After her own experience as a military spouse, Elizabeth Burgin, Ph.D., changed her career path to improve the lives of others with military family and affiliations.
When Elizabeth’s husband, Russ, was stationed in Georgia, the family moved from New York City and Elizabeth knew her job as a designer wouldn’t transfer with her.
“I took a part-time job and was working at a redeployment center, which is essentially a recreation room where individuals who are returning from deployments come back to,” said the College of Education alumna. “I was, in many ways, the first stop when people got off the plane and it was the first place people could go to use the phone or Internet and connect with their families once they were stateside.”
In this position, Elizabeth gained another perspective into the military community and it prompted her to pursue a new vocation.
“In the course of that work, even though my job was mostly administrative tasks, I encountered a lot of people who were in the midst of very significant life experiences,” she said. “Getting training in mental health had always been in the back of my mind. As I got to know the people in this redeployment center and saw people, who were sometimes there for months at a time, I felt there was a need for them to feel heard and get support for the very unique things that they were experiencing. As much as I loved design and had a passion for it, watching our loved ones deploy, and in some cases losing them, gave me this feeling that there was more that I could do as a new member to the military community.”
When her family relocated again, this time to Fort Carson, Elizabeth began looking into her options for graduate school. She was accepted into the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at UCCS, where she made lifelong connections with her cohort and faculty and gained valuable real-world experience.
“They created such a warm and compassionate climate in the program,” said Elizabeth. “I’m still very close friends with several of the people who were in my cohort. I’ve been in their weddings and we talk on a very regular basis. I feel very lucky that I felt so much belonging in that community, and I credit that to the culture of cooperation that the faculty created in the program and the nature of the curriculum that really challenged us to see people’s humanity.”
With the program’s emphasis on practical learning, Elizabeth was quickly applying her lessons and serving her community members with a combination of clinical knowledge and compassion.
“I really valued the setup of the program in that you jump straight into learning clinical skills and getting involved in roles that serve the community,” Elizabeth said. “You’re in front of clients in the spring of your first year, so that responsibility of someone’s mental health being in our hands was very much a part of the culture. It gave me this professional foundation of being able to center clients and put their needs first and view my role in the system in a way that prioritizes their humanity, and allows me to see the ways that different levels of adversity and social protection influence the trajectory of people.”
That compassion culture extended not only to clients and curriculum, but to the students themselves. Elizabeth noted how her professors encouraged her and helped shift her perspective of her own capabilities.
“The UCCS faculty were such generous mentors,” said Elizabeth. “It was right around graduation that a couple of faculty, including Dr. Wehrman, Dr. Leanne Morgan and Dr. Julian Field, each pulled me aside and urged me to pursue a doctorate and I was taken aback by that. I am a first-generation college student with a bachelor’s in fashion design, and so I viewed myself more as a creative type and not as academic. I never thought that I would get a master’s degree, much less a doctorate. It was a unique moment for me to stop and think about how these professors saw and understood me, that they wanted to encourage me in that path.”
Elizabeth did pursue a doctorate, earning a doctoral degree in counseling at the University of North Texas, and is now a military behavioral health child counselor at the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP), which is housed in in the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
“My role is to review literature and develop trainings that reflect best practices in working with military-connected youth around a range of mental health issues,” she explained. “In the past year we’ve tackled topics from best practices for working with families who have a child with autism to best practices in suicide prevention, and we just kicked off a series on evidence-based practice for addressing the mental health-associated outcomes of pediatric sleep problems. We take an interdisciplinary approach and our training audience includes medical providers, like nurses, physicians assistants and physicians, as well as a full range of mental health professionals, including psychologists, social workers and counselors.”
This is only one component of Elizabeth’s role, as she also works with other organizations to support their initiatives and pursues additional research avenues.
“The biggest part of my work is to do research and develop those trainings, but another significant portion of my work involves partnering with military service organizations, researchers and others who serve the military population in different capacities,” she said. “We organize ourselves under a framework called collective impact, and my organization serves as a support backbone of sorts, meaning that we host events, facilitate communication among all seventy of our collaborating organizations and help facilitate the creation of an agenda for clinical practice.”
“I have a couple of different research projects going on right now,” continued Elizabeth. “One of them is around interventions for service members and veterans who have moral injury experiences and symptoms. Moral injury, often articulated as being a wound of the soul, is not necessarily something that frightened you, but something that made you question your belief in humanity or even in your own humanity. It could be acts that you perpetrated, acts that you witnessed or experiences of betrayal that have changed your experience of yourself or your view of the world.”
Other research initiatives of Elizabeth’s include assessments and surveys to better understand how people experience moral injury, in both military and civilian communities, and mask-making group therapy intervention for veterans, derived from the idea that many veterans have to mask their experience of mental health symptoms and their history of morally injurious experiences. She’s also finishing a research series on how surviving caregivers and their children are relating to one another and how they experience their own mental health symptoms in the years following the bereavement of their familial service member.
Recently Elizabeth had the opportunity to work with Wehrman again, this time as a fellow colleague. In addition to her many other projects, Elizabeth made the trip back to UCCS in February when she and Wehrman piloted a military-focused training curriculum for the National Board for Certified Counselors Foundation’s Mental Health Facilitator program.
The training, which aims to provide non-mental health practitioners with basic mental health resources and skills for use within their own communities, aligns with Elizabeth’s overall goal of helping military personnel and their families navigate their mental health.
“The idea is that we can provide one another with supportive listening skills that hopefully allow us to problem solve and feel a sense of support and belonging just within our communities, and that those people have an idea of how to refer others to a more specialized or higher level of support,” said Elizabeth. “We’re mobilizing more members of our community to be mental health informed so they can be advocates for seeking care when it’s necessary and just being supportive members of the community. Especially within the military population, where collectivism and camaraderie are such important values, it makes such a big difference.”