my story
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Kevin Quiles (He/Him)
Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, home of the once largest satellite dish and the Taino Indians, I made my way onto New York rather quickly. There, my parents and siblings took on the challenges before us. Long story short, it wasn't until I graduated from high school and moved to Miami, Florida that I turned into a church goer. New ideas popped into my head about studying to be a minister. Thus, I graduated from Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God in the 1987. I went on to earn a Master's of Divinity degree in 95'. From there, I trained as chaplain, first in a psychiatric residential facility and later in a major hospital in South Carolina. I was fortunate in those two plus years to have excellent supervisors who held an integrated approach to psyche and Spirit. For sure, it was a nice balance.
What followed next was a career in hospice, not church. Working with adults facing that moment of transition changed me in ways I might never be able to explain. Sometimes it made sense. Other times it proved confusing. Nevertheless, I did it for 15 years. I never looked back on the Church thing. My career in hospice was my path. The dying became my teachers. And today I've been fortunate to write about it.
In the midst of my hospice career, I entered academia once again to earn a Master of Arts in Community Counseling in 2011. I began a career in private practice as Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), which I've now done for over 11 years.
Throughout my life I have engaged in some form and fashion in spiritual paths. The travels have been many, especially when confronting the Shadow. Yoga philosophy and the esoteric have become part of my personal practice toward a sense of interconnection of all things, material and immaterial.
My long relationship with the greater Self, which manifests in a variety of ways while remaining transcendence, perhaps elusive to a resistant mind, prompted a reexamination of what I learned in academia as a counselor to be. I purchased, studied, and promoted the DSM for a long time, until I eventually became disillusioned by its claims. I did a lot of digging own my own, since psychiatry and psychology do not offer it freely. What I found proved disheartening. The DSM is far from an empirically-based text. With no conclusive research to demonstrate that mental illness is due to a biological cause somewhere in the brain, psychiatry presents itself as the authority on mental suffering.
Today, when helping clients who represent different cultural realities, it is important that they don't succumb to psychiatry and psychology's narrow epistemology which dismisses the immaterial, however strange it might be, and calls for universal conformity on what is real and normal.
Education:
Southeastern College 1987
Reformed Theological Seminary 1995
Clinical Pastoral Education - Patrick B. Harris Psychiatric Hospital
Clinical Pastoral Education - Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System
Argosy University 2011
Ridgeview Institute - Internship
Member:
International Association for Near-Death Studies
