TME Tuesday: Focus On What Is Important In All of This

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 reentering my clinical work tomorrow after saying goodbye to the intern who took over half of my groups and added some of her own individuals. I will be returning to the life of full-time music therapist - not a supervisor again until January. I will be establishing therapeutic relationships with the clients who have not been mine yet and reestablishing therapeutic relationships with clients who were mine and then were transferred to my intern for the past five months. I will be doing my entire caseload for the first time in a very long time. So, the current therapist-focused struggles of AMTA will not be on the forefront of my mind in the next several days.

In the long run, the focus on me as therapist is secondary (if not tertiary) to my life as a music therapist. My clients have to be my focus because they are my raison d'etre in this profession. If I am not doing what I need to be doing for them, then there is no reason to be even trying to be a therapist.

Is that one of the reasons that this entire situation is so difficult for me to engage in? Is it because the client is not even considered in these discussions? We seem to be focused on the "me" of this blog rather than the people we serve. That may be part of why I am so hesitant about labeling myself as well - it seems to focus more on "me" than on music therapy. Hm. Things appear to be coming a bit clearer for me right now. Interesting - I haven't thought about my aversion to labeling myself through this perspective before.

When I was in graduate school, my mentor professor stood up in front of the senior class (I was the teaching assistant for that course) and stated that her preferred population to work with was students. I had the realization that I did not want to spend the rest of my career with college students as my preferred population. I enjoy being a clinician and working with my children and adolescents more than I wanted to advise college students through their education. My reason for being in this profession is my clients.

So, why do I feel so disconnected from the current issues that are coming up through our national association? Possibly due to my status and level of privilege. Possibly due to my ignorance of specific situations based on how I am perceived in the world. Possibly due to my age, status in the profession, and need to shield myself from most controversy. I can tell you that I am still trying to come up with my own ideas about what I will be doing in the near future.

Today, I will be watching more of the recorded presentations from this year's AMTA conference while I am trying to start packing stuff into boxes. I have to pack up all the things that are currently in front of the closet where the boxes are stored so I can start filling up the boxes. There are plans afoot to get myself out of this place and into my new place, but thoughts of my clients and what we are going to be doing in music will not be far away from me. In fact, I anticipate that I will have a load of materials to take into my room as soon as I get back to work. I already have four of my monthly boxes that will be better to be in my music therapy space than here, so the stack is piling up. I hope to be taking much of my music stuff back to work now that I have the office entirely to myself for the next two months.

Anyway, I will continue to sort through my feelings (much like I am sorting through my years and years of accumulated stuff) on this and other topics as the weeks go by. Thanks for reading.

Time to work on my TMEs for the rest of this week and for the start of next week.