music, therapy, and me

If you have been reading for some time now, you know several things about me.  You know that I am a well-established music therapist who has done this job now for over two and a half decades. I have finally come to a place where I feel financially stable, and I love many of the aspects of my job while still wanting more for the profession of music therapy. I despair when fellow therapists have to leave the profession because they can't survive, and I wonder what they thought being a professional would mean. I have figured out ways to do this job that make it easier on me, and I like to share that information to other therapists in any way possible. I love teaching but will NEVER be a professor because I don't like the higher education environment as a whole. I am stubborn, unrelenting, and pretty sensitive to the opinions of others. I try to please people, often at the expense of my own self-identity or care, and I often bite off more than I can chew. I enjoy figuring out d...

Does anyone have "typical" days in this job? One of the reasons that I am still a proud, fulfilled music therapist after 26 years in the profession is that it is rarely completely planned or routine. I like that because I have an idea of how the day is going to go, but that idea is never set in stone - at best, it is set in half-set cement. I wonder if there is any music therapist out there who plans their day and it goes exactly as planned - no surprises, no clients changing the way music is used, no power outages or missing materials or crabby moods or things like that. Is it just me? Or does this happen to you all as well? I'm curious. I think the fact that my days are somewhat random is affected by me as a person and as a therapist as well as my clients, but I think that there has to be some part of us music therapists that is able to recognize the unexpected and then go with it. Maybe. I'm not exactly sure, but I think that this type of ability is something...

As I keep investigating this idea of culture and what it means to me as a music therapist in my midwestern town with my clients from all over the country, I find myself going in circles. There are so many different things to consider when you start to look at culture, that I think I may need a course in sociology to help me figure things out. Hmm. I may look into a MOOC to see if I can find such a course. I bet I could, and I could get CMTEs because this has a definite application to my work as a board-certified music therapist. I digress. As I am thinking and experiencing cultural awareness, I am finding that I really don't know that much about it. I mean, sure, I understand the basic concepts that our culture is shaped by many influences. I know that my experiences are not the same as others who have not had the same influences in their lives as me, but there is so much to consider outside of the idea of basic cultural influences. Here are some of the terms that I am starti...

I have spent the week reading and collecting information and finding bits and pieces of information to use in my quest for being informed about a particular topic. I am now going to start my graphic organizer to help me see what types of things I am learning. As I start all of these things, however, I realize that I need another title for these types of posts. Song Conversion Sunday is not really what these posts are going to be. I still want to do my Song Conversion Sundays, so I need to find another title. I'm leaning towards "Cultural Considerations" as a title for this series. I did some reading and some organizing of topics this week. I started reading the book edited by Susan Hadley that was referenced in the last post on this topic, Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy . I am starting to experience a point of view that I have never really considered - that of feminism. How this will work into the entirety of this series, I will not know until I get to my dest...

I am in the center of a dilemma. It's one that I've been wrestling with for a while (since I started up my Teachers Pay Teachers store) about how to express to people that aren't music therapists that they cannot call what they do with my materials "music therapy" without the proper training, education, experience, etc. Interestingly, this topic came up on one of my social media feeds today, so now I am really thinking about this particular dilemma. The unfortunate answer to this question is that I cannot control what other people say about music therapy. I cannot police the entire world for the use of the phrase "music therapy" for appropriate uses and inappropriate uses. I cannot control the people who think that playing a streaming service playlist titled, "Musical Therapy," is equivalent to hiring me to work with their clients. I cannot be that person for all other people in the world. I CAN focus on the folks that I reach directly...