music, therapy, and me

Forgive me if I am repeating the same things over and over, but "that" client is starting to display patterns that I am going to use for developing therapeutic interactions. Basically, "that" client wants me to sing and play my guitar and nothing else. The problem with that?? Every other client in the room wants to play instruments and listen to music recordings! One client hits me when I am singing songs that are not preferred but does not tell me that - just hits me. We had a good session yesterday. For nineteen minutes. At the 19 minute mark, I turned on some music. As soon as I put my guitar down, "that" client started to escalate. Please note that nothing was being played at the moment. It wasn't the song, it was putting the guitar down that was the antecedent to the severe behavior of concern that occurred. Noted. The problem? "That" client is not the only client in the group therapy session. I cannot deny the other clients the opportun...

It is almost the end of the semester at my job. I am getting ready for almost two weeks off from working in the school within a psychiatric residential treatment facility, and I am also thinking deeply about what I want to do next year in all areas of my life. This post is about my work role as music therapist in my particular job. I do group music therapy for all students at our facility. All students have to attend 60 minutes of music therapy per week as part of their educational programming, so there are some clients who are not interested at all in anything that I have to say, do, or offer. This can be somewhat disheartening, but there is a challenge in figuring out how to engage these clients. So, what does this have to do with songwriting on a Sunday? I am tired of many of the songs that I have been using lately. I am on a search for new songs to learn, adapt, and share. Now, this isn't client-focused. Many of my clients come for less than a year with us, so they find all of ...

Everywhere I look these days there are angry people. There doesn't seem to be many people who aren't angry about something or another, and most of our anger seems to be part of the entire COVID-19 situation that we are part of at the moment. Some are angry because they are not allowed to do what they feel they should be allowed to do. Others are angry because they want to limit what others do in a protection mode. Others seem to be yelling JUST BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS YELLING, SO HERE IS MY CAUSE THAT I WANT PEOPLE TO HEAR ABOUT! I am not ashamed to admit that I am struggling with all of the negativity that is happening around me, and I am isolating myself from as much of it as possible. As a music therapist, I am linked to music therapists all over the world who are struggling to navigate this pandemic. We are prone to wanting to help (hence the term "therapist"), and this virus has changed everything that we were used to doing in ways that are difficult to process....

I left off on November 11 with a discussion about possible uses of the song that I randomly selected from my stacks and stacks of sheet music books. In the past two weeks, the song has continued to be in my head more than it has ever been before. I looked through my entire library and found that I did not have a copy of the recording (I have "More Songs from Dawson's Creek" but not the original soundtrack), so I purchased a copy of the song for my library. I have learned the song pretty well as far as the theory and lyrics are concerned, so now it is time to put it into my client decision tree to see how I can use the song with my particular clients in my particular music therapy treatment. I started this process in the post on the 11th - see the post here . This is the part that makes the use of any type of musical intervention into therapy (in my opinion) - filtering the musical elements and content of the music into what is best for my client at this particular...