music, therapy, and me

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...

I started the day yesterday with no idea what I was going to do in my group sessions. Let me explain a bit about what it is that I do. I provide 60 minutes of music therapy for every classroom per week so "teachers can get their plan time." There are no other guidelines offered by my administration, so I have freedom in what I do with my students when they arrive. I just have to keep them for 60 minutes. I have some basic treatment guidelines, but nothing really very formal. Music therapy is considered an "educational enrichment" service at the school - something offered for the benefit of students, but without requirements to be tied to the IEPs of clients (fortunately - I don't think I could handle attending 110 IEPs every year and the paperwork would be extremely daunting - ugh). My basic treatment guidelines are to address impulse control, social interactions, appropriate communication of wants and needs, and frustration tolerance/coping skill development....

I came up with a couple of new Therapeutic Music Experiences yesterday. I was sitting in my spot for hallway duty, and I was trying to think of something to write down on my session planning sheet. I didn't have anything in mind, so I just thought a bit about the clients that would be coming to see me later that day. I also wanted to do something different than the things that I usually pull out to do. I went to my TME database and started browsing through the years and years of songs and TMEs that I've collected over the years. I have a database. I have the contributions of practicum students, interns, and all the resources that I have ever found in one large database of materials. There are over 2,000 TMEs in that database, and I use it often for session planning and inspiration. I have more ideas than those that are in the database - I've really slacked off on the "writing things down" thing that I do recently - but those ideas form the basis of my resource...

My vacation ended a day ago, and my back-to-school process is beginning. I have three more days before my Fall schedule starts up again and one of my part-time jobs starts up again. My time will become much more structured and packed as I go into Fall. Vacation ended with a good trip back East. I spent some time with my sister, driving to the airport, and then made it to Salt Lake City without difficulties. At Salt Lake, it was revealed that the flight was oversold, so I jumped at the chance to take a later flight and get a flight voucher! I now have a voucher for travel at Christmas time. I didn't get into my home airport until 3 hours later than usual, but I did get another flight on my frequent flyer miles and got to see the sweet little airport in Minneapolis, so everything worked out well... (The cat wanted me to name this post "kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" which may be oddly appropriate, but I overruled her.) In the next three days, I am ge...

It's the end of my work week, and I am reflecting on what happened in music therapy sessions this week. I am two weeks into the return of individual sessions and am pleased with how things have progressed. For the most part, students have transitioned with me willingly and have engaged in music making. We don't have any mutual goals or objectives at this point, but my goals have been to encourage interaction and exploration of the musical environment. I'm starting to identify the clients that I think will be best served through goal-oriented music therapy sessions and those that will be best served through crisis management music therapy sessions. In the Fall session, I will have 26 individual spots. Some of those will be taken by adaptive lessons (my title for these sessions? Play the instruments MJ won't let us play during group MT very loudly for 30 minutes!!) and by choir, but most will be able to be filled by individuals. I will try to have one crisis management ...

Yesterday, I returned to the world of individual treatment sessions. I saw two clients and was able to get through the two sessions with just a bit of angst and trepidation. Now, for the first session, I chose a young man who shows lots of interest in music therapy and who I thought would be open to trying a new experience. He was open. We spent the session moving the drum set. It wasn't what I thought we would end up doing, but he was determined to move that set from one place in the room back to where it was most of the times he was in the music therapy room. (I moved things around so that I could keep the set organized and able to be used at any time.) I provided some physical assistance and lots of musical support to help him accomplish his goal. I did explain that the drum set would be back in its new spot the next time that he arrived in the music therapy room, and he seemed fine with that statement.  The best thing about that session was that I was able to use music to...

So, I did something that I don't usually do when it comes to blogging - I skipped two days in a row! I try to blog every day, but there are times when I just cannot sit down and write. I had two of those days in a row this weekend. Strange. I did try to write something, but it didn't happen. I was a bit angsty because I hadn't heard anything about my AMTA presentation proposals, but that's since passed. Now, I am getting back into the routine of writing about something therapy-like on a daily basis. Today, I return to work after a week away. I have three group sessions and (I think) three individual sessions as well. That's right. I have some individual sessions to do today. Finally. 361 days after being injured, I get to go back to what I consider an adequate music therapy schedule. Individual sessions! To be completely honest, I am a bit scared of moving on. I know that I can do this - after all, I've been doing this for 23 years - but it's going to be...

It is Wednesday again. I have this one group on Wednesday afternoons who constantly challenges me. Honestly, they constantly challenge the art therapist, the transition teacher, and their own teacher and staff members as well. That simple fact makes the fact that they challenge me a bit easier to handle. In all of my down time at work due to being on light duty, I have been spending time thinking about group treatment. We spend lots of time talking about things like assessing individuals, developing individual goals and objectives, and about how to develop music therapy experiences for individuals, but we don't often think about what to do when those individuals are part of a group. I've come to the conclusion that groups are entities unto themselves. Each group member acts as part of the whole, but is not the whole. Similar to a body, the group learns to function when all group members are present and do not function the same way when a group member is absent or is not b...

I am full up of the music therapy goodness that happens often for me - it is a refreshing change from the goblin-filled thoughts of a day ago...   Yesterday was a good therapy day.   I actually had a chance to run music therapy groups (with drums) during my day, and I spent some time with some great kids! It was the perfect way to banish that shoulda goblin from the forefront to the background (but he hasn't left entirely yet...). We used a variety of drums yesterday in my two groups. With my students, I typically do not do anything really fancy with them until we can entrain to a steady and common beat. This is always an interesting exercise. Some of my students entrain quickly and easily - others do not. It seems that most of my nonentrainers are higher functioning, need less supports, and have diagnoses on the Autism Spectrum towards the Asperger's range. Sometimes they seem to be fighting the urge to entrain to a beat. If I change my pattern to match theirs, they cha...