The Value of Structure

Now that I have a job and a start date, I am overwhelmed with all of the outstanding and amazing things I wanted to do during the months I thought I might be unemployed. I'm so overloaded with potentially super duper fulfilling options, I'm not very effective at any of the things I had in mind. I am trying to do all of them at once or worse, I am wandering around between them just trying to decide where to devote my attention and not actually doing anything at all. Time wasted. That's the unfortunate side of too many interests.

My cure for that is not adderall, but daily writing and it's pretty clear that needs to be a habit I renew real soon... as in the next time I wake up. Last summer I read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I didn't like it, but I did attempt some of the exercises just to see what would happen. Cameron suggests keeping your creativity flowing through writing "Morning Pages," as in 3 pages of free writing every morning. So, I did it. What I discovered was not that I was more creative, but that I was more focused and able to set priorities throughout the day if I started my morning writing whatever came to mind.

What comes to mind when I allow myself to hold still are thoughts on what I value, what worries me and all of the awesome things I need to experience in this short little life. That sounds like a longer thought stream than it is. The truth is, I run out of things to think within minutes. Really, if you pay attention, you probably just think a few versions of the same thoughts over and over and it's harder to maintain that pattern if you're writing wherever your thoughts go. So, if I'm writing instead of getting attached to the same little handful of my favorite mind stories, there isn't anywhere reasonable to take that but to break it all down into little manageable chunks that I can actually accomplish in the moment. Day and mind organized with very little effort. Voila. So this is where I need to begin again. Time to dust off the old journal.

It would be nice to start my new life as a real therapist with some structure in my brain.

And along those lines, please direct your gaze to your right and notice the small survey on the side of my blog. Any recommendations for future ramblings?

And for the sake of images, one of the things I have been doing is preparing a new etsy shop. I have piles of monkey parts all over my desk right now. Here is the first one I completed. Shop opens when I hit 10 new monkeys with bios.

Zee, the mohawked tagger

An Adolescent Group Intervention One

Okay, back to our regular scheduled programming...

A couple of years ago when I was doing my internship with adolescents. My fellow intern and I were co-leading (unsupervised) and had a curriculum to follow (we didn't make it) and it was failing. The kids had been there long enough that many of them had already done it plus they were not ready for the work it involved in the first place or at least they weren't gonna play along on this with 1st year interns (talking about their behaviors, trauma, emotions...) It was pretty much a total nightmare and the rookies running the show (us) were getting eaten alive every single group.  We absolutely could not get to the information of the group, because following the curriculum resulted in chaos and power struggles from the first minute. It was a bad scene.

We talked about it with our supervisors and finally my supervisor (also the director of the program) said, "Drop it. Do something else until they are ready." So we did. This is what we came up with and it was AMAZING. My co-intern and I were doing high fives and body slams after this. (Okay, we didn't really do any body slamming, but I was feeling that Superbowl Sunday pumped and I think she was too.) It was the best group we had all year.

So, here's what happened: we decided we needed to talk about respect, because there wasn't a whole lot of that going on. So, we said it in song. We googled respect lyrics, looking for something other than R.E.S.P.E.C.T and got this from Train:

For reasons I don't know I treated you so cold
I wish I had those times again
Cause something that you said keeps ringing in my head
Someday you're gonna wanna come back and you're gonna wanna treat me fine

Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little time
Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little

I watched me push you down in dreams I had of you
And all I remember about those days is I would run around thinking that you'd be alright
But you lost your light along the way
And oh you were right about the things I'd say
Cause if I had it back again I know I'd treat you kind

Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little time
Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little time
Everybody got to have somebody
Everybody got to have someone

And all I ever wanted from this play
Was someone to talk to when I get down
It seems you get the things you give along the way
Now all I need is one more chance to make you feel like hanging round

Everybody needs a little
Everybody needs a little
Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little time
Everybody needs a little respect
Everybody needs a little time
Everybody got to have someone

We gave them all double-sided photocopies. One side had this, the other side had some really simple sentence completion in a poetry format. It was just something we threw together like,

To me respect is ________________________.
I feel respected when people ________________________.
I wish everyone _______________________.
etc.

We read the lyrics together and then invited them to either write their own lyrics/poem about respect or fill in the sentences. Then we had a little poetry open mic and discussion about how we all want to be treated. The gods smiled down upon the baby interns and their group that day, because the kids LOVED it. They. Loved. It. THEY LOVED IT! Words cannot express the beauty of this moment I swear to you. If it wouldn't have been poor boundaries, I would have kissed the forehead of every person in the room that day. I got so excited I said, "I am so amazed by how well you guys write (TRUE!). I think we need to make a book with this stuff!" and they thought so too and wanted to bring in more poetry, create art for the book on their own time etc... they lost interest in this later, but I think if we leaders had been a little less rookie and a little more creative, we might have been able to maintain a sense of excitement about that project and worked the curriculum we were supposed to follow into this... maybe.

After reading Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents, I think part of the success of this had to do with not only appealing to their interests (they like to write), but also we were not directing this at them. This wasn't about "tell me how you should be respectful and lets review group rules (snore)" but more like, "hey what do you think about respect?" According to Shirley Riley, teens do better when asked about a topic in general terms and don't do so well if asked about their own weaknesses and thoughts due to the natural narcissistic developmental stage.

The kids also noted how great the group had been which allowed us to discuss what they thought had made that happen and how we could have more awesome groups.