 2009 I was ready for a change. I left Atlanta and produced a documentary for a counterterrorism think tank in Washington D.C. Once the film was finished, I returned to news and joined Scripps Howard News Service in 2012, helping them build and launch their investigative broadcast team.
Reporter Kristin Volk was already in place as the tip of the spear for our team. From Day 1 she showed me how to clear the hoops required to cover the Washington D.C. political scene. We worked well together but, given the turnover in the news biz, it wasn’t a surprise when Kristin left the bureau just four months later. Gone, but not forgotten. And as it turned out… not for long.
I kept building connections and after months of persistence, patience and red tape, I eventually cleared the Secret Service background checks and was granted the ultimate press pass: a “hard-pass” by the White House Press Office. That allowed me to come and go through the security entrances on a daily basis and cover the beat. This was one of the true highlights of my career in journalism.
That dream job ended abruptly when a new manager took over and blew up the Scripps television broadcast team. Not only was I out of work, my marriage of 20 years was simultaneously falling apart. I was not familiar with Carl Jung at the time, but I can now see how elements of his 1930 essay “The Stages Of Life” could have helped me understand the consequences of continuing to chase achievement. Although my professional life was at an all-time high, looking back I now see I was blind to the toll it took on my family. I wondered if I had sacrificed the well-being of my marriage for personal, professional success. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The divorce rate in the U.S. is roughly 23%. Unfortunately, the divorce rate for people in the news and entertainment industry is double that.
I can vouch for that statistic.
New Beginnings and Familiar Faces
I was hired by the NBC station in Boston, MA, and my move there coincided with my divorce. But, you know that “first rough draft of history” thing I mentioned earlier? My life story kept getting re-written. Kristin Volk, the helpful co-worker from D.C., became newly single after her marriage ended. She was working at the ABC station in Cleveland, OH. Thinking back on what a good team we made during our brief time working together, I called her up and mustered up my best Joey Tribbiani from Friends impression and asked “How you doin?”. We caught up on the twists life had taken, and started getting to know each other.
We really hit it off and started dating long-distance, eventually spending the next three years trying to line up TV jobs to be able to live in the same city together. Cleveland won. I started working at the NBC station, Kristin’s competition, in 2017. We were married the following year. 
In 2019 I picked up my 17th, and likely final, Emmy award for an interview program that featured newsmakers and politicians across Ohio. Everything was going so well….
“To be a good interviewer, you have to be a good listener.”
“Chris, we love you and you’ve done nothing wrong… but we gotta let you go.”
That’s a phrase I’ll always remember newsroom managers telling me at the start of the pandemic.
“Can you have your stuff cleared out from your desk before 9? We don’t want other people seeing you pack up and go.”
I remember that one too. I understood, sort of, what was happening and that it wasn’t personal. “Go where?” I wondered. I had never looked for a job in a pandemic.
Months went by in a fruitless search for meaningful employment. Although my family thankfully remained healthy, it was a very difficult time. Entering an MFT graduate school program felt like a good fit, and I thoroughly enjoyed earning my masters degree. By the time I started my internship in 2023 and was seeing actual clients, I was enjoying myself in a way I can only compare to my earliest days in news nearly 30 years earlier. Things were looking up at the start of 2024. I was offered a job to be a therapist with Married Life Counseling in Akron, OH and accepted it.
From Breaking News, to Breaking Through
To some of my journalist friends, embarking on a career as a therapist seemed like a left turn. Or maybe they thought I’d lost my mind. What I discovered, though, was that many of the skills overlapped. To be a good interviewer, you have to be a good listener. Asking the right questions and being able to remember the important sound bites are things that help both journalists and therapists. Covering politics was a ‘side hustle’, my main job was as an investigator and a problem solver. I’m trained to look for clues and to be innovative. Bold even. Those are more skills that overlap with therapy. Both try to get to the bottom of things.
During the majority of my career in news I could tell myself the job I was doing was important because I was informing “the audience” about things that mattered in their lives and sometimes our stories made a difference. I hardly ever knew who those people were or exactly how they were being helped. Since becoming a therapist, I’ve taken great joy in seeing clients, getting to know them in detail. They are not a faceless “audience”, they are real people who are experiencing many of the same things I’ve been through. What’s more, I can actually see when and how they are being helped. The new career has been a great fit, and I can honestly say that I wish I’d started the second career sooner.
So that’s a little bit about me, how about you?
Give me a call and we can dive into your story.
Scheduling Office Hours: M- F 9 AM to 5 PM Phone Number: 234-303-2324
