Shannon Hervey-Lentz has taught in PWR for ten years, starting in 2015. In addition to her work in PWR, she recently completed an MA in Psychology Counseling at Palo Alto University. The newsletter wanted to find out about the intersection of her work as a rhetorician and a psychological scholar.
Shannon says that she’s interested in the role of writing in reflecting, reinforcing, and/or challenging our conceptions of self and how the process of writing may influence broader social, cultural, and economic impacts. Her current PWR 1 course is "The Rhetoric of Wellness: The Social Context of Mental and Physical Health and Wellbeing" and her PWR 2 course is "The Rhetoric of Bodies."
Newsletter: Can you tell us a bit about how you got this new area of study?
Shannon: Well, I’ve always had a lingering fascination with psychoanalytic theory—something about dreams, defense mechanisms, and childhood chaos has always made me feel strangely at home. More broadly, I’ve been drawn to the intricacies of the human experience and the mess and magic of human relationships. But I think the real pivot point came while teaching at Stanford.
Over time, I noticed that students weren’t just writing about ideas—they were writing from them. Their projects often carried emotional weight: grief, identity, trauma, longing. And sometimes that weight would land mid-office hours or surface in the third sentence of a draft. I started wondering: why are these academic endeavors hitting so deeply? What’s actually happening here, beneath the surface of a research question?
Eventually, I realized I was doing some form of low-budget therapy without a license. I was walking students to the counseling center a little too often—basically the unpaid intern of CAPS. And while I cared deeply, I also knew it was no longer responsible (or sustainable) to keep showing up as both instructor and pseudo-therapist. So I thought: maybe it’s time to get the tools to actually be helpful.
That curiosity—and a little burnout—nudged me into psychology and counseling, where I’m now learning how to sit with the hard stuff more ethically, more effectively, and with fewer emergency walk-and-talks. I should also note that I started my degree in late 2020 - while common COVID-19 distractions included things like sourdough starters or bird watching, going back to school was definitely one way I coped (or distracted myself…) from the shared existential crisis of the moment.
Where are you now in the process of becoming a professional counselor?
I’ve completed the clinical requirements—both one-on-one and group therapy hours—to finish my degree and advance to Associate Marriage and Family Counselor (AMFT) status. During my training, I had the opportunity to counsel at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, working primarily with LGBTQ+ young people and couples. It was some of the most meaningful, arduous, rewarding, and honestly, thrilling work I’ve ever done. As a queer, married person who was also going through the IVF process at the time, it was a particularly rich and humbling confluence of personal and professional experience.
With my degree, I’m qualified to pursue either or both the LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) and LPCC (Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor) licensures. Initially, my plan was to transition fully into therapeutic work after graduation. But then 2023 happened—and with it, some unexpected but welcome shifts. I became a parent, and I’m expecting another baby in October. That experience reshaped my relationship to work. I’ve always loved working, but I no longer feel the same need for it to provide complete fulfillment—because a lot of that meaning now comes from family.
Interestingly, my training in counseling also transformed my teaching practice. My time at the Pacific Center didn’t just establish my therapeutic orientation—it shifted my emotional register in the classroom, renewed my sense of purpose, and gave me tools to navigate student needs in more sustainable, compassionate ways. Teaching now feels more alive to me (or at least alive in a different way), more authentically reciprocal, and far less prone to burnout. So while I may pursue more therapeutic hours in the future to secure the LMFT or LPCC, for now, I’m focused on teaching and parenting, both of which feel deeply aligned with where I want to be.
What do you most enjoy about doing the counseling work?
I really love the relational nature of this work—the part that reminds us nobody exists in a vacuum. Everything is contextual. Family systems theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy, even mindfulness-based cognitive therapy all offer different angles on this, but they share a recognition that our emotional lives are embedded in relationships—past and present, internal and external. I’m especially drawn to that beautiful messiness: people as puzzles, intricate and layered and sometimes contradictory. Holding space for all of that complexity with compassion feels healing—not just for clients, but for me too.
There’s also something powerful in that tension between individual agency and broader social realities. We teach people skills and strategies—how to ride the waves, so to speak—but we’re also asking them to do so in a sea that might be choppy for reasons entirely outside their control. Helping people navigate that balance—surf it, even—toward some more grounded experience of health and meaning? That’s a gift.
At the same time, I’m energized by how the field is evolving. Psychology and counseling have long been shaped by white, Western, cis male perspectives. It’s exciting to see more practitioners and modalities emerge that challenge that status quo. Approaches like Culturally Responsive Therapy feel more collaborative, more attuned to the realities of race, gender, power, and culture. There are also some crucial paradigm shifts happening around how we define “normality”—and whether we should at all. The critique of applying Western diagnostic criteria like PTSD to communities with different ways of processing and expressing distress is long overdue. These kinds of conversations—about who the field is for, what health actually means, and how care can be more just—are part of what makes this work feel urgent and alive.
How does this new path in your life influence your practice as a teacher?
In every way. If I had to break it down, I’d say there are three tiers: the ineffable, the thematic, and the intellectual.
First, there’s the ineffable stuff: how I show up in the classroom, how I relate to students, how I feel about the work itself. Training in counseling—and, honestly, becoming a parent—has taught me a lot about presence. I lean on mindfulness-based strategies more than I used to, which helps me stay grounded and attuned. That’s made a real difference in student-teacher relationships; I can better sense when something’s off, or when a student is edging toward something meaningful and hard. It also means I’m more regulated myself, which (let’s be honest) helps prevent the slow drift toward burnout that can sometimes creep in when you’re managing a hundred small and large emotions a day. The classroom feels more exciting now, less like a performance and more like a place to genuinely connect.
Second, there are the course themes. I teach "The Rhetoric of Wellness" and "The Rhetoric of Bodies"—both of which have some serious overlap with the worlds of psychology and counseling. Students pursue fascinating, layered topics: how Stanford does (or doesn’t) support students with disabilities; how hospital architecture shapes healing; how sports equipment designed for male-bodied athletes puts female-bodied athletes at risk; how Black women navigate sexual identity amid harmful stereotypes; and how public health campaigns like Make America Healthy Again borrow wellness language to advance pseudoscience and political ideology. These aren’t just academic topics. They’re personal, complex, emotionally charged. My background in psychology helps me hold space for those tensions, ask better questions, and help students grapple with the social and systemic forces embedded in their ideas.
Third—and maybe most exciting for me intellectually—this path has deepened my research interests. I’m currently working on a paper that bridges rhetoric, composition, and psychology, which I hope to share at conferences at some point (but, let’s be real… I have a toddler and am pregnant while eyeballs deep in a home renovation project, so…). I’m exploring how emotional intelligence supports creative thinking, perspective-taking, and the art of conversation in writing and research. All essential to rhetorical craftsmanship—but rarely discussed in writing pedagogy. We talk about structure and logic and audience, but not enough about self-awareness, cultural sensitivity, emotional regulation, or adaptability—all of which are central to writing well in a complex, diverse world. But I don’t just think these attributes make the writing better, I think the writing has potential to develop these attributes in the author.
So yes—in every way. It’s made me a different kind of teacher. Maybe a softer one. Hopefully a sharper one. Definitely one who’s more likely to ask, “How are you really doing?” and stay curious about the answer.
How has it changed your thinking around the field of rhetoric?
In many ways, I think I’ve always approached rhetoric through a biopsychosocial lens—even before I had the vocabulary that counseling and psychology training has given me. I’ve long been interested in how we make sense of the world, and I see writing and research as powerful tools for that meaning-making. The classroom, especially in the context of research-based argumentation, becomes a space where students get to experiment with ideas, locate themselves within (or outside of) dominant discourses, and come to see their writing as a form of action.
The field of rhetoric has always acknowledged that language is not just descriptive but constitutive—that it shapes how we think, how we relate, and how we move through the world. It’s dialogic, meaning it lives in the shared space between self and other. And it's closely tied to mental activity—what Vygotsky might call "inner speech." These ideas have taken on new depth for me since stepping more fully into the world of counseling. There’s now a greater sense of awe for how language coordinates behavior, mediates power, and constructs both individual and collective identity.
What’s changed, perhaps, is that I feel a deeper conviction that research writing—especially when taught with intention—can be a site of profound cognitive and emotional growth. There’s something both personal and communal happening in the rhetorical process. It requires introspection, perspective-taking, curiosity, and the willingness to shift or refine one's view in the presence of new evidence or human stories. All of that aligns beautifully with what I care about in counseling: relationality, context, growth.
So yes, rhetoric has always been interdisciplinary—but now, for me, it feels even more alive. It's not just a method of persuasion or analysis; it’s a deeply human process that helps us survive, connect, and imagine better ways of being.
What's the most surprising thing that you have experienced in your process of becoming a counselor?
Maybe it’s not the most surprising thing, but it’s the one that returns to me almost every day: just how much pain people are carrying, quietly and constantly. And how good we’ve all become at distracting ourselves from that pain—or minimizing it in others. It’s easy to dismiss what doesn’t look familiar or to assume someone’s doing fine (or that we ourselves are) because they’re high-functioning or smiling or just “seem okay.”
But alongside that pain is something else: this relentless, often astonishing, effort toward healing. People show up for therapy not because it’s easy, but because somewhere in them they believe things can get better. That belief—even when it’s quiet or shaky—is both baffling and beautiful.
And this next part I say a little bit despite myself, because I don’t exactly identify as “woo woo”—a term many of my students enjoy. But there does seem to be this thin, almost imperceptible veil between anguish and joy. And witnessing people come to understand that it’s a veil—not a brick wall—is something that feels spiritual. Not in a religious sense necessarily, but in the sense that it touches something deeper about what it means to be human. That’s been the biggest surprise: how often I find myself awed.
