Thoughtful Thursday: Being Prepared

It is Thursday, and we are getting ready for another wave of wintry weather to blow through our area. We will be under a winter weather advisory all day tomorrow. I wonder if my superintendent will cancel school on Friday. If so, I need an administrative decision about whether I will offer shopping in the store or my inclement weather schedule tomorrow. I think I'll ask my assistant principal for a decision today, just in case...

When days like this happen, days when I am waiting for something to happen but am not quite sure what nature will bring to us all, I try to go with the Girl Scout (and Boy Scout also) motto of "Be Prepared." This idea has been drummed into my head since (almost) birth, and it is part of my world view and outlook. I know that some people will not like what I write about here, but this is my blog, my place to share my thoughts and feelings and opinions, and this is one of my core foundational beliefs.

I believe in thinking through as many possibilities as possible before going into known (and unknown) situations.

When I am sitting down to organize sessions with clients, I tend to think about those clients in three different states - optimal, distressed, and overstimulated. When I select my therapeutic music experiences, I think about how I could change musical elements, compositions, speech patterns, instruments, and visuals to support my clients in the emotional and behavioral states that they present to me at the time of the session. I then have many options to use when that session actually arrives. I've thought of many ways to get my clients to their goals and objectives.

When I was a music therapy youngling (before my internship - during my clinical practica), I was awarded "Most Flexible" when it came to session implementation. I think my poor supervisor had no idea what to do with me at the beginning of the session. She would sit in the observation room and check off the things that I did in my session plans. If I wavered or varied in my implementation from the written plan in ANY way, I was challenged to explain my decisions. When we started, I'm not sure if she expected me to follow my script exactly. I hope she didn't, but I'm not sure about that. She would ask me why I shifted the order of my TMEs around during the session. I would answer that it seemed that the clients weren't ready to sit quietly and listen to a story...they needed to wiggle first, so we wiggled and then listened to the story. I always did everything that was on my plan, but not always in the order that I wrote it for grading. Once she realized that I had therapeutic reasons for changes and my thoughts, our relationship became a bit better. She acknowledged that my reasons were based in what I was seeing and interpreting from my clients, and there were no more challenges.

As a therapist, I have to be prepared to handle everything that could possibly happen. Snownado? Yep, I have a strategy for how to handle that if it happens. Broken instrument in the middle of a session? Yep. I have handled that many times. Client screaming obscenities in an attempt to rile me up? Too many times to count. I have practiced remaining calm in emergencies, in times when clients are intent on hurting me, and when no one is interested in anything I do or say or attempt. I can keep my calm voice and most of my body calm (my hands shake which indicates my level of stress and arousal and upset) in crisis situations. Once the situations are over, I fall to pieces, but my job in the moment is to be the calm, rational adult who has to handle things in a safe manner.

Be prepared.

Music therapy sessions aren't always "happy children making happy sounds." There are times when clients do not engage as expected. Get accustomed to this idea because it will happen. It doesn't matter what population you end up working with - there will be times when your session plans do not go as you envision. If you know this fact, then you can start to plan for what you will do when (not if - when) your clients do not do what you expect them to do. 

Be prepared.

I did the bare minimum grocery shopping on Monday evening, so I have enough food stuffs to get through a snowy weekend, if needed. I have candles and matches around my house if the power goes out. I have my ice scraper, emergency kit, and sleeping bag in my car trunk again. I have also spent a bit of time thinking through snow day session strategies, and I will spend more time planning things out before tomorrow arrives.

Be prepared.