Needing More Time
I just plain old need more time.
I am always amazed at how quickly time goes when you are trying to get to a big picture - conference, life plans, long-term clinical goals...
In the past 16 years that I have worked at my facility, we have moved from a long-term care model where clients stayed with us for their entire education to a shorter-term care model where we may only get 3-4 months with a resident before he or she is transitioned to another setting.
SIDE NOTE: I know that 3-4 months is a long time in the views of other therapists who are in acute treatment settings or in hospitals, but for school therapists, 3-4 months is just a blink of the eye.
As a music therapist focusing on treating kids who are under-served or difficult to serve due to intellectual, developmental, and psychiatric disorders, I often feel that I could help my clients more if I only had more time. This change in the length of stay of our clients has made my therapy style change dramatically.
When your time is much shorter than it used to be, your priorities change.
I watched the movie, A Thousand Words, this weekend. It was concerned with time, priorities, and being cognizant of the sense of every word you utter. I enjoyed it.
I head back into my music therapy clinic tomorrow with a renewed sense of the importance of music in my clients' lives. My time with them may be short, so it becomes essential that music provide my clients with long-term benefits and help them when I am not around them.
I need to focus more on fading into function.
Hmmmm...
I am always amazed at how quickly time goes when you are trying to get to a big picture - conference, life plans, long-term clinical goals...
In the past 16 years that I have worked at my facility, we have moved from a long-term care model where clients stayed with us for their entire education to a shorter-term care model where we may only get 3-4 months with a resident before he or she is transitioned to another setting.
SIDE NOTE: I know that 3-4 months is a long time in the views of other therapists who are in acute treatment settings or in hospitals, but for school therapists, 3-4 months is just a blink of the eye.
As a music therapist focusing on treating kids who are under-served or difficult to serve due to intellectual, developmental, and psychiatric disorders, I often feel that I could help my clients more if I only had more time. This change in the length of stay of our clients has made my therapy style change dramatically.
When your time is much shorter than it used to be, your priorities change.
I watched the movie, A Thousand Words, this weekend. It was concerned with time, priorities, and being cognizant of the sense of every word you utter. I enjoyed it.
I head back into my music therapy clinic tomorrow with a renewed sense of the importance of music in my clients' lives. My time with them may be short, so it becomes essential that music provide my clients with long-term benefits and help them when I am not around them.
I need to focus more on fading into function.
Hmmmm...
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