music, therapy, and me

On Friday, before I went a-craftin', I went to some thrift stores to see if I could find an interview skirt and then to the Dollar Tree to roam. I try to get to the Dollar Tree once or twice a month to see what they have that can supplement my music therapy experience design. This month was fruitful for Halloween-themed things. Now, if you know me, you know that I do not celebrate Halloween much. I tend to downplay holidays in my therapeutic interactions with clients because (my former) clients tend to get too involved with holiday excitement and seem to think that it is an excuse not to work on therapeutic goals. This is too bad because there are SO many cool things to shape therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) for this season. Friday's trip was no exception. I left there with all sorts of things, placemats, stickers, playing and educational cards, Mad-Libs, and Halloween Movie Night Kits which go along with my most recent sing about edition: sing about the movies . Of course,...

Most of this weekend was consumed with running my first ever solo conference, Rhythm to Results: Clinical Innovations for Music Therapy with Adolescents, but I also had an email from someone who was watching my Creativity Camp videos and wanted some thoughts. That started my own creativity going, and now I have some things to start generating for my TPT store and my Etsy shop! I love it when collaboration with other music therapists helps me figure out what to do next. The project that I have in front of me now is something that can be sustained almost indefinitely. I am looking forward to parsing the project, setting up templates, and then getting going on this project. I will be asking for ideas once I finish my own list, so stay tuned!  My book needs some love. Time to project plan the new ideas and continue to work on my current projects. I am going to see Hadestown, the musical movie, this morning, so I cannot spend all of my morning at my desk. That's a good thing. My sister ...

Oh, dear. It is Friday, and I feel that the week went both fast and slow. Having less than usual numbers of sessions and students makes the week seem unfinished somehow. We get to do that again on the week of 19th for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. That type of schedule is difficult to navigate, especially when you are a creature of habit like me. So, it is now the end of my four-day work week. I have two groups and an individual on the schedule today. That's it. The rest of the time that I am at work needs to be productive, but I have not been actually productive lately. So, I will be using my 30 minutes of work with 30 minutes of something else. I am in between visual aid projects at the moment, so I really don't have anything sitting there waiting to be worked on. I guess one of my work tasks should be to print out more visual aids to work on in the next 22 weeks. Meanwhile, back here at home, things are just piling up around here. My Christmas boxes arrived on Monday, and I h...

It is Saturday, and I am only interested in sleeping ... and eating right now. I feel guilty when I just nap and eat on my Saturdays, so I try to make something happen on these days. I am getting ready for the start of my #100DayChallenge tomorrow. I may get a jumpstart on that by making a card today, but I might not. I am not really all that inspired to do anything right now. That might change after a nap, but it probably will not. I want to make some journals today. I have been collecting the outer packaging to blu-rays that I purchase, and I want to laminate the packaging and make journals out of those disc covers. I have about eight covers that I have been putting off laminating because I haven't set up the laminating area that I envision, but it is time. I want to get these projects going so I can add them to my Etsy store and, hopefully, sell a couple of them to people out there in the world. Okay. Now I have some direction. I want to get some paper signatures ready to put in...

I am sick today. I get sick quite often in my role as a school-based music therapist and getting sick often complicates the time I have with my interns. I realize that you can read that last phrase two different ways (at least), and both iterations seem to be appropriate, in this case. I always have a plan for what interns do on the days when I have to be gone unexpectedly, but there are times when I have difficulty getting my co-workers to understand the plan. That's a whole other topic, though. Let's focus on the point that I am trying to make right now. There will be times when you, a music therapy intern supervisor, will have to take a sick day. This is going to happen, so you have to figure out what your interns will do when you have to be gone. It is better to have a clear plan that you share with your interns than to have to figure it out as you go along. Over the 25 years that I have trained interns, I have had more absences in the last 10 years than in the first 15. So...

Being an internship director means there are times when I have to deliver bad news to an intern. This might be something like client or staff issues, remediating skills, ethical situations, changes in supervision, or other things that come up during the time an intern is with me. One of the easiest things to talk to an intern about is extension of the internship past the proposed end date due to need to get clinical hours, but that is never the easiest of situations either. One of the things that I like about being a National Roster Internship Director is the ability to change and adapt the program to accommodate the needs of each intern that arrives through my door. I tell my interns that their time with me will be THEIR TIME WITH ME. Each intern needs different things from me, so no intern's program will be identical to another intern's program. I have had to extend the programs of several of my interns. Most of the time, when we extend a program, it is because of attendance....

Today's sentimental post comes to us from July 25, 2019 . It is on a topic that makes up the cornerstone of my organizational system - bullet journaling. If you are interested in reading this particular post, here's the link .  I am currently starting the process of migrating into a new bullet journal, so this random selection is interesting to me. It is interesting that this came up (I use a random number generator, so I didn't actually select this post, it was selected for me) this week. I sat down on Friday and selected my next book from the stash of blank books that I have available at all times. So, when this was the post that my generator selected, it seemed to be a good time to review the reasons why I do what I do... I have always had a planner of some sort. My aunts and uncles gave me planning systems from the time I entered high school until I graduated. After that, I used my own calendars to keep track of assignments, tasks, appointments, etc. I use this planner ...

This is the last week for intern #35, so we have been preparing clients for next Tuesday when intern #35 is no longer in the music therapy room. We do not have any say about when our clients attend our facility or when they leave our facility, so we cannot go through the process of termination with clients. So, we do the termination thing with interns. We start the talk about three weeks before the intern graduates, and we term the leaving as "graduation." Many of my students have been around when our older students have graduated from our program, so that concept is usually pretty understandable for my clients. The responses to the intern's announcements vary from "Nooooo. Stay. MJ can leave," through "So??" and "Yay!" There is nothing more simultaneously uplifting and degrading than telling a bunch of adolescents that you are leaving them. Next Tuesday, when it is just me, there will be many questions - there always are questions, but we wi...

I had a big win at work yesterday, and I am engaged in quite a bit of gloating about it! Let me explain... We have to engage in physical behavior management techniques every so often to maintain safety of our clients. These techniques involve placing clients in specific holds and assisting them when their behaviors of concern become severely aggressive in nature and are causing significant harm to themselves or to others. We are trained and engage in refreshers every three months.  We started this form of behavior management 13 years ago. During our initial training, there was one movement that I could not complete safely. This was due to a complex medical diagnosis that I got when I was 16 years old and involves severe vertigo and falling. It is the only movement (out of seventy-some) that I am not able to do, so I do not use that assist...ever. The day before break, we had to go through a certification test where we had to demonstrate all of the skills. When we came to that one m...

When I started this blog forever ago, I wanted to find a title that would help me focus on what I really wanted to write about - the complexities of being a music therapist in this world. There are three pieces of this blog, and I find that, for the past year at least, I have been focusing more and more on the last part of this blog title - the me part. I will still be writing about me - that's a part of this entire blog, after all, - but I want to also up my post count on the other two parts of this blog. I already have TME Tuesdays going, but I think I want to go back to what I used to do - offering ideas to you, fellow music therapist! I got away from that because I got sucked into some social media trolling that insisted that it was the responsibility of music therapists to give ideas and intellectual property to other music therapists without the expectation of payment. I find that I miss the opportunity to share ideas here, so I think I will go back to offering ideas - not th...