music, therapy, and me

What is your music therapy style? How do you do this job that we share? Are you a "it's all about the music shared between the client and the therapist" type, or a "all sessions must be planned around the client's goals" type? Are you someone who likes to create new music at every session opportunity, or are you someone who likes to have memorized music in predictable patterns? Are you someone who identifies as a music therapist within a specific theoretical or technical structure, or are you someone who identifies as "eclectic" when it comes to how to do this job? I am curious about how other people define themselves at the moment, probably mainly because I am moving to a new home and am going through all of my stuff. It is amazing how much stuff you can accumulate when you live in a place for 17 years, especially when you tend towards wanting and keeping all the stuff! I am wondering why I am thinking about this right now, but I think it is becau...

I am getting ready to toss things out while I am packing. I find this part of moving the most difficult for some reason. I am a packrat daughter of a packrat daughter of a packrat daughter of a woman who lived through the Depression and was a pastor's wife with six kids. I have a suspicion that she was also a packrat due to necessity. I am also the creative daughter of a creative daughter of a creative daughter of a creative daughter and repeat. None of my hobbies are simple, so I have tons of stuff that go along with the things that I like to do. I have difficulty throwing things away. I do not like having to stop in the middle of a project to go get materials, so I keep as much as I can around me at all times. That is a problem because of the stuff accumulation that happens. I still do it, but it isn't all that good for me. My new house should help with some of this stuff accumulation. I have set out stuff and no stuff zones. The upstairs will be a no stuff zone. That will be...

How did it already get to be the end of October? I am not ready for today to be today. Work isn't the issue at the moment. Home things are taking over my bandwidth, and it is almost distracting to have to go to work to do the things that are paying for my home things. If I could take the next month off, I think I would get ready for this move. I had hoped to be doing these moving things during one of my school breaks, but it just didn't happen that way. Life doesn't always happen the way you think it will. It is already one third of the last quarter of the year 2021. I have been able to be at work for this entire year - no full isolation situations at my facility. I have shared this year with two interns who have had to figure out how to do music therapy in our pandemic reality right along with me. I am currently trying to figure out how to do music therapy without an intern - something I do quite often as an internship director - get back into doing music therapy as full-t...

It is the start of the most difficult time of the year - Halloween week. Oh my goodness, there is so much excitement happening that you can cut it with a knife at my job. Kids are so excited. Staff are so excited. I am less than excited, but that's an entirely different post. From now until Winter break, we will all be in a state of emotion more than rational thought. Some of my clients will get to visit family members at least once during these months. Some of my clients will not. There will be lots of emotional outbursts, and there will be some hurt feelings. Excitement and anger will be around in equal helpings, and some of my clients will cycle between those emotions in seconds. I am already exhausted. So, what do you do when groups are full of hyper-emotional kids? You go back to the very basics of musicking. For the next several months, my therapeutic focus will be emotional catharsis and safe expression. We will do some of the things that people do during holiday seasons, bu...

I was sitting at my computer yesterday when I realized that I was grinning. I wasn't looking at anything or doing much of anything important, but I was smiling. It has been so long since I had a smile on my face just because that it felt a bit foreign to me. I took yesterday off from work, using some of my precious sick time to have a mental health day. It was a good day. I packed up some of my craft room stuff, the rest of the clothing, and some of my books. I felt like I had accomplished quite a bit, and I was smiling! I know that this doesn't seem like such a big thing, but it is not my usual way of dealing with the world. At least, it hasn't been my way lately. I can't really remember the last time I just felt happy in my own skin the way I felt yesterday. The last year and many months have been difficult, to say the least, and I think I haven't really felt like things were coming together until yesterday. I have worked with clients through almost all of the pan...

I am currently in a season of creativity and idea generation. This is always a good time for me since there are times when I end up trying  just sitting there, staring at the mess of things that are in front of me. I enjoy when songs just come out of me in the middle of music therapy sessions and when clients respond to them in ways that are beneficial to their goal growth. In my career, I have had many ups and downs when it comes to creativity, so I have learned to appreciate the ups and live through the downs knowing that there will be an upswing at some point. The problem with being in a season of creativity and idea generation is that the ideas often come faster than I can record them. Yesterday, I was strategizing about a group that had a difficult session last Friday. The group was disjointed and everyone seemed to be crabby. I was trying to incorporate music into the environment, but no one was paying attention to me - they were all staring at the peers who were engaged in b...

Egad. I am currently a bit overwhelmed and engaged in a slight anxiety episode about all the things happening in my world right now, and the post that I started today was not helping me out, so I am back, writing run-on sentences and manifesting my anxiety through writing. Deep breath. I notified my rental company that I am intending on leaving at the end of next month. I am not sure why this is causing me so much anxiety, but it really is. Everything is going like clockwork, and that is scaring me. At the same time, I am very excited and cannot wait to be moving into my very own home. Then, I look around at all the stuff that I have to pack up and actually move. I am going to pay for the moving part of things, but I need to pack as much as I can before the professionals arrive to move me. If things go as planned, I will have four days to move some things over to the house before the movers move me, so I should be able to get things packed up or toted over if I cannot pack them - like ...

I am frustrated. This probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to those of you who have been reading my posts lately, but it might surprise new readers (Hi, there, new reader!) that I am frustrated with the world of music therapy in general these days. Now, my own job is fine (just got carpet in my room), but I am extremely frustrated with things happening in our professional organization, the American Music Therapy Association. I am tired of people who decide not to be members of the organization making demands on what my organization does.  I do not have the right to demand that the Canadian Music Therapy Association do anything.  The reason? I am not a member of the Canadian Music Therapy Association ! Why do we feel that we have to cater to the demands of people who do not pay money to be members? Why do we feel that we have to change everything to accommodate the demands of those who have chosen NOT to be part of our group? Is this an example of being a therapist getti...

Oh, dear. This is going to be one of my "less than interesting to anyone except for me" type of posts. I am trying to change my life circumstances from apartment dweller to townhome owner and am in the "Why the heck do I have this much stuff, anyway?" stage. It is disheartening to see the boxes pile up with no appreciable decrease in the amount of things that need to be packed, but I must move forward. Egad! I am getting bogged down in stuff, and it is not good to be bogged down at all! I am going through my old textbooks and am sorting through what I want to keep and what I want to send out into the void of thrift stores. Since I live in a university town that has a music therapy population, I thought that sending my texts to the thrift stores might be one way to get those texts into the hands of people who cannot spend $45 on a text but who would be thrilled to get the text for $1.59. I am trying to figure out what I am going to do with the stuff that I have next ...

Gratitude is something that you hear lots about if you are in any way interested in self-care or mindfulness or any sort of personal focus programming. I have been encouraged to be grateful for what I have and what I am experiencing in the middle of great experiences as well as in the middle of devastating experiences, and it can be difficult, but I do find this type of mindset valuable for my mental health. I have a Facebook tradition of making a Daily Happiness post. I started this about three years ago when I noticed that all I was doing was complaining about things - my health, my frustrations with things. I decided that I needed to start a gratitude practice in the mornings to start my day off a bit better than things were going. I was in a pattern of burnout and didn't really like the people who signed my paychecks, and was seriously contemplating leaving my job. Every morning, I would get up and gripe about having to go to work. Then, the messages about gratitude and the nee...

Yesterday, I decided that my inspirational messages needed to change a bit. I have two tchotchkes on my desk that include inspirational quotations. In addition, I have a tarot card reading application on my Kindle that is fun to use. I needed to change what I see every morning, so I started with the Kindle app and then moved through my easel thingy and my box of quotations to see what messages are out there for me. The Kindle app pulled the card - visualization - and then told me that it is time to manifest my dreams through visualizing them and then making them come true. Okay, that is a great message to take with me into an escrow situation and the dream of owning a home pretty darn soon! All the way to work yesterday, I visualized a smooth therapy day with limited need for attention to other things happening. I also visualized my room the way I want it to be. I focused on the arrival of my new cabinet (spoiler - it hasn't arrived yet), but when I arrived in the doorway to my roo...

Me in my almost house! After a long, busy weekend, I am heading back into my regular work routine. It is 4:24 am, and I am sitting here, gazing at my blogging post wondering what in the world I might have to say to myself at this moment. My home is a mess because I have started packing for the move that I will be doing next month. The to-do list is getting longer and longer as I try to sort through all the things that I will need to do during the next 30 days. I have my checklists to go through and get myself organized with, but I am also feeling a bit overwhelmed about stuff. When I get this way, I tend to try to compartmentalize myself a bit more than I usually do, and it gets very overwhelming very quickly. I am also a bit hesitant to commit to leaving my apartment and to make arrangements for things like utilities because of my parents' experiences losing houses after offers had been accepted and all that. So, my music therapy routine is a bit off kilter because my life routine...

Oh, dear reader, I am still grappling with some ideas about what the AMTA conference meant to me this year, but I am also trying to turn my focus to what is happening in my real life - specifically, that I have to pack up 17 years of stuff and move it a mile down the road to a new house in exactly 31 days, so I am a bit scattered at the moment and hope that I will become less so in the next month. Doubtful, but a hope of mine. Throughout the entire conference, I was struck again and again how often the conversation veered towards the state of the therapist rather than the way that we work with our clients. Over and over again. I understand that this has been a strange year in our way of doing things, but I am concerned that we are losing sight of what is the most important part of the therapeutic triad - the client! Without them, there is no music therapy, right? So, my focus is having to return to the people who ask me to do the things that I do - my clients. I am going to be reenteri...

For many of us, the American Music Therapy Association national conference is now over. For me, it is still going on because I have so many presentations that I want to watch that I was not able to see live because the same thing happens every time I go to conference - all the presentations that I want to see happen at the same time! So, conference continues. In fact, I will listen to the MTex session right now while I am writing this.  **I can't wait for Cathy Knoll's rant!!**   I enjoy hearing about clinical technique. If you look at my most recent posts, there is one about the lack of clinical presentations at AMTA (something that I have noticed happening since I started presenting for AMTA - anyone else remember the days of Clinical Forum presentations?). I am a proud clinician who wants to be able to take ideas back from conference for direct application to my clients. I do not often have those ideas when I am finished up with conference, and I do not like that. I think m...

This morning, I saw a link for the live Twitter feed from the AMTA Business Meeting that happened earlier this week. I would like to thank Kyle Fleming, MT-BC for tweeting during the meeting as a record of some of the things that were shared. It has greatly helped my understanding of what is going on in the American Music Therapy Association, and I recommend that others who are curious and confused read this feed as a place to find some information. I have saved this thread in my AMTA 2021 folder on my computer so I can continue to parse through the comments and issues that are returning over and over again to our conversations. This thread joins several other resources that people have sent to me over the past week as I have been writing about our association and what is going on. I still feel very strongly that we need to be reorganizing how we do things within the membership of AMTA. I also feel very strongly that we need to be focusing on the membership and not those who have dec...

This is the second version of this post - the first seemed a bit disjointed, but that is primarily because my life is a bit scrambled at the moment. My inspirational message at the moment is "It's not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratitude that makes us happy." I am grateful for so many things today, so I think I will engage in some gratitude journaling here today - mostly focused on you, fellow music therapist! I am grateful that I am one of a small but vocal group of dedicated professionals who get up every day and go out into our uncertain world. You do important things, fellow music therapist! It is often not recognized in the bigger world, but it is important to the people who ALWAYS matter the most - your clients! I am grateful that there are music therapy clinicians who go out into the world to do the art of music therapy. Without us, the profession dies. We have to remember that fact and embrace the burdens and the powers that come with acknowledging...