Bumbling young fool.

That's what I felt like today. A long weekend writing internship applications, a night of really poor sleep haunted by all of the thoughts and worries I have been putting on hold these days, and a rainy Monday morning made me especially not present today. I found myself spacing out, thinking about my own tasks for the day, and sometimes just not listening. This is probably okay if your job is not purely based on listening to people. However, in my line of work, it can be downright irresponsible

When I opened my mouth, my thoughts were jumbled, too self-referential, and often too precise, cutting, or straightforward to be taken in by my clients. The buffer where I can usually contain myself and dispense only as much truth as is kind and gracious failed, and even a good amount of caffeine couldn't dislodge me from my funk.

I hope that my attempts to admit my bumbling, admit my discombobulation, and apologies for my addled state were sufficient. It's an odd profession where you must wonder if your clients can handle you being a person today, or if it is too soon.

I am tired, so I shall rest. Thanksgiving can't come soon enough.

How My Faith Impacts My Clinical Work

I am grateful for God’s provision in my life in the form of Christian parents, a Church that provided for spiritual parenting, and a rural small-town upbringing that protected me from experiencing many of the more painful realities of this world. Yet, like all parents, although the Church was “good enough,” I came away with my own set of wounds. Along with the messages of justice, faithfulness, and holiness, I took away from my religious upbringing the quality of being judgmental, an emphasis on impression management, and more fear than freedom.

All of this was transformed over the past five years that I have spent in graduate school. During this time, I came to a new faith experience through mourning the losses of my life and entering into my disillusionment. God has painfully yet lovingly stripped from me my false self, and invited me to enter into a relationship with Him that is based on honesty and genuineness. My journey to accepting that I am God’s beloved has been a difficult and ongoing struggle to know my self so that I might be able to better know God. Because of my unbelief, I had my very name, “beloved” permanently tattooed on my physical body, so that the identity I struggle to daily accept cannot be denied.

This experience of God, as a lover of my true self, has been instrumental in how I view the context of therapy. Based on this understanding of God, therapy becomes a journey toward self-knowledge, health, and restored relationships for patients. Regardless of our respective belief systems, when I enter into a relationship with a patient, I bring my true and authentic self. I reflect who a patient is so that she can see and discover her true self. By understanding and knowing the self, a patient learns about the Creator through studying the creation. Balancing grace with truth, therapy is a place to ‘bind up the broken hearted and to set captives free.’ Because of my beliefs, therapy becomes a journey of faith where change is assumed, innovation is expected, and rebirth is welcomed. Rather than reacting out of fear, I rest in my identity in Christ, able to come alongside patients as they wrestle with and through the questions of life and God.

God also calls us to mirror His creativity. Beauty, art, and imagination are instrumental in this process of knowing and being known. These mediums are understood as coming from the Creator and as a means to better experience, express, and understand the various aspect of ourselves, others, and God. Thus, therapy also becomes a space where I encourage patients to explore creative means of knowing and engaging the self through art therapy, mindfulness, contemplative practices, or role play.

I appreciate that God equally values the individual self and the community of multiple selves in relationship. God, whose nature is relational, calls us to live in a community of people where individuals can bring their full selves in order to both know others and be known in such fullness. I strive to provide such an experience in the therapy room so that patients may go out and engage in healthier relationships, participating in the narrative that God is telling through scripture, history, and experience by fully engaging in their communities.

Stocking Your Therapist's Stocking

The holiday season is quickly approaching. There may be a good chance that you're actually around this year because of some wonderful mental health professional. Or maybe you just want to drown the children, kick the dog, and hoard all the candy canes a little less than you used to because of some good but hard therapy. It could be that your family hates you slightly less than they used to. This is a good thing that warrants a thank you gift for the person responsible.

During this season of joy, remember the person who sat with you when you were less than joyful, who listened to your entire life story (over and over and over again), who spent his or her weekend watching that movie just because you mentioned it in session, who spent many hours writing session notes when you simply had to write a check and make your way home, and who actually turned that story about how your sister got the better Barbie doll that one Christmas into a meaningful metaphor for your life.

Below are some gifts highly reccommended for that important therapist in your life.

1. www.knockknock.biz
The Self-Hurt Series from It has such great titles as How to Get Fat and How to Traumatize Your Children. These books contain such gem advice as:

As a controlling parent, you know what’s right. You know what your child should fear and what she should believe. You have the final say in what your child should wear every day, what friends she should have, and how much food she should put in her mouth. Because when there is not room in your universe for your child’s ideas or opinions, you save money on art supplies.

We are our successes and failures—after all what else is there?

Life is tough, and the sooner your child figures out he’s nothing special, the better.

2.
Does your therapist have cold feet? Afraid she suffers at home on cold winter mornings? Do you feel he sometimes "slips" and says things accidentally on purpose? Like that time he claims to have said, "Would you like to suck on a mint?" But you swear that's not what you heard. Well, then your therapist buddy needs some Freudian Slippers. I can personally testify that these are therapist tested and Freudian approved.



3. Maybe your therapist seems a little rusty in the therapy room after several years of practice, or he is a new therapist with that big licensing exam coming up. Maybe you just know that you know more than her. Showcase your knowledge and affinity for psychology based jokes by giving her Therapy Flashcards.










4.Sometimes the therapy relationship has boundaries that feel constrictive. Have you ever want to reach out and tickle your therapist? That concerned head nod make you want to break the tension of a deep moment? Fulfill all your unfulfilled fantasies and phantasies with this Tickle Me Freud plush doll. And have a laugh at your own expense.




5.Maybe you want to be a therapist. The thought of being in control of the therapy session, a wise old sage dressed in a sweater cardigan while fingering your beard, appeals to you. Instead of graduate school try fingering these puppets.Choose from your psychological menagerie of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, or Anna Freud. Couch included.




6.
When starting that new therapy practice, you may have times when you just don't know what to say to clients. For your budding psychology driven desires or to help out the favorite therapist in your treatment team, purchase Dr. Freud's Therapy Ball. It will provide 20 questions or phrases, Magic 8 Ball style, for those moments when the silence is awkward and must be filled.




7.Last, but certainly not least, if you want to tell your therapist to suck it, or if you'd like to suck your therapist, buy and share these watermelon flavored Freud Lollipops.

Sunshine, rainbows, and ponies.

While you were all handing out or collecting candy, I was busy writing discussion questions for a book on signature sins. It's a really well written book that looks at our temperament, our struggles with sin that are unique to who we are, our past experiences, and how contemplative spirituality can help us to address the sins that cling so closely. I'll let you know when it comes out. (Oh...wait...let me clear something up. It's NOT my book, but the book of the professor for whom I've worked for the past four years.) But, doing so does not make me a cheerful gal. Everyone else eats candy, I contemplate sin. I guess that fits more with Reformation Day than with it being Halloween. Calvin was a sucker for gluttony, and so am I, so skipping the candy might be a good thing.

In the therapy office today, it seemed to go exceptionally well. Clients that never talk, talked. Clients that are never quiet, were quiet. And clients that considered leaving therapycame in and told me about their misgivings. That's all any therapist can ask for in a given day. It felt like sunshine, rainbows, and ponies. I never would have thought that a profession that leads me to sit with people in their various pains, false selves, and suffering could be so life giving. The honor of sitting with another in love and truth can be as uplifting as it can be full of despair. I wouldn't call the struggles of my clients uplifting, but to see that an hour a week gives some of them hope to keep fighting, changing, and growing, is a relief. It emboldens me to the goodness that we can taste in this life.

It's a busy day, and I am still working on things. I must go. Just know that there is hope, even for those of us who think we are lost causes.

Celebration of Discipline

Saturday, I started a stained glass class. I've wanted to learn stained glass since I was a preteen reading a novel, its title long forgotten, about a misfit young girl who connected with her Gram over her stained glass hobby. Then her Gram dies and she finds a way to stay connected to her Gram by using her exposure to stained glass to create a masterful light design for her school play in order to save some dastardly sets.

I wanted to be that girl on the way to becoming her wizened grandmother, and I wanted to learn about the vividly described rich colors of the glass, the whirr of the grinder,and the snap of glass across the score line.

Of course, the process of cutting glass is difficult, breaks are uneven, and have you ever tried to cut a circle free hand? Stained glass is an art of preciseness, and my character and personality are very imprecise. It is a time-consuming endeavor, requiring cutting and recutting while trying to conserve expensive and beautiful colored glass. Completion of one step requires movement to another process and yet another, meaning my task oriented nature becomes fatigued, frustrated, and tired.

But there's a special blessing in the muffled crack of a run, the undulations of specialty glass under my fingers, and of hues reminding me of the sour balls that I used suck as a child. I need a hobby that is unable to be completed in one sitting, one Saturday, or one late night. I need a hobby that requires me to walk away because the runs aren't working that day, or because I broke my last piece of beloved glass.

I need a discipline that makes me plan ahead, consider design ahead of time, but to hold my plan loosely, ready to be inspired by an unexpected moment or an unanticipated break. In fact, this feels much like therapy without the constant worry about managing my self with intense focus on another. Rather, I am able to focus only on my experience of the glass, the pliers, the grozers, the grinder, and to adapt to the cuts and how they turn out.

Once you've committed to a cut, you can't stop or you'll ruin it. You must learn to work with your mistakes while cultivating accuracy. You can't fake stained glass. Under examination fakes look, well, fake. So this weekend, I'll return to a community college chemistry classroom to spend time with retired and disabled senior citizen Gary who "takes classes because without them I have no reason to get up in the morning," cockeyed middle-aged Rick whose children have left the nest and who seems to need conversation, lots of conversation, and Marie, a younger than me woman who speaks only when spoken to, but whose gentle features soften the room without any words. And we'll cut, grind, solder, and all of that, hoping to learn more about something and to have an experience.

Restoration frees us here

How am I to be in the world?....How can I be a believer in today's world in such a way that it involves my whole self--my passion, my intelligence, and my allegiance? My question always invites me to return to the desert. Alan Jones in Soul Making

Have you ever had a day that was so encouraging, and where you felt as if everything was coming together in some cosmic God-driven way, and the goodness and sweetness of it overwhelmed you? Your everyday annoyances, the things that grate, irritate, and wound seem less uncomfortable for a moment, and you find yourself in a moment where you felt truly alive.

I think that happened today.

It wasn't anything monumental, if you look from the outside. It was a women's professional development group where approximately ten women in my field talked about finding our voices and this distinct gifting and calling we have as psychology professionals. It was a conversation about being relational, authentic, and uniquely who we are as the beloved of God, dispensing grace to others, in the same way it has been dispensed to us.

It was feeling at home in the therapist's chair and feeling such overwhelming love for my clients that I felt for a moment I was seeing each of them through God's eyes. Of feeling so excited about the even smallest glimmers of possibility and potential in their lives, that I cannot wait for each client to find the small glimmers of hope that you see and she has yet to uncover for herself.

It was two friends show up to work out with me after work. It was coming home to a husband who had half of dinner cooking on the stove. It was the snuggle of kitties and the comfort of having nothing that HAD to be done.

They are rare, but needed, and I am thankful for today.

This is a first...

A patient in the waiting room at my practicum site took out his guitar and started tuning it, and then he started playing some song, and then...then, he started singing. There is a guy playing guitar and signing in the waiting room. WTF? He's out of tune, too. I better see what's up.

A (not so) brief paragraph on the process of healing.

The Process of Healing

Healing, in its various forms, is a complicated process. While God sometimes chooses to intervene in miraculous and seemingly immediate ways, more often God leads the human to healing through a process. The reasons for this are many and often known only to God. However, through the wisdom of scripture, tradition, and personal experience, there are methods through which we find healing often happens.

One of these paths is having another bear witness to one’s pain and suffering. Witnesses hearing testimony and confession confirm the reality of one’s story. Any individual who has long held a secret to the point that he or she doubted its truth will attest to the incomplete but remarkable relief experienced by speaking such secrets aloud to another person. Healing also often occurs in the context of relationship. From relatively high functioning individuals to the severely character disordered, we all posses a level of inherited and acquired relationship patterns that are convoluted by sin. By entering into loving and caring relationships with others (and with God) that disrupt or frustrate these patterns and provide new ways of relating, we can experience a measure of healing. Such experiences compel us toward healthier and holier interactions with one another and with the Creator.

Finally, healing is reflected in the developmental process. God, being fully aware that we are never fully aware, orchestrates our individual experiences in such a manner that we learn in a cumulative but somewhat lock-step way. Each experience has the potential to yield new insight that we previously could not grasp because of the cumulative nature of each experience before that moment. Such a developmental path to healing accounts for the temporal nature of certain dis-eases.

I'm tired...

..of being low man on the totem pole. My site is amazing, but being a student means never being in the same office. That's hard for me, a person who is highly impacted by place. I just received an email that my client and I have been rescheduled for another room. This is pretty darn annoying because my client and I have met in that room for 2 years. Talk about disrupting the frame. *Sigh* Do I speak up or just put up with it for this one week? Or point out that there's an empty room that no one is scheduled for that the clinician who is changing her schedule could use?

I sent an email, and I hope it's not taken as whining. I'm willing to move all my clients but this one, because we're in the middle of terminating what has been a 2 year therapy relationship.

What do you think?

In the state of Illinois, the extent to which therapy sessions with adolescents are confidential is at the determination of the therapist when it comes to whether or not to disclose to parents. I highly value the confidentiality of the therapy context, and believe that it's my job to work to have an adolescent tell his or her own parents important information, so that I can eventually be out of the picture and they have new skills in regard to communication with one another. But there are limits to that, and I often tell the teen, you can tell your mom/dad at the end of the session, or I will. Which do you prefer? Or, you have until our next session to tell mom or dad this or we'll be doing it in that session.

Here's a list we're supposed to rank for my Advanced Ethics course. What do you think? Tell me your ratings and then I'll show you mine after some people have responded.

Would you require disclosure to parents (or anyone else) for any of the following behaviors on the part of your 16 year teen client even if the teen doesn’t want you to disclose? Give your rating on the following scale for each of the following:

Rank the 0-10 with 0 being Would Not Disclose, 5 Totally Depends, 10 Definitely disclose.

_____ Being sexually active?
_____ Being sexually active without the use of protection?
_____ Being sexually promiscuous?
_____ Doing marijuana once per week on the weekend?
_____ Smoking pot daily before school?
_____ Doing ecstasy once per month?
_____ Driving into a dangerous neighborhood to buy heroin for the teen’s personal use?
_____ Dealing / selling drugs?
_____ Vandalism (graffiti)
_____ Petty retail theft
_____ Buying a fake i.d. to use in bars
_____ Selling fake ids to others
_____ Your client tells you that she is having sex with an 18 year old girl
_____ Your client tells you that she is having sex with a 35 year old
_____ Stealing bikes from kids in the neighborhood and re-selling them elsewhere
_____ Your client was in a group fight with kids from a rival high school and thinks that he may have broken the nose and arm of another kid and possibly fractured the other kid’s skull as well
_____ Your client stole a car
_____ Your client plans to be involved in a large scale fight between rival groups this weekend
_____ Your client plans to have a party at her home this weekend when her parents are away
_____ Your client is pregnant and her parents don’t know
_____ And she is thinking about having an abortion

Random notes...

This week, my wonderful husband is out on his own, being a writer, doing writer type things, and hanging out at all of our old favorite Knoxville haunts. That means I have to somehow make extroverted me deal with all this silence, quiet, and being aloneness that comes with a week of married singlehood. This includes such anomalies as making my own lunches, picking up my own dirty clothes from their random flungness on the bedroom floor, and feeding myself and two cats (kibble is for kitties, kibble is for kitties). From this, I've learned that I'm completely NOT ready to be a parent. Not until after graduate school. So, what have I been up to?

Well, I read Meg's great post on productive vs. fruitful. She has another one on suffering that I found pertinent, astute, and clever.

On Friday, before my dear husband left, we went to a hip hop show downtown at the Abbey Pub. Me! In all of my rhythm-lacking anxious whiteness, went to a hip hop show, and I. Loved. It. Please, do check out two great hip hop groups of artists. The other one is over here. If you've ever wondered what my husband looks like, he looks like Adeem, the rapper in Glue. (What a great name for a music group!!!)

I've been reading for advanced psychodynamic class, again, some excerpts from Soul Making by Alan Jones

This is how you have to be--like the dead; beyond cursing and praise, unaffected by the opinions of others.

Silence and a feeling of deadness seem to go together. To be utterly silent can feel like death. And silence is important to both the desert tradition and to psychoanalysis. As we have the the psychoanalyst's role is sometimes to sit with the patient and remain completely silent and apparently unhelpful.

'Stopping the world' is an exhilarating experience. Just for a moment, we have no chioce but to see all our dogmatic and philosophial baggage thrown overboard as we stand ship-wrecked on an unknown island. There we are, naked, stripped of the fig leaves of our prejudices and presuppositions. The believer's world is full of images of this "dying." It is strange how many believers are cuaght off guard, since some for of 'dying in order to live' is at the heard of all the great religions. Yet the really creative and free souls I have encountered all have been shipwrecked at one time or another. They have had their world taken from them and lived to tell the tale.

Last night, I had a long overdue, meaningful discussion about life, family, and becoming a therapist with my friend Sarah. She has the most beautiful hair in the world, and a beautiful spirit that is even better than her hair. But let's not talk until 2am again, okay Sarah? At least not on a school night.

I have also spent time being called out, by my clients. Or A client. Yeah, so ever tried to help another person become comfortable with silence when that's YOUR growing edge as well? It's not easy. Rewarding, but not easy. Said client called me on the fact that I always take a sip of water on my kick ass water bottle anytime I want to be maintain the silence, but am having a hard time keeping my fat mouth shut. Wow, how perceptive! So many of my clients would be great therapists. Many of them are so gifted in this sense of the word.

I've also been doing some psych testing. I'm getting to know the Woodcock Johnson. Written by Dick Woodcock and his colleague Johnson. How many slang terms for penis can you fit in one test name? It makes me giggle. Any suggestions for what a female version of a test name could be?