music, therapy, and me

My anticipation meter is a bit off this week. No one has actually done what I have expected them to do in music therapy sessions. My first two sessions on Monday were horrible - assists, screaming, arguments. It was stressful and led me to spend most of the rest of the week thinking about how much trauma the staff at my facility go through without acknowledgement or mediation. I am someone who releases my emotions well other than through crying. I cry quite a bit in my car. There is something really surreal about having to go through a session where everyone is screaming, trying to engage them in something musical, and then having to turn around immediately to do it all over again. I am sitting there, playing my guitar, while my fingers are shaking from my adrenaline release. It is part of what I do, but I am tired and am ready to move on.  Fourteen months to go. At this time next year, I hope that we will know who the next music therapist will be. I will have taken most of my thin...

this picture will make sense - keep reading It is a snow day. My superintendent made the call yesterday afternoon, so I knew that I did not have to go to work today since yesterday, and I am embracing the day away from work. Yep, you read that right. I decided to stay home today. I am trying not to feel guilty about staying here, but it is a difficult reach for me. I feel guilty. So, time to embrace that feeling and then release it into the world. I may try to get out of my driveway tomorrow to get to work, but I might not. (I think we will have another snow day tomorrow, by the way.) Today is already full of chores and things to do for work. I have to make some signs for an upcoming after school event run by the clinicians at my facility for our residents. I like making signs, so I am going to take this time to do this task. I will be Zooming with my intern who is also having to take a snow day at her house. I was able to finish up her busy box of things designed to stimulate her crea...

I was talking to a co-worker yesterday about the extreme fatigue and feelings of frustration, overwhelmedness, and exhaustion that seem to be overcoming our entire workplace. She said something about this pandemic going on for over 600 days now, and I started wondering about how we were going to be working through the effects of this pandemic once we finally get to the point where it is no longer a big, new thing but is just one of those things that happens to us - like influenza. This led me down a rabbit hole of looking for information on the internet. Now, I did not just go with anything that I saw - I think I am so-so at identifying good sources rather than propaganda, but I learned some things about myself and others during this brief dip into the information pool. First of all, it has been 602 days since January 9, 2020, when the WHO announced the presence of this virus (https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020). That is all. It has been 538 days since...

I am struggling right now to make sense out of our world. There are things that are happening that are traumatic. There are things that are wrong. There are things that will ruin us as a whole that are happening because of a very small number of people who presume that we share their ideas. I have a father and several family members who think that the things happening now are the greatest things ever. The rest of us don't talk about these things. I have been on a news hiatus since the last Presidential election. I find myself either yelling and getting furious at what I hear or I cry about it. There is very little in between, and I just cannot go through that process every day. So, I avoid listening to the news. Right now, though, there is no ignoring what is happening to families in our nation. I work with children who have been separated from their original families and often from many other family units as well. Sometimes those separations have been warranted - the family wa...

I often wonder, during my reading about things trauma related, what happens when trauma is denied - when people do not remember trauma or like to pretend that it never happened. A bit of antecedent information. I have a family member who has never had a stable home life. His mother and father were together when he was born, lived together until he was 3, and then split up. They were never married, so he did not go through the "trauma of divorce," but the only thing that was different was the legal aspect of that type of separation - everything else was the same. Neither of his parents is very stable. His father has continuing health issues, a new family (which is breaking up), and he has recently moved away from this family member - to the other side of the world, to be near the little son who is also living on the other side of the world. The family member is staying with his mother who bounces from relationship to relationship, often having more than one at a time. She ha...

Now that I have taken up the role of Internship Director/Supervising Music Therapist again, I am finally getting an opportunity to put my Trauma-Informed Care Trainer Certification to work. (Also, you will be hearing lots and lots about my interns and how they challenge me to think about music therapy from a different perspective than my own!) One of the training topics that the trainers are trying to insist that my interns sit through is "Trauma Sensitive Care." I refused the topic (mainly because I have sat through it and it is pretty much worthless) stating that I would take care of that training myself. In retrospect, I have not told anyone at work that I am a T-IC certified trainer, so that may be some of the insistence on their parts, though I doubt it would make much of a difference if I told them that fact... I digress... One of my future interns is very focused on working with persons through a T-IC focus, so I'll be spending time talking to that intern abo...

I am somewhat late to the Trauma-Informed Care (T-IC) philosophy, but it is the significant treatment philosophy being pushed at my facility, especially for those of us who are therapists. We are being encouraged to use the tenets of T-IC in every interaction that we have with students. I am immersing myself in strategy development on how to incorporate the ideas and thoughts of T-IC in my music therapy practice. One of the things that I have learned is that being a practitioner who is aware of T-IC is that there are no "T-IC" music therapy interventions, per se. The idea of T-IC is to interpret responses through a different lens - remembering that exposure to traumatic experiences changes brain development, so sometimes the behaviors are brain-based rather than deliberate. Just like there is no music that you can prescribe for a specific diagnosis, there is no "one-size fits all" when it comes to working with people. For my population, T-IC has become the bas...

I admit it, I didn't get my reading done this week, but I did spend time thinking about trauma-informed music therapy practice - spurred on by several situations that occurred in my music therapy sessions and structured by the reading and training that I have had in this particular topic. As this topic is something that challenges my way of thinking as well as my own interactions with the world, I am allowing myself to explore at a leisurely pace rather than keeping to a specific schedule. My left arm was scratched by two separate clients on Monday. I have some wonderful bruises and small indentations on my forearm. This is just part of my job - there are times when I get scratched, bruised, kicked, pushed, hit up the side of the head - you name it. Part of my job is to help my clients learn that aggression is not the way to get what you need out of others, but there is a learning curve to that situation. When you've only been able to escape danger through fighting, you fig...

Last week, I realized that I did the unforgivable - I published my Synthesis Sunday link without the reference. I will try my best not to do that again. It is now affixed to the bottom of this post. My reading this week has taken me into the second half of the first chapter of the text, Music, Music Therapy and Trauma: International Perspectives. This chapter, written by Julie Sutton, offers some of the background needed to move further into the book. I particularly appreciated the outline of "post-traumatic echo" found on page 27-28. One of the things that many of us forget is that when we live in the world, constantly hooked into media streams and with news at our fingertips is that we are exposed to traumatic experiences that are not actually happening to us. Even when these experiences do not happen to us personally, the way we access information and the way we are exposed to those experiences have an effect on how we process the situations.  I work with people w...

I have started my journey through a new to me book, Music, Music Therapy and Trauma: International Perspectives , edited by Julie P. Sutton, and published in 2002 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. I'm thinking this may be a long series of posts as I was not able to get through the first chapter without having to stop and process - I only made it through 4 pages, there was that much to think about. Perhaps it will get easier as I progress through the book, but I'm not sure if that will happen. There is lots of food for thought in these pages. This text was written as part of an Award program that included a conference and correspondence between music therapists who work in different areas of the world. There are authors from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Bosnia, and Israel. Each author offers a clinical perspective on music therapy treatment with those who have trauma histories. I haven't heard of many of these authors, so I am very happy to delve into yet ano...

On Wednesday evening, my anxiety came to a head with me crying hysterically on the phone while talking to my father about how I was feeling. My father, who doesn't really like to address deep feelings, suggested that I call my sister who is better at addressing those feelings. So, I did. After talking to her, I made some proactive changes to my sleeping and went to bed. I tossed and turned all night, sweating through my pajamas, and waking every hour or two. When I woke up yesterday morning, I was exhausted and sick. I got dressed in my work uniform and attempted to blog (several different times). I took the last dose of my stomach medication and prepared to go to work, but I couldn't get going. I called and arranged for a sick day. Then, I went back to sleep until the cat woke me up. I went out to get some medication, a new thermometer (mine always seem to go missing when I want to take my temperature, some water filters, and a new book to read.  Isn't it amazing how t...

Faced with yet another tragic community event repetitively referred to on every single media platform imaginable, I figured it was time to start back into my Trauma-Informed Care information - yet again - but I haven't been able to do it. I just can't right now. Trauma is something that happens to everyone - whether it is primary, secondary, or vicarious. I am particularly prone to vicarious trauma - effect of a traumatic event that does not happen to me but that I am exposed to over and over again. This is one of the reasons why I do not have cable or television services - I cannot avoid situations when they come into my home via every single outlet possible. I also do not listen to the news on the radio anymore - too many emotions brought up by just hearing specific voices. Trauma is not just shootings or injuries or abuse. There are things that are traumatizing for one person that do not traumatize another person. Trauma is personal, it is different for every person, and...

It is time to start a new book for Synthesis Sunday. After mulling things over, I've decided to use my Sunday readings for two purposes - first, to read and share something that I find interesting and important (I hope), and second, to work on a course that I want to offer. To that end, I introduce to you Synthesis Sundays centered around trauma-informed care and music therapy! I have my textbook, Music, Music Therapy and Trauma: International Perspectives , and I have my notes from my facilitator training. I have my notebook, and my ever faithful assistant who is ready and willing to sit on top of materials, to hit the pen as I take notes, and generally comment on my writing process right near by. It is time to start. First, a bit of background about why this topic at this time.  I work with children and adolescents who have significant trauma histories that have led to the development of antisocial behaviors and responses which make education and safe community particip...

I've been thinking quite a bit lately. These thoughts are often circular in nature and just keep on going and going, so I am going to put some of them down in fixed form here to help get them out of my head. I may be an internship supervisor again in the future. This is a part of music therapy professional life that I really enjoy. The role of supervisor is a completely voluntary one for me - no financial benefits, but I do get 4 CMTEs for being a supervisor - but it is a role that I love. Each intern that I've worked with has left a mark on my professional interactions with my clients and with every other intern who has decided to spend their 1020 hours with me. I enjoy the privilege of watching students become therapists (and they have all had that moment when learning and experience solidify into being "therapist" - it's hard to describe what that really means), and I learn from every single individual. I've been singing a variety of opening Therapeutic...