music, therapy, and me

I did not sleep well last night. These nights of staying awake are becoming more prevalent in my life which is interesting to me. I am more likely to stay awake than I am to go to sleep these days, possibly because my energy output is less than it was when I went to work every day. My life is quiet now, and it is spent mostly in my own company. I am starting to feel an itch to get a job, not just for financial reasons but also for having something to do with myself. There is a reason for this first paragraph - while I was not sleeping, I kept working on my Game Board and first set of game cards. I now have two games in the design phase. The cards are finished, the game board arrangement is ready, and now I just need to make everything into a digital format for posting on TPT. After that is finished, I will print out copies and make the games for a video that I am thinking about. The games that I am designing are based on my usual games. They will use game cards and dice to move around ...

So, I am in a season of change and metamorphosis. There is just no real way to define how I am feeling at this moment because it changes from moment to moment. As a result of the emotional rollercoaster that I am currently on, I am feeling the need for structure and boundaries and routines. So, I am going to be structuring my blogging a bit more than I have recently. Sundays will be for music sharing, thoughts, and therapeutic music experience development using songs that others have composed as well as shared with the world. The problem with this type of blog post is that I am often unsure what songs to use in posts like this. I try to select something that would work with a variety of populations, and I will strive to continue to highlight how you could use these pieces of music with everyone that you do music therapy with during your week of sessions. If you read this blog regularly (and I know that some of you do), then you know that I like having structure and templates are my thi...

And, here we are - FINALLY! The first day of my break. It stormed yesterday afternoon - lots of rain and thunder while a front rolled through the area. Rain came in bits and spurts but the thunder was pretty continuous there for a while. I am hoping that the storm will have decreased the heat and humidity, but I sincerely doubt that it did. Yeah - a quick look at my weather app shows that we have 88% humidity at the moment with a forecasted temperature of 91 (before the heat index kicks in). The storms did not help at all, but that's okay. It is what summer is like out here. I miss the dry heat of California. No more dwelling on that thought. Let's talk a bit more about what this break will be for me. I am going on an extended break because I am having another bowel resection on Monday. A part of my gut is growing things that it shouldn't, so it has to be removed. My mother is arriving tomorrow to help me out during my recovery. I have two days to get my house in order and ...

Yesterday was a day when I was grateful for my TME database and idea book. I don't know about you, but I have times when I do not have any idea what I want to do for my group programming during the week. I sit and stare at my guitar. I wonder what I am going to do with the clients who will be arriving to my music therapy room.  I was in such a state yesterday, and I went to the places that I keep my ideas - my ideas book and my database. One of the quests that I have right now is to update my database so I have all my TME files listed. I am behind in that task - seriously behind - so it is something that I am spending time organizing. As I was looking through the individual letter folders, I remembered several TMEs that I used to use and have moved away from recently. I also flipped through my ideas book to see what ideas are waiting to be moved into my "Ideas for Development" folder in my TME folder. My ideas book and the Ideas for Development folder serve the same purpo...

It is Tuesday again, and I am gearing up for five groups and one individual. Usually, I have two individuals on this day, but one is away for the week, so I get a bit of a break. Not much, but a bit. The temperature is cooler - both outside and in my music therapy room - so tempers seemed to have cooled as well. We will see if that continues, but for the moment, I am enjoying the more relaxed atmosphere in the rooms next to me.  I felt the urge to sit down with my ideas book yesterday to record some ideas that have come to me as I have been moving into the role of observer rather than therapist. I am physically moving my body closer and closer to my office where I will spend most of the rest of my intern's time to provide supervision but not interference. I tend to be more likely to write TMEs when I am in my office for interns' sessions than when I am primary therapist. When I have to remove myself from client interactions, my brain starts to design things to do with those cli...

Oh, goodness. I have remembered to write in the afternoons now two times in a row. My views have gone down significantly, but I think I know ways to get you all to see my posts on various social media accounts... we'll see. Okay. Today is Tuesday (and my brain is working a bit better today than it was yesterday), so that means it is time to talk about therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). So, here we go. This week, the first week in May, is always Star Wars week in my music therapy room. It will always be so - I have decided. We are exploring elements of my favorites stories and some of my toys, and it is music therapy because of the goals behind it all. My groups are getting to spend some time in a galaxy far, far away because I am just a bit of a fan. We have a presentation that introduces some of the music of the series and some of the planets that the creative people behind Star Wars have developed over all these years. We talk about how it would be difficult to take instrument...

Do you ever hear a song and think, "that would make a GREAT experience with ____. How can I use it in a session?" I had that experience yesterday with a client who loves all things Pokemon, Mario Brothers, and other things - this particular client always surprises me with session topics and I never know what is coming. Anyway, we started talking about chain chomps because that was what we needed to talk about. I know nothing about the Mario Brothers or Pokemon or any of that stuff - I've decided not to devote too many brain cells to these things since they have very little to do with my daily life. I am always willing to learn, though, so I learned about chain chomps yesterday at the end of the day. I found the musical theme from the game, and then my TME thoughts started churning. At this point, my TME idea includes some motor planning, some directed listening, and some attempts to sneak past a chain chomp. I might make an actual chain to rattle as part of our game - jus...

I took some time, in my new(ish) office, yesterday, to write down a TME in my database in my "finished" format. The TME is not quite finished - I need to notate the song to get things completely finished - but almost. This is the first idea that I have formalized in a long time, and it was nice to have the time and the attention to get something done. I am hoping that this continues for the next several days so I can get some TMEs finished. Writing a therapeutic music experience (TME) takes time, if you do it right. Several years ago, I decided not to publish any more new TMEs on this blog for a couple of reasons. First of all, I feel that publishing my ideas without any sort of music therapy filter could lead some people to use my ideas without understanding the tenets of music therapy. I didn't want non-music therapists to think that they could follow my procedures and be "doing music therapy." Second, I got kind of pissed off by the attitudes of some music th...

Since it is the beginning of the month, I went to my thematic boxes with anticipation to see what I had stashed in the box for the month of June. What forgotten materials and TME ideas and visual aids would await me to jumpstart my creativity and give me some sparks for my session strategizing?? Wait for it...  That's it! That is all that was in June's box!! This is one of those months where I had not really thought much about what types of things I do in the month of June, and the box REALLY reflects this fact! There are exactly THREE things in this box for use during the month - all of them are orange for some strange reason, and none of them have TMEs attached to them, so that's not going to work for me! This month's "What's In the Box" post is going to be quite disappointing if I don't get to brainstorming and creating and thinking about what can go into that there red box!! For me, June is a month of summer school sessions. We have four weeks of o...

I spend lots of time talking about therapeutic music experience (TME) development and why I think it is important to have a well-thought out experience before you enter the session with a client. I do what I do partly because that was what was expected of me during my undergraduate training and partly because having this system in place has helped me explain what I am doing to non-music therapists. I think it has saved my job a couple of times, and I know that it has started other music therapy positions in other places because of this process and system. Let me explain... Over my career, I have come across people who just see what I do as entertainment. They often have difficulty seeing all the things that happen when music is introduced into an environment. My TME plans have helped me explain things in a way that illustrates that there is more to music therapy than "happy children making happy sounds." As I have matured as a music therapist, I find that having my TMEs in a ...

I think my therapeutic music experience (TME) development process is a bit frustrating for my interns - I know that it was for at least one of my interns because she told me so - because I do not believe in wrong ideas, or songs, or experiences. I believe that all TME ideas are valuable and that there is a person out there who would benefit from the idea that I come up with - I just may not have met them yet. This is the way that I move into TME development - trying to be as open as possible in order to get new ideas. The only rule to TME development is that there are no rules. -by me (paraphrased from some source that has become part of the lexicon - a trope now, according to various sources...) This attitude has been something cultivated by me for my entire TME writing career. I have half-formed ideas, snippets of paper, and half-written songs on post-it notes and index cards in all sorts of places. The most important part of my TME process is that there is no "wrong." Ther...

One of the things that my interns have asked over the years has been "where do you find your ideas for therapeutic music experiences (TMEs)?" This question always makes me stop and think because I do not really have a process for coming up with ideas - I just write down every single thought about things my clients might like to do when those ideas pop into my head. I keep those ideas all over the place - I really do need to come up with a system for this...it's a bit out of control at the moment. Anyway. I often start with something. A picture or a song that I hear on the radio or a toy that I really enjoy playing with that I want to introduce to my clients. My brain starts clicking. For example, I was looking through some materials in my music therapy visual storage a couple of weeks ago and came across a True/False book that was originally a Teachers Pay Teachers file - here's the link . I'm not sure if the original designer, Sarah Gast-Allen , intended for this...

So, here it is. Tuesday again, and the return of my TME Tuesdays. Several years ago, I wrote TMEs every single Tuesday and shared them with readers on this blog. I decided to stop doing that for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because of some of the attitudes of other music therapists on social media complaining that they did not want to pay for the intellectual property of other music therapists - that the other music therapists should just give them whatever they wanted at any time. I don't think that is appropriate - after all, the original music therapist had to spend the time, energy, and effort to create, so that author should receive recognition and recompense for that time, energy, and effort. Since I still feel that my intellectual property has value, I am not going to publish TMEs (TME stands for Therapeutic Music Experience, by the way - the term I choose to use for what I do with clients in sessions) the way I did before, but I will tell you the general portions of thes...

Every month, I walk to my front closet and take out one of my monthly boxes. In these scrapbooking boxes, I store month-specific visual aids, books, songs, and TME ideas to use during the month. There are lots of things in some of the boxes, and less things in others, but this is a place where I can store holiday-related things until they are appropriate to use. I opened April’s box towards the end of March to see what types of things were in it to use. It was pretty dismal to begin with – one Easter book, some empty animal eggs, and not much else to work with. My March box, on the other hand, had lots of books and visuals for St. Patrick’s Day and Spring things. That’s the way this storage goes – sometimes there are lots of things to use and other times there is just lots of space. I looked around me for some things I could include in the box for this upcoming month. As you know, I have recently reacquired some storage space in my music therapy clinic that had originally had a d...