Elizabeth Taets Von Amerongen, the new director of Syracuse University’s Disability Cultural Center, described her career path as “circuitous,” one that was longer than the most direct way.

Her personal philosophy, career path and life experiences serve to influence her new work at the DCC.

She is looking to bring a philosophy to the DCC that focuses on the emotional existence of people. The philosophy’s framework involves helping students figure out who they are, where they belong in the world and what their meaning and purpose is.

“It has to do with feeling that you’re contributing to something much bigger than yourself so that you don’t get so lost in the weeds,” she said.

She began her undergraduate education with the goal of becoming a lawyer. As a first-generation college student, she didn’t have the opportunity to see what being a lawyer looked like while growing up. Once in law school, Taets Von Amerongen discovered that it wasn’t the right career for her. 

“I had to figure out, so if that’s not the type of counselor I want to be, what type of counselor am I meant to become?” she said. “I knew I wanted to help people, and I knew I wanted to help people as they struggled with various things in life.”

She ultimately attended graduate school at SU, where she discovered psychotherapy and earned a master’s degree in counseling. She then earned a doctorate in philosophy, interpretation and culture from SUNY Binghamton. Taets Von Amerongen researched, wrote, taught and hosted a radio show as a hobby in each city she lived in after graduate school. 

In April, Taets Von Amerongen was named director of the DCC. Diane Wiener, the center’s former and founding director, moved to the university’s Burton Blatt Institute in January to take on the role of research professor and associate director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach. 

Taets Von Amerongen said after she learned she would be returning to SU, she felt both total elation, and like she was coming home.

“I was getting to take a leadership position in an area that is so near and dear to my heart,” she said. “It was amazing.”

While studying counseling at SU, Taets Von Amerongen began to feel as though psychotherapy was the field that would allow her to best help people, she said. It was in her doctoral studies, however, that she made the connection that would help bridge her career in counseling to her current position as DCC director. 

Taets Von Amerongen worked as a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor at Sunshine Coast Health Centre in Canada before coming to SU. Most of her work in therapy has consisted of working with people who have co-occurring disorders — when one has both a mental health and substance use disorder — or process addictions. As part of her director position, she’s working on expanding the DCC’s focus to include invisible disabilities, such as learning disabilities, she said. 

Wiener, the DCC’s founding director, was Taets Von Amerongen’s mentor and dissertation chair at SUNY Binghamton University. At the time, Wiener was an assistant professor in the college’s social work department. 

Taets Von Amerongen said Wiener helped her as she struggled with her disability identity and her identity as a Chicana. She came from a family of generational poverty. She was the first in her family to go to college and was also a teen mother.

Wiener described her as genuine, driven, brilliant and compassionate — someone who will fight to make sure that people’s rights are honored. Taets Von Amerongen is also a good listener, not just through her training and background as a counselor but because of who she is as a person, Wiener said. 

The two of them would meet at a diner in Binghamton to work on Taets Von Amerongen’s dissertation, outlining ideas on the diner’s napkins, Wiener said. 

“Her devotion to her family and to the rights of people of all kinds of different marginalized identities was evident to me in what she wanted to write about and how she conducted herself as a scholar-activist or activist-scholar,” she said.

The location of the DCC on SU’s campus allows for Taets Von Amerongen to continue the intersectional work that Wiener first mentored her in at Binghamton, she said. The DCC shares a suite in Bird Library with the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the LGBT Resource Center, a set-up that allows for a “renewed focus on intersectionality of identity and experience and what it actually means to the individual student,” she said. 

When students see the DCC as a whole, Taets Von Amerongen wants them to see a place where they can not only feel comfortable being themselves but also find others on a similar path as them. Everyone has connections that can be found if people feel comfortable enough to open up, she said. 

“The opportunity to be able to empower and amplify the voices of the folks here who are starting out on their journeys too like I was back in the day and to help them to find how they can have that larger impact … that to me is such a privilege,” she said. 

Published on September 11, 2019 at 10:26 pm

Contact India: irmiragl@syr.edu