music, therapy, and me

There are systems involved in every thing we do as music therapists - even documentation. For me, documentation is a professional responsibility that is not required by my administrators. This translates into several facts that affect how and when I document. First, I can document in the manner and style that fits me the best. This is a good thing. Second, I can set my own requirements and timelines for documentation. This can be a good thing, but can also mean that I am missing something important to notate. Third, if I decide to change documentation formats, I can do so without talking to other people about it. I have spent some time thinking about the nuts and bolts of documentation. Check out my YouTube channel here to see some of my Music Therapy Morsels about how I do my job and things to consider when setting up documentation strategies and systems.   For me and for my clients, the most important part of documentation is response to intervention. Most of document...

Does this ever happen to you? You head to work full of plans, just to find that one thing has changed all of what you have planned into something new? That happened to me yesterday. I started off with a plan for what I was going to get done during my time as an internship supervisor and ended up just being the therapist. Not at all outside of my realm of experience, but not at all what I was expecting to happen. My day was full of interesting responses - to me, to the change in leadership, to the ways I was doing things, and just general stuff, you know? The most definite thing I can say is that we all survived. I'm not sure how effective I was as a therapist yesterday, but we all survived. There you go. I am currently struggling with a couple of non-direct care tasks and concepts that have surfaced just lately. One of them is documentation and the other is a presentation that I am supposed to give (after being postponed twice) on Wednesday. I have nothing to present to this ...

I decided to go into work this morning to do some things without being paid for them. I have a horrible habit of not doing my documentation on Thursday afternoons - those afternoon groups just wear me out - so, rather than making myself do the notes and then forgetting to do them and remembering halfway home, I decided to plan my day around going in to do my notes and then taking the rest of the day to do some things I rarely do - namely, shop. I'm ready. I don't have to go in at any particular time today, so I'll leave home when I'm ready. I'll go to my office, do some planning, finish my documentation from yesterday's sessions, and putter around until about 9 am when the first store opens. I'll shop there for stuff for my home until about 10 am when the next store opens. I'll finish up my shopping experience at that store (a teacher specialty store that's having a good sale today), get my fast food, and then go home. If I get distracted by somet...

I'm very sorry if you were looking forward to a TME Tuesday post this morning - I just woke up with a need to write about something significantly different today. I was reading my social media posts yesterday afternoon (as I often do) and I came across one that stuck with me. The author of the post wrote about a disconnect between documentation and personal feelings and experiences about the experiences that occur in music therapy treatment sessions. This comment started me thinking about this same thing and how it happens in my life. (The best posts always challenge my thinking about something, and I really appreciate them.) I responded that I do documentation for my administrators and documentation for myself - something more humanistic for myself and something more objective for those who bother to look at my documentation. This takes many forms, but is something that I do in order to process what happens in my sessions.  (By the way, I am completely caught up with my clin...