music, therapy, and me

Yesterday's day off ended up being a bit more painful than I thought it would be. I coughed and tore one of my oblique muscles. It hurts lots, mostly when I cough, but also when I twist my torso in any direction. This is a problem because I have to be able to assist with behaviors of concern, if we have any, and I don't know that I will be able to do so without significant pain. I was able to sleep with the assistance of a positioning pillow and eventually finding a position where I was relatively pain free, but this has added some complications to my existence. As a result, I am talking about what I know about music for pain today. This is not something that I know much about, other than some information offered in AMTA presentations a long time ago and personal experience, so note that my information may not be the most up-to-date. What I know is that we have found that people who listen to music before and after surgery often have less need for pain medication than those who...

Today's post comes to you from the fact that I cannot breathe and have to go on breathing treatments that change my body chemistry and make it difficult to drive places. So, I am taking a sick day. Yep, I'm an internship director who is taking a sick day. There is a bit of guilt associated with this since I am the only music therapy supervisor at my facility. So, if I'm gone, then my intern does not have a music therapy supervisor present. That means that groups with a paid staff member present can happen, but individual sessions cannot. I tend to be someone who believes that sick days are important to take during the course of work. Of course, I am also someone who gets sick quite often, so it has become easier and easier to use these days over the years. I also have a compromised immune system, so when someone comes to my room who is sick, I get it all. This, however, is my usual way of doing things in early February. I call it my "OCMT sickness" because it happ...

The prayer shawl I started OCMT 2023 is over - at least the live portion of OCMT 2023 is finished. I am interrupting my really short stretch of nostalgic posts on Sundays to reflect a bit about the Online Conference for Music Therapy, and how it has enriched my life over the years. In 2003, I took a course on how to develop online courses in the School of Education at my local university. This was part of a minor in Curriculum and Instruction, and it was one of the first courses offered on this topic (at least, according to my professor). I developed an online course for education teachers on how to add music into the elementary classroom. I didn't have a place to put it, but I started thinking about using the internet to teach music therapists things. In 2010, John Lawrence, a music therapist from Canada, sent out a message on the Music Therapy Listserv asking if anyone would be interested in starting an online conference for music therapists. After about a week of contemplating i...

This is the first of a new Friday series - Fiction Friday!! I have a bit of fun writing stories, so I thought that this would be something that I could share. So, let's start at the beginning...   CHAPTER ONE "Number 2427," Persephone whispered to herself as she walked through the masses of people and the hallways towards her designated entrance. It was orientation week, and she was trying to find her seat in the auditorium. To do that, she had to find the hall that linked to her section and row - she was number 2427, and that meant heading up about halfway up and a bit over halfway across the great building. There were so many people. Persephone had never been in a class with more than her sibling before. This felt like a small city full of people. Some were playing instruments. Others were singing in groups. Still others looked scared and skittered around the edges of the groups to get to their designated seats. That's how Persephone felt. After finally find...

Well, everyone. My Wednesday was better than I thought it would be - the student who is giving me the most challenge was absent. The rest of the class was fine except for the BHT who spent the entire session on a cellphone with a client rather than encouraging the client to engage in music therapy. I have to talk to the principal about this... ugh. So, Wednesday went well. We have three groups today and three individuals, so it is a light session day. This means that I can finish the binder page activities that I am making for our classrooms. I can also keep working on the file folder activity innards (our post-graduate program is working on the file folder laminating - I have lots of pieces to cut out and add Velcro to before those folders come back to me - 75 folders worth! I have been busy with these things. I am currently contemplating how to distribute these binder pages and activities to the four classrooms that seem to need them. There are some things that will not really work f...

I just finished watching a show that I am enjoying and there was a MAJOR twist at the end of the episode that just left me stunned. No details here, but I am stunned! I didn't see that twist coming, which is pretty unusual for me. I can generally figure these things out, but not this time. Music therapy is often like this for me. There are twists that happen that I have never imagined. There are moments when I sit and think, "Man, I was never taught how to handle this in music therapy school." For me, these twists are what keep me intrigued and working with people. I figure that I will stop being a music therapist when I stop feeling a bit of surprise each week with how the people who come into my sessions respond to music and to music therapy and to me. I had my two groups with the newly formed class at my facility. I focused on play during this week - I wanted to see how these five children played with toys and with each other. I also observed some preferences and encou...

One of the biggest and most important lessons that I have learned over my years as a music therapist is that there are many times where you do not need or even want complex therapeutic music experiences or lots of visual aids or even many different instruments. There are times when simple is better than cool. At my facility, we are in a season of change. This happens every year about this time, but this year's changes seem more abrupt and pervasive than in other years. Every classroom has new staff members. Most of the classrooms have new class members. As a result, music therapy sessions have had to focus more on relationship building and learning how to do things with new people than on our music therapy goals. We have to focus on Maslow's pyramid base right now rather than the upper levels of that pyramid. It is time for meeting physiological needs and basic security needs. So, how do I do this? I go back to my own musical basics - rhythm, parallel play, and working on being...