about Chuck Genre

Well, let’s quickly summarize the uninteresting stuff: I have been educator, psychotherapist, and former criminologist with over 25 years of experience teaching, coaching, and counseling. I taught high school and college students (I loved teaching high school!) and I’ve led a bunch of workshops and intensives on emotional intelligence, traumatic healing and other subjects. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in private clinical practice nearly 15 years. Whew.

Now for the corny: I left my sweet high-school teaching and vice-principal gig to become a psychotherapist because I felt called. Corny, right? It was a terrifying, enormous leap of faith. With hope, I wondered, “what if I could transfer my creative, spontaneous way of teaching to struggling adults in need of healing and hope?” These adults were everywhere. They were the unhealed parents of my lovely students. They were the lost twenty and thirty-year-old alumni who visited school with stories of professional success but emptiness in their eyes.

They talked to me. I listened. Sometimes they said it. Often they didn’t, but I could tell: they were carrying deep hurt within them. So, just like that…I felt a need to go bigger with my life, to help these people bring the sparkle back to their eyes. Honestly, quite simply, that’s what my work is about.

At this point in my life, my deep interest is doing my best to be a full-spectrum human being. I know, sounds weird. It means feeling free to feel the full range of emotions without grasping on to any of them. Just be present to what happens and appreciate this tricked-out ferris wheel of life, even when I want to display a “Do Not Enter” sign in front of it, which is at least once-a-week.

I know this though: I believe in people. I have an ocean of belief in my wife and young daughter–the little one who flits around the house like a hummingbird. All of that child energy! She makes me feel young and old all at once. I believed in my dear, old friend and mentor, Dr. George Hay, a pioneering therapist and a true healer–the best I’ve ever seen. I was his last protege. I accompanied him during his hospice stay.

From his hospital bed, he would hold my hand and whisper himself to sleep, then squeeze my hand with suddenness just before he dozed. Those whispers held deep truths, I’m sure of it. That squeeze, over and over again, transmitted something quite powerful: a deep love, an ironclad trust, a rising faith that remains as mysterious today as it did then when I stared wide-eyed at that mammoth, loving hand years ago.

After he died, my call deepened. I have been determined to carry on his compassionate, fun and creative tradition of transforming peoples’ “survival selves” to their deeper, more playful one who is at ease with life.

So, now, if you catch me looking at your hands it’s not because I’m coveting your watch or jewelry (Or. Is. it.!); it’s because your hands are involuntarily doing exactly what George’s hands did: welcome, connect, give. Then I might lean in to listen deeply for your whisper.