Founder’s Statement
Shari Foos, M.A., M.F.T.
When I left college to come to Los Angeles thirty years ago, I had intended to work in television and eventually complete the Bachelor’s degree I’d left unfinished. Within two weeks I had an apartment and a job. I worked in offices during the day and spent nights and weekends rehearsing and performing. It was slow and frustrating. I felt that my most cherished goals were always slightly out of reach.

My formative years had reinforced the idea that I was, as I’d been told by my father, “bad, lazy, no good.” We lived in a wealthy community but for us money was scarce, and my difference was apparent to me and to my peers, who were sometimes cruel and seemed to take their blessings for granted. I reacted by becoming a “bad girl,” yet beneath my rebellious risk-taking were tremendous feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. I used my sense of humor and my willingness to be outrageous (often at my own expense) to gain attention. My strategy worked — I was noticed. But I also paid a price: I barely graduated from high school. Later, no amount of professional or personal success could affect the ideas I had developed about myself and my abilities, society and my place in it, until I addressed them directly, as a learner and a developing intellectual. It was only by turning toward the root of one of my greatest fears — my shameful image of myself as a bad student and a “dummy who’d never amount to anything” — that I could tackle this problem with the only possible cure: a positive educational experience.