Question: What do the Arctic Circle and psychotherapy have in common? Answer: Sally Brandel ’63.
A federal agent turned psychotherapist, Brandel’s seemingly separate lives bear common threads. The U.S. State Department named her the Senior Arctic Official in 1999 where she led several U.S. delegations, including many Alaskan natives, to the Arctic Council, an eight-nation forum for Arctic governments and peoples. The council was formed at the close of the Cold War when nations with extreme northern exposures worried about pollutants generated from all the aging military equipment trapped or sunk beneath the ice.
“It was a wonderful finish to my federal career,” she said, which was anything but boring. As a member of the CIA for a time, Brandel was sent to exotic locations all over the world to help people and nations cooperate and define self-interests. “I was always far away from home, but the internal workings of people were still the same.” The Arctic Circle was about as far away as she could get. As federal retirement loomed, Brandel longed to settle down at her home in Silver Springs, Maryland, but she was hardly ready to quit exploring.
“Trying to get nations to define self-interests and trying to get small groups of people to define self-interests—there are many similarities,” she said. “It’s the same kind of exploration.” Brandel enrolled in psychotherapy graduate studies during the final years of her federal career. “When I was embarking on this new adventure I got more excited about work and school.”
She retired from the government when her studies required an internship. Brandel earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology last summer. Today, she is beginning a private practice and belongs to several psychotherapy associations. She co-leads an incest survivors group and plans to specialize in counseling cancer patients.
Brandel sees her life as a tapestry of related events, which began with keeping the peace between students as a junior advisor at Denison University, between nations as a federal agent, and now between families and individuals as a psychotherapist. “I feel very lucky to have drwan these threads together,” she said.