Sorting Through Feelings and Thoughts and Hopes for Future Interactions

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 decided to criticize from the outside. (This is my opinion about people who choose not to vote in elections as well as non-member music therapists - if you don't make an effort, then you should not expect to be listened to when we seek to make changes.) I wonder what paying members are wanting from our organization. No one has asked me that question yet. Honestly, I don't know what I would say if someone did ask.

I think we are struggling so much with these questions and requests because of the nature of who we are.

My father was a plastics engineer for many years. He would go to the plastic engineering conferences every so often, and they would hear about new ways to make plastic and how to decrease costs for packaging and where to get the best resin. Their conferences were always based on making the thing that they made - plastic. I am sure that there was controversy at times, but how much controversy can you have when talking about chemical formulae?

We, as music therapists, have several things stacked against us when it comes to being a coherent whole. We are passionate people. This becomes evident when we start to talk to each other about the things that we care about. We are outwardly focused (most of the time). We work for people who are traditionally marginalized by society for all sorts of reasons. (There is a better way to make that statement, but I am not sophisticated enough in this topic to truly express what I want to say - any help is very much appreciated!) We are almost always in the midst of advocacy - for our clients, for our profession, for ourselves. It is something that we do almost without a thought.

Since we are these passionate, helping, outwardly focused, and advocacy-minded people, when we attempt to talk to each other, we tend to bring those traits to any conversation. I cannot remember a music therapy conference where there wasn't something being passionately debated by the assembly of delegates. I have been present for assembly debates where people passionately argued for and against a comma placement in a proposed revision. A comma. The topics that we are talking about now are not commas, they are Association-changing.

I think that one of my difficulties in coming up with my own opinions about all of this is that the conversation has been taking place away from my awareness. Now, this is not the fault of AMTA, it is completely my own fault. There have been discussions and opportunities to be part of affinity groups (which I always feel strange in since I am one of the perceived privileged). I have not taken part in these conversations. I do not know how other members have felt discriminated against or marginalized. I cannot speak for others. I can only speak for myself.

My questions include how are we going to make changes that will benefit all of the members of AMTA? 

I have been tempted to volunteer for AMTA again for some time now, but all of the requests include a statement about seeking someone who is diverse to play a role. I am not diverse in any way that is evident to others. I am a middle-aged, white woman who does not like to discuss her sexual preferences with anyone. I do not feel like I need to know who anyone wants to have sex with in order to listen to what they have to say about music therapy with clients. In fact, if a presenter starts a conversation with those sorts of statements, my regard for them goes down significantly. When did it become important to label yourself in public?? (That's another rant for another day, I am afraid!) I really do not care what pronouns you use to refer to me - pick whatever you want. I will, however, refer to you by your name and by your preferred pronouns because I recognize that this is important to you. Just don't expect me (or require me) to follow suit. I still believe in personal freedom to choose all of these things for each of us. I feel very much like we have so many things happening in AMTA at the same time that it is difficult to figure out what the situation is right here, right now.

What should we look at first? Are we going to scrub every element of white supremacy culture from AMTA? How we will restructure when we do this? I admit to just now reading the information written by Tema Okun, found in the article from www.dismantlingracism.org. I am interested in how we will change our organization to decrease this type of cultural practice. I wonder if we will be able to do so in a society where major decisions for how 501(c)3 organizations are run are made by white men in a flawed election process. I hope that we become a truly aspirational association, but this is going to take so much time that I doubt I will see it happen in my lifetime.

When I was a bit younger than I am now, I got amused when some of the baby boomer leaders in our association started running presentations to train the "future leaders of AMTA." In fact, I was introduced as one such person at one point. It made me snort a bit when I heard that - I happened to be there when the introduction took place. The baby boomer leaders were concerned that the Gen-Xers like me would destroy the association that they had worked so hard to build and preserve over many years - taking over from the legends of the profession who established all sorts of things. The baby boomers had been through their own revolution with the split of the National Association for Music Therapy and the newer, more progressively thinking and just plain old different way of doing things American Association for Music Therapy. The baby boomers were proud of uniting us back into one association - AMTA - and they were absolutely certain that we would change things so much that we would splinter. I think that we are having some of these issues right now. The baby boomers are starting to disappear from the working of our association, but they are still in power. The Gen-Xers like me are disappearing from the association for many reasons - many of them seem to be association relationship related which is not unusual for us. Okay, I am getting a bit away from my thoughts here - time to focus...

Now that I am looking at retirement from my current music therapy job and am still thinking about the rest of my lifetime and continuing to be a music therapist, I am wondering what type of music therapy oversight or governance or association or group will be there for me and for you. I agree that we need to change things that we can, but I'm doubtful that we will get this task finished in the near future. Patience is something that seems to be in very short supply among the most vocal of our community (don't know if they are members of AMTA or not, and that is part of the problem for me right now). Even if we start the conversation about change right now, we cannot accomplish the types of changes that people seem to be demanding for a seven year cycle - that is on the university side of things, NOT AMTA! We cannot expect to see significant changes in education or clinical training for some time. We can expect to see more conversation from our elected leaders about these issues. 

The last part about all of this is that we, individual members of AMTA, need to make ourselves heard by the association. There was an interesting portion of the twitter feed that I posted above about "a vote of non-confidence" in the current AMTA board. We do not have that power as written in our bylaws, so any sort of vote is symbolic rather than formal, but isn't it interesting that the people who went to the business meeting felt that this needed to be said? I think so. We need to be asking questions. We need to be listening to answers. Our elections need to be more than popularity contests, and our committee appointments also need to be based on more than "this is my friend." Our entire structure needs a close review to see what mechanisms are advancing our mission statement and which ones need to leave, or we need to write a new mission statement.

Is the purpose of AMTA to get music therapy as a service to more clients or is the purpose of AMTA to support the members in their quests to get music therapy as a service to more clients? There is a bit of a distinction there (at least, in my head), and I think clarifying our mission statement is long overdue. 

Up until now, I felt that AMTA was doing its stated mission by advocating for music therapy as a profession for the benefit of clients, but now I wonder if there is value in becoming more focused on members. Do we give our therapists fish, or do we teach them to fish?

Hmmm.

Thanks for reading all of this. As always, questions, comments, challenges, and concerns are welcome! Leave them on my social media feeds or here in the comment section below. I do not publish comments unless you indicate that you are okay with them being published.