Our Counselors’ Backgrounds

Counselor’s Introductions & Background

Ted Witzig

I am Ted Witzig, Jr. I’m a clinical psychologist here at ACCFS. And I am from Morton, Illinois. I was born and raised here, grew up here, and I’ve raised my family here.

Ron Messner

My name’s Ron Messner. I was born in Winthrop, actually a town near there, but the Winthrop, Minnesota church, which, there’s some context that the little church was very rural. Because of who we are here, I tend somewhat to get situations that are church related. Somebody who’s either experienced some spiritual distress or maybe some sin issues or discipline or something like that and needs help sorting through that. So that fits somewhat my role as spiritual director to try to be an educator or a liaison between how the church is working with somebody and how we might help them in that process.

Kathy Knochel

My name is Kathy Knochel and I am from a small community in Michigan. That’s where I was born and raised and where I still live. I am a clinical social worker currently providing clinical counseling.

Brian Sutter

My name’s Brian Suter. I was born and raised in Taylor, Missouri and grew up there. I was the oldest of four boys. A really great place to grow up. I had a lot of good experiences and a lot of outdoors life there. And then, fast forward, I graduated with my master’s degree in 2007 and then I started working here in 2009 and have been working here ever since.

Craig Stickling

My name is Craig Stickling. I was born in the Dunlap area, North Peoria. I finished high school there and after graduation went to local colleges but I’ve always been in the Dunlap area. I’m an LCPC, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. I work part time with ACCFS and I also work full time in a school district in Pekin at a junior high as a school counselor.

Kaleb Beyer

I’m Kaleb Beyer, and I grew up in Sabetha, a small town in Kansas, an agricultural community. I grew up with five brothers, so there’s six of us boys. I wouldn’t have imagined myself sitting in this place as a marriage and family therapist. In my senior year of high school, I remember communicating my plans with my mom and she asked if I would go talk with a local professor at a community college and I still remember his office to this day and remember communicating with him.

His name was Clifford Hawk. He was a sheep farmer. His office was a mess. But he talked to me about this program, feed science and management. And so, it appealed to me. And from there I attended a year at a community college and still worked locally for a farmer. And then I transferred to Kansas State University.

I Graduated with a bachelor’s degree in grains, feed science and management. I started working at Wenger Manufacturing and I would say a couple years in, loved the work, loved what I did. I was involved in a project that required extensive traveling. I would leave Monday morning early and would come back home Friday evening late and be shot on the weekends.

I would really sleep a lot and wouldn’t be real present with my wife. And at that time we didn’t have kids. But it was during that time, I’d be traveling gone all week, come home on the weekends, that I remember one night, my wife, Angela, turned to me, and essentially, I don’t remember exactly what she said, but communicated real clearly, that I can’t keep doing this.

I can’t live in this place where you’re gone. When you come home, you’re not with me, you’re exhausted. And for whatever reason, I think she’s told me before, but that night it had a profound impact on me. And I was torn because I loved what I was doing. I was excited. I saw opportunity and potential and growth and all of these things.

Yet at the same time, the very thing that I was pursuing was bringing distress, great distress in my marriage relationship and to my wife, whom I deeply valued. Another kind of thing along the path was four years into my time at Wenger Manufacturing, I was moved into a management role. And in that role, I obviously worked more closely with individuals. And I loved the management part of project management doing product development, but I also loved and found myself growing in love of meeting one on one for goals and evaluations and then things would come up with personnel or there’s conflict or situations.

And I found myself interested and drawn to that part of the job as a manager. And so, I would say that’s another thing that continued this path on, I wonder what it would be like to do more of this full time. As time went on, I attended a few Christian counseling conferences just to really explore and understand opportunities, what it’s like, communicate with those that are in the field, and just kind of understand what it is like to be a counselor. What’s helpful, what’s not helpful, do you have recommendations? That sort of thing. So, through that process, at these conferences, it was fairly clear to those that I communicated with, that to do some of the things that I would want to do, I would need a master’s degree to be licensed.

Ted Witzig

When I was going through high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I’d look at things in the biological sciences and eventually thought about becoming a physician. And in fact, that’s what I planned to do. And all my college applications went out in pre medicine. A really unfortunate thing happened during my senior year of high school, and that was I had a good friend take his life.

And that is impactful for anyone. But for myself as a high school senior, it just really spun me around and trying to figure out why would somebody do this and oh there’s a lot of cana, coulda, shoulda, wouldas, and what should I have done, could I have done, those kinds of things.

It was at that time I started talking to my mom and dad, talked to my elder, Joe Braker, about what it would look like to go into the counseling field. As I was growing up, I didn’t even have a frame of reference for being a counselor. There was nobody I knew that was a counselor. I didn’t have any framework for that.

But I did with being a physician and being in school and it actually was a better suited field for me because what I realized is many of the reasons that I wanted to become a physician were about working with the people and what I realized  along the way, and this is God’s goodness, after the fact you see these things, but I don’t know that I would have made all that good of a physician in one sense. I’m a lot better suited for working with people’s emotional hearts than I think I would be dealing with their bodily chemicals and their physical hearts.

Ron Messner

So even in high school, I liked math, but I had an interest in being engaged with people, and I still remember, in my senior year, talking to one of the professors there that I’d gotten to like, and took some interest, and talking about options, and he said, really, you have to go to graduate school if you want to get some kind of a functional profession or a career in working with people. And so that really was the point that I thought about and I decided to pursue an advanced degree in social work. Being in a very rural area and a relatively uneducated one, there really weren’t careers to look at. There wasn’t somebody I knew who was a social worker. There wasn’t somebody I knew who was a counselor or somebody that I thought I’d like to be like them.

So, it really wasn’t role model based. It really just was as broad and non-directional as sociology is more people based than math, and sociology is a non-functional degree. And you have to do something else, and the only reasonable thing to do with it was go on to graduate school in social work. So, once I got accepted and started, it occurred to me because they laid out the different tracks, and the tracks are different today, but there was the mental health track, which was the one that I had a grant in, so that made sense. But there also was community work, community advocacy work, and there was a third, maybe more of an administrative. So, social work was defined very broadly then as it is now but it wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I realized that.

Kathy Knochel

Going into the mental health field was not anything that I had like a plan to do. As I was graduating high school, I had some plans to do things in the medical field and I was probably going to be pursuing physical therapy when I was in high school, and that was the path that I kind of felt like was right for me.

And so, in the second semester of college, I needed another class to stay full time. And there was an Introduction to Social Work class that was offered, and I thought, well, I don’t even really know what social work is, and I kept flipping through the class outlines, and for some reason, that just kept coming back to me. This seems like an interesting class, I wonder what a career in this field would look like. And so, at that point, I just signed up for it, still in this area of I wasn’t sure what the right direction was.

And, through the course of that class, I really came to be very interested in the mental health field. And, it was an interesting professor, she had a lot of experience in a variety of areas in this field. And so, at that point, I thought, you know what, this is a path that I’ll pursue in college.

Brian Sutter

You know, when it comes to my career and thinking about moving into the mental health field, that was not even on my radar until way down the stream. Growing up, academic, school, career, was just not on the radar at all. And, even going into college, I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I was still in love with football at that point in my life, and that was really it. But then as my freshman year of college kept moving along, I went into a sociology class, and I always loved people. I loved thinking about people and thinking about their stories, and that just blew my mind as I walked through that class.

And all of a sudden, I still wasn’t thinking about career or what I might do, but I was like, I’m interested in people. This is fascinating. And then I just started taking classes in the vein of psychology. And that’s how things got started.

Craig Stickling

Passion or my heart for counseling? I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on it earlier in high school or early college.

I enjoyed being able to speak with people. I enjoyed being able to listen to people. Looking back, our family had some struggles and challenges, and I saw the impact of that in our family life. In one of my teaching interviews, the person interviewing me said, you’re interviewing for the wrong job.

You’re interviewing for a teacher position. But he says, you should be interviewing for a school counselor position. I think from what he shared; he thought I was not speaking enough about the content that I was going to be teaching, but I was speaking more about kids and how to connect with kids and my desire to build relationships and connections with kids and I think he saw more of that piece as opposed to I think this might be a good math teacher. I must not have sold myself very well on the math element, but it was a good question that he had.

Panel Background

Brian Sutter

Well, I’m glad to get to sit with each of you here and talk through a little bit of our training and how that maybe impacts our view as helping others. Kaleb, you are a marriage and family therapist, Ron, you’re a social worker, Brian, a counselor, Ted, you as a psychologist, and Kathy as a social worker as well, so privileged to sit with you.

And I think it might be helpful just to think through, talk about our training, how that’s impacted us and our role as helping. And Kaleb, would you mind sharing a little bit about you being a Marriage and Family Therapist and what that means and how that maybe impacts you?

Kaleb Beyer

Sure, yeah. So, as a Marriage and Family Therapist, one of the key components of our training is systems theory. So, for example, a husband and wife is sitting before me, right? And so, it’s not just how the husband’s communicating to the wife but how does she respond and how does she experience the way the husband’s communicating, that interplay.

And so, with families too, for example, as we see families we’re looking for oftentimes there are unspoken rules or there are certain ways of relating to each other that they do without even knowing. And so, really what we’re trying to do is understand what are those things that maintain someone being depressed or being anxious. Maybe those things aren’t in the room but are certainly having an impact. Right.

Ted Witzig

And how does that impact when you do individual therapy as opposed to doing marriage and family work? Do you still think through a systems lens?

Kaleb Beyer

Yes. So even with individuals, let’s say someone comes in with depression. One of the things we’re looking for and assessing is where does this person see themselves within their family? How is family communication, sharing of emotion, all of these things influence and perhaps can even be a maintaining factor for the depression. And so, we want to understand.

And sometimes we do that by bringing the mother or the sibling into the room and asking them, how is it that they respond when you react this way when you experienced depression or negative thoughts.

Brian Sutter

Okay. So, it’d be interesting for you to as a psychologist, what you would say is similar or different in your training and helping others.

Ted Witzig

Sure. We psychologists appreciate systems theory and some of these other approaches, but our starting point is a little bit different from the Marriage and Family Therapist. We’re going to start with a good assessment. When somebody comes in, they oftentimes are presenting with various symptoms or hurts or whatever.

We’re going to start by wanting to make sure we’ve got an accurate diagnosis and understand the things going on there. And so, oftentimes we use psychological testing, checklists, and other tools to be able to make sure that if there’s a diagnosis like panic disorder, depression, personality disorder, personality pattern, or some other features coming in there, we want to understand that early so that we can figure out what the right treatment is because we’re going to look at it and say that the treatment is the next phase of that, okay. It is going to be driven by whatever this diagnosis is.

Brian Sutter

It does seem like diagnosis testing, those would be like hallmarks, yeah.

Ted Witzig

And so, for the psychologist, getting that accurate diagnosis and we call it differential diagnosis, figuring out, is it this or this? Ruling things out is really important. And yes, Brian, testing is always the best practice or evidence based.

Brian Sutter

Yes. Those are things that seem to be on the forefront of your mind.

Ted Witzig

Yes. And so, not only do we want to find the right diagnosis, but then we’re very interested in using empirically based treatments that’s like, what does research say is the best treatment approach for this or that? And of course, there’s some flexibility in that, but when somebody has panic disorder, we’re going to be looking and say, the research shows this is the best way to do this and go at it through a more manualized approach in terms of this is what research shows is the best. And of course, we as individuals, we add our flexibility to that. But that’s the accurate diagnosis and empirically based treatment. That’s top on the list for the psychologist.

Brian Sutter

And it seems like, too, for the psychologist, for your training as a doctor, I mean, where you have a doctorate degree and the rest of us would have a master’s degree, and that being a different thing. And I don’t know if you could speak into the years of schooling as well as that piece of it.

Ted Witzig

There’s more time spent in both understanding research and more too about things related to doing supervision of staff and then also in terms of doing things like program development and other kinds of consulting work.

So, what happens is that extra there is, I want to say this very clearly, I don’t think that it always makes me a better counselor. I don’t think that I’m a better counselor than you or Kaleb in our different specialty areas, but it’s given me a breadth of things. And I think one of the things that’s really nice in getting to work together is the fact that when you’re working with somebody and you feel like some testing would be really helpful here. We’ll work together on that. You’ll refer the person for testing. I’ll do some testing and we’ll work back and forth on that. And so it allows you to get the benefit of the testing, but at the same time to be able to just really stay in your niches and can really work in that because that’s where you’re most gifted and that’s where your heart is.

Brian Sutter

Yeah. And it is nice to be in such a diverse group. And I think being a counselor and an LCPC that that’s kind of a new degree on the block and so I’d be interested to talk with the social workers about what that means. You guys are kind of the old statement.

Ron Messner

I don’t think we can describe social work without putting something straight into it. Sure. Because it is a part of our culture, the field, so I’m not going to go through the history, but there was something called the social work movement and goes back to Jane Addams in Chicago. And so, the original focus wasn’t about mental health, but partly because mental health hadn’t matured to a place where you even did counseling.

Those interventions didn’t happen. So social workers, I mean, it came from people looking at child labor and people in poverty or people with disabilities and kind of moving from a time when we blamed the individuals. So, people were that way because of some fault within them, whether spiritual or otherwise, and beginning to look at society in a bigger way and how society had disenfranchised certain people or people needed assistance from group policy kinds of things to help them move out of that.

So, there are social workers who still do that. Kathy and I were talking about how it’s a little different. I’m going to let her fill in about today. When you go into the field of social work, how you choose tracks. But it was once we get into a clinical field, we borrow very heavily from the stuff you’ve talked about. But initially, we have to make a decision about whether you’re going to do casework or community work or administration or advocacy policy those kinds of things.

Brian Sutter

It does seem with social workers that the options are almost endless.

Ron Messner

Yeah, we don’t think about that here, but the people we went to school with, the people we know and actually people who are not necessarily our clients but others they interact with social workers all the time.

So, it may be getting benefits for an older person, somebody’s in the hospital and they need a discharge plan and the social worker looks at not just family systems, which is clearly a part of it, but the bigger what’s out there in society, what kind of programs are available, where can we draw in other supports?

Part of what we bring when we’re talking, when we do case supervision is that perspective, the bigger perspective of what’s out there in terms of resources and how those are applying, not just at a family level. But also where does this person live, what kind of community are they in, what’s available to them, how isolated or not are they?

Ted Witzig

That’s oftentimes the joke that we have in and amongst ourselves is because the psychologist is oftentimes looking so much at the individual and looking at trying to get that diagnosis of the individual and the social workers are oftentimes looking at the whole, the community systems and education and poverty and all those things and the marriage and family therapist and we have a lot of fun together with that. And I think what’s great is we appreciate that about each other. But there’s no question it does bias us sometimes in terms of what we see first. Right, for sure. Oh, no question.

Kathy Knochel

So, I would say from a school perspective at the bachelor’s level and undergrad, it really is a generalist approach. You’re able to learn a lot about different systems and how they interact. And, you get into a little bit of the clinical work, but a lot is in child welfare or with a geriatric population. And then as you move into your graduate program, you’re able to decide, am I going to do more like on the macro side where I’m going to be doing policy work and community organizing and administration and that sort of thing. Or you can take more what’s referred to as a micro approach and that’s working more just on the individual level. So, you take classes that are focused on clinical skills and understanding maybe school social work or medical social work.

And the neat thing about the social work field is the possibilities are endless. There are so many different areas to work. For me personally, God just opened the right doors to go down the path of clinical counseling. And so, what happens after graduation is you take just a lot of continuing education credit sets and you learn more about interventions that you use in the counseling room.

Kaleb Beyer

So, are you choosing that track early in your master’s program, that you’re going down clinical or these other, other paths?

Kathy Knochel

So, in my experience, there was kind of the macro path of community organizing policy work, which was not at all an interest to me. And then it was the generalist approach. And so, there were specific classes that you could take that were a little bit more clinical in focus. Where the deciding factor came in was the licensing exam that I took. I took it so that my license has a clinical focus in social work.

Brian Sutter

Which is in some ways similar to the counseling degree as well, in the sense that our options are limited, but it’s either the clinical, like in a setting like this, or clinical in a school setting.

Ron Messner

You know, and you’ve got a dozen others. You can’t quite make up your mind. Yeah. Well, I think in this group, we don’t need to spend time with it, but probably none of us would have said at age 20 or 22, this is what we’re going to be doing. Totally. Yeah. We all took very different courses to get here.

And I think that’s helpful as we meet with other people, whether that’s people at church or people are asking that you have to be flexible both hopefully as a believer to where God takes you, but also just where there is opportunity and what you discover you have an interest in. And follow that as it happens and not be distressed that you didn’t know.

Brian Sutter

Right. Cause a lot of that seems, at least for me, to develop through experience that you don’t always know what you’re interested in or what you’re going to be. Like, oh, this fits or this doesn’t. And that comes through things that you find that really grabbed your heart.

Ted Witzig

And I really appreciate that because some things have grabbed your heart around attachment and adoption and trauma and yours around marriage and family. I mean, we each have those things, but it’s really interesting because there are things that really, you go, I could do this all day.

Brian Sutter

And that can also just shift and change, you know, and that’s one of the benefits too, of just having different perspectives that, you know, somebody could help you along and move in that direction if you’re interested in whether that’s a focus area for treatment or even a training or approach.

So, I just really appreciate being a part of this group. I have a lot of respect for each of you and your different training and the different places that’s taken you, whether that’s your degree or your licensure.

And I think it really helps us be able to help each other and hopefully then effectively help those that come into our offices. I’m glad to be a part of the team. Thanks.