TME Tuesday: Combating the Holiday Hype
Can you feel it? If you are like me, you do everything you can to avoid the stores this time of year because of the barrage of holiday music that bombards you as soon as you enter and continues until you leave. There are messages of consumerism every place you look, and it is sometimes hard to see the original purpose of the holiday itself under all the glitter and tinsel and opportunities to "buy, buy, BUY!"
The holiday hype permeates schools.
If you are involved with school-aged kids or adolescents, then you know that there is a change in learning ability and interactions between October and January. If you work in a school associated with a psychiatric residential treatment facility for school-aged kids and adolescents, then you know that those changes happen in those settings as well, but the responses may be a bit more pronounced.
We are in the last week of school before our winter break begins. Students are finished with school on Wednesday. Teachers return on Thursday for grade prep and professional development. Our students are excited about home visits or are angry that they will not be having a home visit. There are many emotions swirling around the facility, and they come into the music therapy sessions as well. At the moment, some of my clients are very Santa-conscious, so there are some efforts from those clients to be on the "nice" list, but that is not something that I ever use with my clients to gain compliance to what I am asking them to do.
So, how do I deal with the holiday hype? I do not bring the holidays into my clinic because I recognize that not everyone that I meet celebrates holidays. If a client requests a specific song, I consider using it in the moment, but I do not initiate the listening of holiday music unless it has a clear therapeutic benefit for the clients I see. As a result, I have lots of Christmas-themed TMEs that I do not use during sessions with my current client population, and that is fine.
I try to maintain my expectations at the same level as I always do because my students do best when they are part of a routine. With so much that is unpredictable in their lives, my students thrive when they know what to expect and how to navigate their world. We do the same things in music therapy that we always do - an opening, TMEs shaped to the goals, objectives, and current emotional states of the clients in the session, a closing.
I looked at my December box yesterday morning because I hadn't examined it in a year. I found a story about Santa and the littlest reindeer (her name is Dot, by the way), my Christmas song visual aids, all the holiday BINGO cards I have collected or made over the years, and my Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa social story book that I put together a long time ago. I have used all of these things with clients in my past, but my current clients are not sitting and listening the way previous clients could and would. I packed the things up again and turned my thoughts towards what I could do with my clients.
Structure, structure, structure.
Over the years, this has been my quest. I strive to be consistent in my responses to my clients, in my expectations for my clients, and in how we do things. I try to define my negotiables and my non-negotiables in ways that my clients can understand. I do as much as I can to keep myself calm in difficult situations to assist my clients in seeing and finding the structure and expectations of the music therapy environment.
This week, my intern is playing instrument JINGO (name of the game - my clients find it REALLY difficult to accept that a BINGO game can have any other title) with my students. I may do the same thing with mine because I can. We are not doing much movement because the music therapy room is very hot. It is easier to keep kids happy if they are not overheated, so a sit down, music therapy adjacent game (with therapeutic goals and objectives, of course) is a good choice for this week. Students get a sheet of stickers when they finish their first BINGO (we don't expect them to yell out "JINGO" at the end of the game), and that is usually a great prize for them to earn. I might bring out the buttons for my clients who are not as attentive to games like JINGO. They seem to enjoy exploring the different sounds and making their own recordings. That reminds me - I need to take in the batteries that I recently ordered.
I try to make music therapy a place of calm for my clients in the middle of the holiday hype that happens around us all.
Happy Tuesday, all.
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