Eugene Hall and Tom Hegblom recently joined CCAPS as resident faculty members in the MPS in Integrated Behavioral Health and MPS in Addictions Counseling programs. We chatted with them about their backgrounds, their teaching styles, and what they wish they knew when they were in graduate school.

Meet Eugene Hall

Eugene Hall is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in Minneapolis and an AAMFT Approved Supervisor. His research interests centered around sexual and gender minority stress. Clinically, he has specialized training in working with PTSD, substance use, and personality disorders.

Eugene Hall

What did you study in college?

Eugene Hall: I started out in child psych, and then somebody said, you seem like a family systems person, you should check out that department. So I took a few classes and loved it. I was immediately sold on family therapy. I went right from the U to St. Thomas and did my master’s in counseling psychology with a concentration in family psychology. So that sets you up for an LMFT (marriage and family therapy) licensure. But sometime during that program I decided I wanted to go back to the U and do my PhD in family science (couple and family therapy). After that I did a postdoc at Boston University.

How did you come to teach at the University of Minnesota?

Eugene: I had taught a fair amount during my PhD program. I also did a teaching fellowship in the Family Social Science Department, where I did the intro class Preparing Future Faculty at the U, which was great. Once I got out to Boston the pandemic happened a few months later, so I ended up coming back and opening a practice. I had always known I was going to come back to academia at some point. I appreciate the reciprocal relationship of teaching and clinical work. Having direct clinical work to draw from has been so valuable for me in the classroom.

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

Eugene: I think it might be seeing students really start to get it, or you know, things fall in place, and how that influences their excitement about doing this job and the lives that they are going to be impacting for the better. I like experiencing students developing, learning, making those connections.

How would you describe your teaching style?

Eugene: I would say I take sort of a collaborative approach or come from that paradigm. I think it is similar in a lot of ways to how I do therapy myself. I think there's a lot of innate knowledge, a lot of lived experience that is all just really beneficial. I think every student brings in their own experience and their own knowledge, especially now with the growing diversity in the field. What was once a pretty homogeneous profession is now becoming less so, which is great. I think people are just exposed to so many different experiences that, in and of itself, really impacts people's ability to do therapy with a wide range of individuals. I like to tap into that student-to-student learning as well.

How do you create—whether it's online or in person—a trusting space among the students and them with you?

Eugene: Maybe I've just been lucky in that way, but I’ve found a vast majority of students come in knowing that that's going to be the case or want that to be the case, and are respectful and open and willing to have discussions that might push people out of their comfort zone. I think it's also about bringing myself into the room and my own experiences. I try to talk about real-world examples from my life or my work (as) an invitation that we can talk about some of these things in here. So taking the lead, I suppose. And vulnerability in the classroom is some of what I'm talking about.

What do you wish you knew when you were in grad school?

Eugene: The things that get in your way of learning are often the same things that get in your way of being an effective therapist. So figuring out and addressing those from the get-go is just going to have waterfall effects in a good way. In general, self-care is huge in this field, but there are other specific things that they need to be aware of.

You know, it sucks to do assignments, to write papers, to take tests. But school is such a valuable place to do training. You have access to so many resources while you're in school that you have to pay for later in life. I think there's the sort of student mindset, where it's like, I'm just going to get it done. But make sure you're not skipping past some of the learning. It will all be really beneficial.

Which courses do you teach?

Eugene: So right now I'm teaching Research Methods and Evaluation and Introduction to Co-occurring Disorders. Next semester I'll be teaching Research Methods and Family Dynamics in Therapy.

Meet Tom Hegblom

Tom Hegblom is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) and Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor (LADC). Tom's teaching and research interests are culture and human diversity issues, specifically providing queer- and trans-affirmative mental healthcare, ethical considerations, postmodern counseling theories, expanding critical thinking among counselors, and developing the self-efficacy of counseling students. Clinically, he specializes in substance use disorders, trauma, and queer-affirming counseling.

Tom Hegblom

What did you study in college?

Tom Hegblom: My undergrad degree is in youth studies, Spanish, and educational psychology. I finished my master’s in counseling and worked primarily in the substance use disorder treatment field. I was offered an opportunity to adjunct at a graduate counseling program and really loved it, so I decided to pursue a doctorate in counselor education and supervision, which has led me here.

How did you come to teach at the University of Minnesota?

Tom: This is my second full-time university. I was teaching somewhere else last year before this position became available. It's an incredible opportunity, to be part of the University of Minnesota. I'm actually an alum of the Inter-College Program of CCAPS. So to come full circle and be back where my academic journey really started is kind of surreal. My office is in 20 Ruttan and that is where I would meet with my advisor. The Saint Paul campus is really familiar to me, which is fun.

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

Tom: It's very relationship oriented. It's fun to get to know the students on an academic level, but also to help them develop their professional identity as a counselor and envision what that means when they are sitting across from somebody who is talking about some of the hardest parts of their lives. To be able to connect with students about how powerful and remarkable the experience is as a counselor and to see them get really excited to do the work—that's what is hands-down the best part of my job.

How would you describe your teaching style?

Tom: I like to think that it's very collaborative. I'm not a stand-in-front-of-the-room kind of lecturer, and I think this is probably pretty typical for my colleagues as well. I like to be at the same level as my students. I like to be involved in discussions and conversations and role plays and sharing feedback. Graduate school is more than just digesting the content. We're operating at a higher level of Bloom's taxonomy, where we're synthesizing and applying and creating and making meaning of the stuff that we're learning. I think the best part of that for me is I learn so much. I'm a better counselor because I teach. Had I not followed this path, if I had just stayed counseling, I wouldn't have grown in my clinical skills and abilities the last few years like I have.

How do you create—whether it's online or in person—a trusting space among the students and them with you?

Tom: One of the things we do a lot in counseling is reinforce this idea of safety with clients, and so doing that in the classroom is really important, too. I might reflect to my students, “So you're experiencing this here: How does that affect how you're going to show up when you're leading a group and you expect people to be vulnerable and to have these conversations?”  

I think an important part of it is modeling my approach to creating a warm and empathic atmosphere like I would in a counseling relationship. I physically bring myself down to their level and sit with them so that there isn't a hierarchy from a visual perspective. I talk about how power and privilege are at play in counseling as the counselor, how they're at play in the classroom as the instructor, to really normalize those experiences.

What do you wish you knew when you were in grad school?

Tom: I think one of the things that I share with students quite a bit—and this is just based on my own experiences—is that it's such a fallacy to think that you're going to learn everything, and you're going to walk away from grad school as an expert. Students are exposed to a wide range of theories in a really short amount of time, and then they walk away from their training program thinking they know nothing and questioning how they will do this work because they haven’t learned anything. Students absolutely have, but it can be so overwhelming that it becomes really difficult to recognize what you do learn.

What I wish I would have known is that it's a field of continuing, ongoing development, and grad school offers the baseline. The work and the supervision and the experience sitting with clients are what really become the teacher. We’re always learning.

Which courses do you teach?

Tom: This semester I'm teaching Advanced Professional Issues, also known as Ethics and Foundations of Co-Occurring Disorders. Next semester I will teach Ethics again, along with Multicultural Foundations, Motivational Counseling, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.