Teach Me to Love Myself

<p>Holly Elliott was familiar with forging new paths. As she describes in her memoir Teach Me to Love Myself she was probably the first professionally trained deaf counselor-therapist in the United States. In her initial position as intern and then staff member at the University of California Center on Deafness she became an advocate of total communication-a combination of sign language lip-reading and oral competency that was a new horizon for rehabilitation therapy for the deaf. She was one of the first individuals with inner-ear nerve degeneration to receive a prototype cochlear implant and several years later one of the first to have an implant upgraded. Finally in a more general sense of pathbreaking she made a courageous career shift at mid-life. After twenty-five years of marriage and child-rearing she accepted her deafness and embarked on a retraining that eventually led to a distinguished professional career.Holly Elliott was an unusual role model for women of her time and still speaks to our twenty-first-century experience.</p>