Story by Emily Williams, Features Editor
Photo courtesy of Marie Karlsson
It has been said that some of the most useful lessons you can learn in your field of work cannot be found within the bindings of a textbook.
Murray State graduate students Morgan Wild of Pinckneyville, Illinois and Tara Pursley of Marshall County have found this to be true in their own lives after taking part in an experiential learning program that gave them the tools they needed to move forward boldly in their pursuit of a career in the area of clinical psychology.
Under the guidance and leadership of Marie Karlsson, assistant professor of psychology, the two students had the opportunity to learn outside the boundaries of their classroom and a run-of-the-mill clinic last semester.
The program, which was brought to Murray State by Karlsson shortly after her arrival in the fall of 2016, allows two clinical psychology graduate students per semester the opportunity to visit a women’s prison once a week for eight weeks. During this time, students are able to work with incarcerated women who have been sexually abused in their lifetime.
“Research shows that most incarcerated women have sexual victimization experiences, especially childhood violence,” Karlsson said.
Karlsson said research suggests that sexual abuse is a pathway to prison for these women, meaning that they tend to grow up in very abusive households. As the effect of the abuse progresses, it becomes substance abuse and mental health problems which eventually leads them into the prison system or the legal system.
“Most of them have been through a lot of trauma,” Karlsson said. “The reason we focus on the sexual violence is because that tends to lead to most problems. So our assumption is that even though they have all these things going on, the sexual trauma is kind of underneath all of it.”
Pursley said she has always been very passionate about working with women who have been sexually assaulted. She said the women in the prison system oftentimes are not given the opportunity to receive help in addressing the mental health issues that stem from their abuse.
“For me, it was very rewarding to give services to a group that wouldn’t get it if we weren’t to provide it for them,” Pursley said. “It was also really rewarding on a personal level. There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t have been able to learn from an academic standpoint, had I not been able to do this.”
Karlsson said the key point is to give these women a safe environment to make sense of the trauma they have undergone through a treatment called exposure therapy.
“The idea for someone who’s had sexual trauma, or any kind of trauma, is that they need time to process the memory,” Karlsson said. “Because the memory itself has become scary and out of control. So the main part of the treatment is that each one of these women will share their story around sexual trauma and we help them to select the one that has affected them the most.”
Wild said while everything is rather unpredictable while they are at the women’s prison, it’s helpful to see their supervisor in action and watch firsthand how to deal with situations.
“Marie teaches us really innovative ways to rely on our gut and feel in the moment, so it was a really cool experience to apply that to individuals,” Wild said.
Karlsson said the most challenging aspect of going to the women’s prison for students is the massive learning curve.
“When you go to the prison, everything intensifies,” Karlsson said. “It’s overwhelming and there’s a lot going on that you’re trying to make sense of. Then you get through all of that and you learn a lot.”
Pursley said this learning curve is not something she would get in a classroom.
“The experience that I got from that group has helped me tremendously,” Pursley said. “Because we’re very protected here, right? We’re very safe, we have rules and a structure on what we can do. But in the real world, you really kind of have to fend for yourself and figure out what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s the best way to do things, what’s the worst way to do things. The experience that we got in that group has helped a ton with trying to determine how to practice in a real world setting.”
Wild said before jumping into this program, she did not really have an idea of what she wanted to specialize in within her field. But after jumping in headfirst, she learned a lot.
“Up in this [Murray State’s Psychological] clinic, you have a caseload of seven therapy clients and four assessments,” Wild said. “I thought this would be a really different way to get outside of the clinic as well as do something in a group. That’s really unique to the type of work we’re doing, because not a lot of people are doing this therapy in a group and in a women’s prison. It ended up really helping me in my individual sessions.”
Karlsson said she began doing this work when she was a graduate student at The University of Arkansas in January of 2012. She said that they now have research on treatment outcomes from over 30 groups.
“We’ve collected data on these groups now for six years or so and we know that they work,” Karlsson said. “The techniques that we’re using are not new, but what is new is to do it in the prison. About 7 out of 10 women improve so much that it suggest they are qualitatively feeling and doing a whole lot better.”
Wild said the experience has opened her eyes to all the different possibilities of how she and others like her can help women.
“What I learned, I learned in the group,” Wild said. “Really, like, experiential learning. I learned it on the fly and then if we messed up, then we said, ‘Well I shouldn’t have done that. So what should I do next time?’ It was really easy to self-correct and learn from it.”