music, therapy, and me

Do you remember all the posts that were coming across social media about how rough 2019 was for many of us and how much we were looking forward to the new start that was 2020? I do, and I long for those naive days when 2020 seemed to be a big step forward into life. Little did we all know that 2020 would be what it is now. Since it is now July and quarter three, I've been sitting down to do some things that I do pretty much every quarter. I sit down to make goals for myself and evaluate my progress on the goals for the previous quarter. This quarter also coincided with filling up my old bullet journal, so all of this planning and evaluation is happening in my new journal - the one I'm designing for myself. What have I learned from doing this exercise?? I am great at establishing goals but LOUSY at working towards them at all! I always have really sound and appropriate goals written down for myself, but I rarely make any progress on them at all. I am constantly making grandiose ...

I have always collected things. (I know, you know this if you have read my blog - I collect more things that is good for me.) One of the things that I love collecting is pictures that catch my eye. I have been putting them into a book that I use when I need some ideas for songwriting or therapeutic music experiences (TMES). The pictures are just things from magazines, but they are fun and inspire me to think about the stories behind the pictures. Something else about me is that I enjoy making and filling books and journals. I've been thinking about combining my picture collection with my current love of making books and starting to make myself an inspiration art journal/glue book/junk journal. The purpose of this particular project would be to house these pictures to use when I feel blocked and unable to be creative. I think I'm going to use one of the books that I already have because I can't seem to find paper to make into a book big enough to house some of the pictures ...

It is the end of my therapy week. I only have large group treatment on four days of the work week, so my Fridays are reserved for planning and preparation and a few individual and/or push-in sessions. This is because we move from a five day workweek during the school year to a four day workweek during the extended school year/summer sessions. It is too difficult to compress a five day group schedule into four days, so we just establish a four day group schedule and reserve Fridays for the required planning time that we are entitled to under our Master Contracts. It's complicated, but it works for us and that's what matters. ANYWAY... This week was not as full of creative ideas as I would have liked, but my students didn't really seem to miss the creativity. I have lots of ideas to develop, but it will take me some dedicated time to get the visual aids and the games together, so I'm not stressing about having everything absolutely perfect. What did we do this week?...

There was a question about working with persons with the diagnosis of Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD) on one of my social media links, and a friend of mine tagged me to respond. I started to think about the folks that I know who have come in with this label, and how I worked with them. In my years of working with children and adolescents with a variety of concerns, I have found that the way I work with those with the initials ODD as part of their mental and developmental health diagnoses is not that different from how I work with those without those particular letters. When I start to sit down and think deeply about what I want the therapeutic relationship to look like, I want my clients to make decisions about their own treatment. I want my clients to know that they have a say in what we do, and how we do it. I want to foster a mutual respect for the clients who come to music therapy with me. To that end, I find that there are times when my clients don't want to do what I h...