TME Tuesday: Simplify

One of the biggest and most important lessons that I have learned over my years as a music therapist is that there are many times where you do not need or even want complex therapeutic music experiences or lots of visual aids or even many different instruments. There are times when simple is better than cool.

At my facility, we are in a season of change. This happens every year about this time, but this year's changes seem more abrupt and pervasive than in other years. Every classroom has new staff members. Most of the classrooms have new class members. As a result, music therapy sessions have had to focus more on relationship building and learning how to do things with new people than on our music therapy goals. We have to focus on Maslow's pyramid base right now rather than the upper levels of that pyramid. It is time for meeting physiological needs and basic security needs.

So, how do I do this?

I go back to my own musical basics - rhythm, parallel play, and working on being in the same space as others without being aggressive.

This week, my groups are playing with my musical toys. We are also going to do a bunch of singing for those who come and see me twice a week, as opposed to the groups that see me once and see my intern the other time they arrive in the music therapy room. I have a bunch of different musical toys that I have been gifted or collected over the years, and this is the best time of the year to get them out and play with them. Exploration of these toys works on cause and effect understanding, and we also do lots of work on basic communication skills, sharing with others, and choices. There are some situations where we have to engage in negotiation with our peers. We also have to figure out how to use things.

For me, as therapist, I get lots of insight into how my clients respond to the world when we do a simple TME like the one described above. I can see if my clients are able to figure things out on their own or if they are dependent on others for all things. I have many clients who have never been allowed to try things on their own, so they tend to just sit and wait for someone to do things for them. That's not how it works in music therapy, though, so they learn quickly to either try things on their own or to ask for assistance.

For our singing TMEs later this week, we are going to just sing songs - some will be familiar to my clients and others will be mine and completely new to my clients. We are going to focus on maintaining a steady beat and silly songs. We are needing to laugh a bit right now. 

In addition to this being a season of change, it is also a season of stress for us all. Our Behavioral Health Technicians (BHTs) have not had a break other than the two weeks of vacation that they earn after working with us for a year. They are having to deal with new co-workers who do not really know how to do the job as well as working with kids who are in turmoil because the holidays are over, the weather is unpredictable, and who have new BHTs and classmates to figure out. Last week, I had a couple of physical behavior management situations that could have been avoided had new people just let me do my job, but they did not and things escalated into aggression on the side of the client. To say I felt frustrated last week is an understatement. We even had a snow day on my most naturally frustrating day last week, so I didn't have that to complain about last week!

So, music therapy for the near future will be focused on simple things - feeling the beat, just learning and relearning how things happen in music therapy, and trying our best to find a routine again. We will be doing some drumming. We will be doing some breathing. We will be singing. We will be engaging in body percussion to get back into connection with our bodies and the beat. We will be doing simple.

I am starting to plan my next several months now. My intern will be leaving the facility in 18 days, so I will be a lone therapist from the middle of February until the beginning of June when intern #36 arrives. I will go from having very little clinical duties to doing it all. That is perfectly fine with me because I love doing sessions! To do that well, though, I have found that I do best with a set structure to help me strategize TMEs and sessions. So, I developed my structure. I do a monthly rotation through four different subject areas - our culture of the month, an instrument not usually used in music therapy sessions, a music education concept, and a musician of the month. Occasionally, there will be some split weeks that need to be filled with something - we will do technology on those weeks. This encourages me to continue to learn about apps and music-specific technology but does not make my music therapy sessions electronic-centric. I refuse to only use my Promethean Board for music therapy. My student do not need any more interaction with technology - they are already addicted to their iPads.

Am I biased against iPads and screen use in music therapy? Absolutely!! There you go. Does that mean that I refuse to use those things in my music therapy sessions? Absolutely not, but in extreme moderation. I use my Promethean Board more for displaying our Spotify playlists than anything else. It is just an extremely expensive monitor for me. That's it. I do have some apps that I use, but not very often.

Well, folks, it is time to head out into the cold world to do two groups, watch three other groups and an individual session, and then go to a classroom for another individual interaction. Then, I finish up with bus duty and then go home to work on OCMT things and talk to some family members. After all of that, I will go to bed and sleep until I wake up.