 "Photo: Joshua Doby for The Hilltop")
The furniture is arranged in an open manner, with a comfortable couch directly across from two cushioned chairs. An Irish saying sits atop a stand nearby, “I believe in the sun when it's not shining, I believe in love even when I feel it not, I believe in God even when He is silent.”
Each week, Cassandra Pavone, the new director of counseling at Mars Hill College, welcomes her guests and clients into her peaceful corner of the MHC Infirmary. Her goal is to impart calm. Even her cream blouse and khaki pants compliment the mood subtly. She listens, encourages and helps the MHC community through life’s tribulations.
Pavone, a 1975 alumna of MHC, has been ushered into MHC life with nothing short of a packed schedule.
“The hardest part is making sure I have enough time to see people who want to come in,” she recently said of her new job.
Pavone’s experience in the counseling field speaks of her qualification – she has been a volunteer and manager at a rape crisis center and an executive director of a family services center. Most recently, she was the director of counseling at Montreat College, in Black Mountain for five years, before arriving at MHC this semester.
Besides counseling, Pavone’s jobs have included teacher, law officer and real estate agent.
Pavone earned a business degree, then taught middle and highschool grades in North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio. Several factors lead her from teaching to counseling, she said.
“In teaching, I realized that kids had a lot of problems, and it was difficult to learn sometimes because they had a lot of family issues, and I thought they could benefit from counseling,” Pavone said.
Additionally, Pavone’s husband worked in a maximum security prison in Ohio at that time, and she wanted to learn more about what he did because of the stress level of his job. Volunteering at the local mental health center allowed her to gain a better understanding of her husband’s work and to be more supportive.
When her family moved back to western North Carolina, Pavone earned her master’s from Western Carolina University in counseling. Although she planned to be a high school counselor, she did not enjoy her internship at the secondary education level. Pavone wanted to have more therapeutic involvement with people.
Pavone’s involvement at the Rape Crisis Center in Asheville allowed her to gain experience in dealing with victims of sexual assault.
She first only counseled adults, but her work soon expanded to include children, as awareness of adolescent and child sexual abuse became prevalent.
Then Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department invited Pavone to head up the Special Investigations Unit. The unit investigated sexual assaults, also dealing with “child and elder assaults, too,” Pavone said.
Following her career as a law officer, Pavone spent 10 years working at the Family Services Center in Asheville with children who had experienced some form of abuse.
Then, uncharacteristically, Pavone left the counseling realm when she received a license to sell real estate in 2000. Her career change was due to burnout, a common problem in the field.
“I guess I had absorbed too much of what I had been dealing with … and felt like I needed to take a break and get a little bit better perspective on the world in general,” she said. “Sometimes we have to take a break from it, not just to refresh ourselves but to understand that we are capable of doing something other than that one thing that we’ve done forever and ever.”
Pavone returned to counseling when she became the director of counseling at Montreat College, where services are a bit less comprehensive. She said MHC offers a variety.
“It really is a gift. A lot of colleges aren’t able to offer these services,” Pavone said.
The counseling center offers individual, couples and group counseling. Because many MHC students are taking advantage of these free services, it is best to drop in and schedule an appointment, Pavone advised.
The center can educate students on a wide variety of issues: depression, suicidal behavior, alcohol and drug use, sexual assault, assertiveness training and more.
“We also do a couple of orientations on mental health issues and how to recognize how they [students] themselves have issues or their friends do,” Pavone said.
Disability services are another part of the counseling center.
“If student has a documented disability … and they bring us paper work … then we can assist them in getting the help that they need to be successful in getting their educational degree,” she said.
Pavone would also like to hold seminars that concentrate on time and money management.
“We are going to try to bring people in from the community that specialize in different areas,” she said.
For Pavone, information overload can contribute to personal identity issues such as confusion about how best a person can make a difference in the world.
“You have to know yourself pretty well not to get off on the wrong track or get confused,” she said.
“Helping them [students] to realize who they are and create their own identity is an exciting thing to be a part of,” she said.
The opportunities that now exist in society can create more stress and confusion about what a person wants to do and how he or she wants to impact the world, she commented.
Pavone advises students to deal with these stress issues with organization, flexibility, support systems and physical health.
“Getting enough rest, exercising and eating right are things that relieve people’s stress,” she said. “If you don’t do those things, it catches up with you, and you do suffer a lot more from stress.”
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