music, therapy, and me

Yesterday was another rough day for my session - not for the ones that my intern ran, but MINE! I am starting to feel that this is a personal vendetta from my clients, but I know that is ridiculous. Today, I am heading into a full-moon (don't doubt, scoffers), upcoming winter storm, short-staffed, mess of a job to lead three groups. I am hoping that they will be at least a bit receptive to music therapy today. We have two other groups to go through - my intern will lead one completely and will do as much of the second as possible! In another setting event, I got home to a home without power - on webinar night. I was able to start a communication chain but had to cancel because I was unsure if the power would be on at webinar time. Sigh. At one point during my ONLY group session yesterday, there were two kids in crisis, one kid taking a break, and all sorts of situations happening. We had a new staff member in the session - don't even know the person's name - who did not app...

There are some strange things happening this time of year with my clients - things that I cannot reveal but that have never happened before and that are really concerning. Granted, these strange things are not happening to many of my students, but that does not relieve any of the worry, concern, and fear that any of us have for the ones that are in this spot. Since I can't write about specifics about any of my clients, I am thinking about what it means to be a therapist and to care for other people. One of my favorite visuals is called the SmartTherapist Manifesto. Unfortunately, the website that originated this wonderful visual has "retired" (in website speak), but the visual lives on in other posts - here is one where you can see the visual that I'm talking about on the right side of the page - Look for the SmartTherapist Manifesto . I love this visual (which is a variety of print on a paper in a variety of fonts and colors that includes the following statements) be...

I didn't run any music therapy sessions yesterday because I moved my intern and myself and all my junk into the storage closet. You see, some short-sighted administrators (who have all left under mysterious circumstances now) decided that we didn't need any extra office space in the education area and gave that away to the clinical team and now we need that office space back but every single nook and cranny is full to the brim of stuff, including my room, but since I have three separate storage areas (2 offices and the closet which I only spread things into in January), I was expected to be a "team player" and allow people to be constantly tramping through my music therapy sessions for the "good of the team." Now, I have lived with the "people tramping through" situation for several years, and I HATE IT! I decided to make things fall the way I wanted them to fall. I approached my new principal (not one of the short-sighted) and told him that I knew...

I had a better yesterday than the day before, even though I broke a laptop display and then the same computer sat in a puddle of urine for an undetermined amount of time... Ah, the life of a music therapist that people rarely write about. Welcome to MY blog! Even with the destruction of my clinic computer (the one I use to play recorded music for my clients), yesterday was a better day than Tuesday. That happens often in my world - ups and downs all the time. My 2020 visual here needs to be updated a bit to include how 2021 has just taken me down a new track - 2020 is no longer a closed circuit but took a sharp turn into 2021 issues and events. I think this picture illustrates life pretty well - it is a series of loops and twists and turnabouts that just seem to happen without any sort of rhyme or reason. 2021 has continued the pattern here - there was a sharp fall after my father died with lots of bumps and twists in the (almost) three months since he passed away. Today is my parents...

I have decreed it to be so, so it shall be so! I started crying this morning when I saw a suicide prevention public announcement encouraging people to engage others in small talk. To be completely honest, this type of crying is not unusual for me at all. My primary emotional outlet is tears and always has been, so having a crying day is not strange. It is normal. Today, however, I think I am going to refrain from some of my "work-from-home" foci to allow myself to be able to burst into tears at any moment without fear of being on video. I think today may be a planning/visual aid/TME development type of day. I can work on music production without having to be filmed, so red, swollen eyes will not be a problem. Why is today declared a "Crying Day?" There is no specific reason, just more of the roller coaster things that are happening in the lives of others at this point. I am physically fine - things are at my normal for this time of year other than the broken fingers...

I woke up yesterday in a down mood. I am not sure if this is based on my hormonal cycle or the circumstances that are happening around me, but it is not my preferred state of existence. I do not like being someone who is on the periphery of situations - I prefer being in charge and making essential decisions. That is not the case right now. I am an extra in the drama of other people's lives, and that is not the place I prefer to be. I am also lonely with all the working from home stuff. I miss my daily interaction with my clients. It is difficult to find songs to sing that provide them with something to do where they cannot engage in choice making or providing input. I have to change my way of thinking about what I am doing in order to make it make sense for me. This is a complete tangent from the title of this post, but I think it will make sense if I write it down. Bear with me. I have always loved the idea of writing music to supplement educational curricula. My first thesis pro...

I am starting the first of two days without my interns. They chose to go to the AMTA virtual conference - I opted not to go. So, I will be heading into work to lead their groups and then spend some time in my space alone. To be completely honest, I am looking forward to being "therapist" for a couple of days, and I am also going to enjoy doing things like cleaning out my office from the bottom to the top! My afternoon group today has been cancelled due to germs, so I have from 11-2:45 to take things out of my office, sort them, toss things, organize other things, and then re-load things into a cleaner office space! I think I will take some of my newest DVDs to watch while I am cleaning. Having something on the television engages my attention so I can work on tasks that I don't really like - like cleaning... I have my sessions strategies ready, but I am really missing the guitar today. I wish I could bend my fingers enough to play, but I'm not healed yet. I didn't ...

Well, yesterday we had a "this is the way it is" talk at work. We have these about every 5-10 years and have ranged from "Hey, welcome to the last day before Winter Break - by the way, we might not be open on New Years. Merry Christmas!" to yesterday's greatest hit, "We may not be able to sustain our numbers with the level of funding that we have now, so some of you may not be working here in July." Sigh. I am currently experiencing an anxiety attack about all the things that are in my head right now - hence, the last afternoon blog post - an attempt to get this out of my head and into the ether of the internet in a way that is archived for all eternity but that allows me to purge my thoughts and try to settle. I got sick again on Sunday - not anything COVID-ish, but lots of my typical gastrointestinal stuff. I wasn't able to sleep very well in between issues and attacks, but things started earlier on Sunday than it did last Sunday. I was a...

One of my favorite movies in the world is called Bowfinger . It is a silly movie, but it is something that I absolutely adore. It stars Steve Martin (who also wrote it) and Eddie Murphy (in a dual role) along with Christine Baranski, Heather Graham, and Terence Stamp. It's a funny movie about the movie industry, and I have most of it memorized. One of Eddie Murphy's characters is a famous movie actor who gets involved with everyone else in a con situation, and his character is on the edge to begin with. As part of the story, he is involved in a form of counseling and has a mantra - Keep it Together. During the movie, he repeats this mantra when things get a bit too much for him to handle. You can tell how much he is upset by the pitch and the tempo of his repetitive chant - keep it together, keep it together, KIT, keep it together. Last week's sessions were a time when I used this mantra. Things were spiraling, and I was coming down with my Jan/Feb ick, and it was all...

In the past two weeks, I've had very few positive sessions at my facility. My students are struggling, our mostly new staff members are struggling, and I am struggling to get anything accomplished. I am feeling like a failure as a therapist because I haven't had a day go by where I wasn't physically assaulted by a client for simply requesting that they remain safe in my therapy space.  Here's the deal, folks. Music therapy is not always comprised of "happy people making happy sounds." There are times when you have to deal with humans at their worst, and it is not fun. These times, though, are the times when music can be most powerful and the role of the music therapist is the most important. Sure, any therapist can enjoy their job when everything is going right, but it takes stamina and realism and dedication to stick with a difficult client during a difficult time! (I currently have about 100 clients going through difficult times, so I am feeling like ...

I love being an internship director. This is a statement that I can make because it is entirely true. Being an internship director is something that enriches my professional life significantly, and I enjoy being able to share the path of each of the music therapists who spend time with me. They are each unique in how they approach music therapy, but there is something that they bring to the program that is common to all - enthusiasm. I like to think that I still show my enthusiasm for this profession, but I think it's been tamped down a bit by all the things that I've been through as a therapist over the past decades. I still feel that this is the profession that I was made for and that I do good things in my roles. It is easy to get bogged down in the arguments and differences between us all and the people who just cannot and will not accept that their opinions are not fact, but all of those things are human traits, not music therapy traits, so these things would happen ...

True story. My grandmother loved all things November. We made command appearances at her house for Thanksgiving every single year until we started high school because it was her preferred holiday and she loved having people around. Her birthday, November 22, was a big part of our celebration responsibilities, and we would do things up right! There would be open houses, big meals, ping-pong tournaments, cousin spats, and (shudder) formal portraits. My grandmother and I shared one unfortunate trait, however. We were both as stubborn as the day is long. We also both knew that we were right and the other one was wrong. This picture is the result of one of our interactions. I was three. Now, I am the oldest cousin, sister, and person in my generation of the families I am part of. I have always been expected to do what I am told, and I often did just that - what I was told. But, for some reason, being at Mama Icie's house just brought out the stubborn in me. In this particula...