music, therapy, and me

One of the most challenging things that I have in my life has nothing to do with being a music therapist, but has LOTS of influence on my life as a music therapist, and that is my label as an introvert.  NOTE: If you've never missed out on opportunities because "You're just so quiet, we didn't even think about you," or "You just don't know how to have fun," or "You are just so serious," then you are probably not an introvert and won't really get what I'm trying to say, so you may just want to move to another blog post. I am an introvert. I am about as introverted as you can get on every single type of scale that measures human interaction and how we engage in society. I have always been this way, and it is just now that we introverts are starting to assert our own strengths and power. This is a wonderful time for me (and probably for most introverts, but we probably will NOT shout it from many mountaintops - we are, after al...

My thinking has led me into a corner this week - a place where I can't really move forward, only a bit backward once I've fully explored this space. I think that this corner is an important one, so I've been content to just stay here and think and think and think. I realize that my title states "all" the different ways to define culture - that is my ultimate goal, but right now, I have started to define all the ways... My current corner is full of the different ways that we define culture and how many different types of cultural experiences we all have in our lives. When I start to think about the cultural experiences that make up the "me" that participates in this world, I find that I have lots of influences, expectations, biases, and exposures to different things that make up the culture of "me." This started me thinking about how far do we go when we consider "culture" when interacting with other people. First step in this ...

This is a rant. It is a post that is influenced by my current illness, probably affected by the storm going on outside, and my levels of frustration with the world outside my front door. No worries - I'm going to the doctor this morning, so things should start to get better soon. Less rant-y, more music therapy centered again. Read on with CAUTION! A friend of mine posted a letter from a teacher on one of my social media feeds yesterday. As I read it, I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the opinions shared all over my posts. Opinions are simply that - OPINIONS. Isn't it interesting how little actual real information is ever shared? Anyway, the letter that was posted stated that the reason kids are having so many problems in schools is because of bad parenting. Opinion. The one thing that I got out of the post was that everyone seems eager to blame someone else for the woes of society. "Can't blame me that my students are out of control in my cl...

In our clinical services team meeting this week, our Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant (COTA) presented a sensory inventory checklist. As I took the test (thinking about myself), I found nothing really surprising. I have Sensory Processing Disorder, especially in the areas of vestibular, tactile, and interoceptive senses. This is not a big reveal moment for me - I was unofficially diagnosed when I did my internship and my mother had diagnosed me many years before while she was watching me interact with the world. She was watching me through her Occupational Therapist glasses and knew that I had something sensory going on. During my internship, I was the target of all experiments. As a music therapist, I was not allowed to do the diagnostic tests for official documentation, but I was allowed to learn how to look for specific responses. Since I was the only one who wasn't allowed to diagnose sensory processing difficulties (it wasn't an official disorder back in those da...

In the past several sessions, I've been improvising a song entitled I Am Thankful For . This is a therapeutic music experience (TME) that I have used before and will use again. It's main goal (primary goal) is to encourage thankful thinking - something that can be very difficult for my clients as being grateful is an abstract concept. The concept itself is simple - write down or draw things you are thankful for and then craft them into a song. Some of my clients have really gotten into this TME - they've written or drawn things and then have sung them for their classroom groups. Others have used the concept of being thankful as an excuse to have a behavior so they could escape from the concept. Yet others have written things and then asked me to set it to music. Giving thanks for something that you have when you think that everything has been taken away is difficult. My clients are often taken away from family, family often relinquishes parental rights, and my clients...