I also learned that just about every guy a girl dates will resemble her father in one way or another (one thing of Freud’s I might actually agree with). The trick is finding one whose qualities resemble the good stuff and not the bad. SFSG. )

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

(1) I feel an attachment to Dexter not because he’s a vigilante of sorts, but because he reminds me of someone from my life. Someone who also is not very in touch with their feelings, who works a boring job and disguises himself as a dork. Except this guy doesn’t have Antisocial Personality Disorder, he’s more the Schizoid or Avoidant type, less law-breaking. Regardless, I have a certain fondness for him, based solely on the familiarity. And especially on the facial expressions.

(2) I’m inspired by the APD. I mean, I prefer Dex to have emotions because it’s the healthier thing to do. But at the same time I find myself more easily detachable from emotional situations after watching some of the Season 1 episodes. Season 2 is shaping up to be a whole ‘nother ball game, now that Dex is feeling feelings and such. Personally, I need a little less feeling in my life.

(3) Speaking of feelings, Debra hit the fuckin’ nail on the head when she told Rita she didn’t miss her wife-beater-addict-ex-husband but instead missed the way he made her feel about herself. It didn’t click until she fell for her age-inappropriate boss who “made her feel strong.” Yeah. I took on one of my exes because he made me feel loved. You can love someone who loves you because they make you feel great. But you will not necessarily fall in love with them. I’m with my boyfriend now because he makes me feel worth it. (And maybe still the high school crush thing.) There is a huge difference between feeling loved and feeling lovable. You can easily fall in love with someone that makes you feel lovable. As a matter of fact, they can help you through the “love yourself before you can love anyone else” thing. For as long as they’re around, shortcomings just feel like traits-in-progress. I believe in a better me because I have him. I don’t know that anyone has ever made me feel hopeful before, and truth be told I’m not even that bad (anymore)!

Maybe I’ll look back on this when I’m feeling differently. Probably not, but it’s nice to document once in a while.

As ever, good night, cruel world.

P.S. If the crazy Borderline girl doesn’t get out of this show soon, I’ll have a completely different portion of my past to write about (I’ll pretend the Lilla/Lila coincidence doesn’t exist for now). Hey, at least it’s material.

So apparently the laws of ethics demand that therapists can never be friends with or sleep with clients. That makes perfect sense in the short term—sleeping with someone you’re currently treating as a client has all sorts of terrible repercussions (not to mention what it says about the therapist as a person). However, say for example a single female therapist sees a single male client in 2011 for a specific phobia. The client is otherwise a mentally healthy individual except he’s terrified of heights or injections (or dogs, whatever) and treatment takes about three months. After those three months, the client has overcome his fear and appreciates the help he was given. Three years later at a 2014-2015 New Years’ Eve party, the therapist’s best friend invites her roommates’ friends, one of whom happens to be this former client. They start talking about absolutely nothing related to the fear he experienced in his past (or even if they do) and they find out that they have a lot in common and share similar opinions and senses of humor.

They are absolutely forbidden to have sex or become friends based on the APA ethics code. As a matter of fact, they probably shouldn’t even have spoken. Because it’s “unethical” to establish any other form of a relationship outside of the therapeutic one with someone who has ever been a client.

I personally don’t agree with this. It was brought up in class that it’s just a simple black-and-white rule that having sex with a client is strictly forbidden. It’s not black-and-white. Nothing is ever black-and-white. Maybe that’s just the difference between myself and certain other people, but I always see myself interpersonally as having the potential to develop friendships with others in almost every new social interaction. If I were in that situation described above (and I wasn’t in the theoretical last relationship I’ll ever be in), I don’t know that the situation would really warrant that restriction via the ethics code. I’m sure this opinion will screw me in the future somehow, but I just want to know where the harm is in such a situation. Or why it’s so unfathomable that a situation such as that could easily arise.

At this stage in my training, my interests in facilitating group work are higher than I imagined they would be at this time. When I always thought about psychology, I considered it only in the one-on-one fashion, and not as something often done in groups (save for maybe something like Alcoholics Anonymous and the like). My first exposure to group therapy was in my senior year of undergrad. I was working as an intern at an in-patient facility in New York for an art therapist. On Saturday of every week, I participated in four groups-one adolescent female, one adult, one adolescent co-ed and one child group. Due to the fact that I was an undergraduate intern as opposed to a Master’s student intern, I was never asked to co-lead a group. I simply provided assistance and participated in the projects themselves. I was rather surprised at the level of processing of some groups (e.g. adult) and the utter lack of processing of others (e.g. co-ed and child). I left that experience feeling as though art therapy was a bust for certain populations (and more specifically with externalizing issues). Because of this, I chose not to involve myself in the adolescent groups being run at a local high school through the child research team. Despite the groups not being art-related, I didn’t have a lot of faith in working in groups with that particular population. Technically, I still don’t; however, I’m more receptive to the idea at this point, because I also believe that the method in which the facility I worked at practiced therapy was not a very efficient one. I don’t imagine it to be a relatively easy task, but I am certainly interested in getting involved with some of the group projects that are coming around again on the child research team. However, my preference is with the child population as opposed to the adolescent groups.

To be perfectly honest, my population of choice for group work would be adults. (My population of choice for individual therapy is children.) I had the opportunity to watch some amazing emotional processing and revelations while I was an intern and it brought a feeling of doing. It sincerely felt like these individuals were getting something out of treatment. They were usually receptive to the task and would work at something (even if it wasn’t the assigned task) which was always a step in the right direction. Not everyone chose to share what they created or what it meant to them, but that wasn’t always the goal. So long as they were understanding the object of the assignment and could reflect to any degree on their own, the group was successful. At some point in my career, I would prefer to conduct (or co-lead) some form of an adult group. However, at this stage in my training, my preference is a child group. I have limited exposure to therapy with children (and I discredit the experience I had previously) and I don’t believe that my anxiety towards the unknown should be a barrier to performing a task such as this one. I have been told on numerous occasions that I work well with children (and have been asked in public domains if I am a teacher). I try to imagine that my strength in that area is enough to overcome my weakness of not knowing how or having faith in my ability to handle clinical populations.

I also don’t often take culture into consideration when creating these pseudo/imaginary groups in my head. Everyone is always White, and I think that’s just a product of my own culture–the neighborhood in which I grew up, who I had as friends, and even the cultures of the populations I worked with before. There were always several African American children or adolescents, but the majority of the population were White kids. Moving to Philadelphia and working in community mental health has certainly changed my exposure, but I haven’t been acculturated long enough for that to feel like the prominent culture in my life (though I imagine that will change over time). I also believe it’s something that can be addressed in a group, especially with a child population. Culture, ethnicity, religion, etc. are not things that we readily talk about, despite them often making us uncomfortable, and I believe that may be a rather effective group if presented to a group of semi-receptive children (of any culture). It may also influence the way they develop in life, having some semblance of perspective.

If I had a professional development plan (which I don’t currently), I would list exposure atop the list. I find that I am most influenced when I experiencing something directly and what better way then to delve in. I think co-leading is an excellent first step, and I personally plan to get involved with the group run through the child research team as soon as it begins. Being receptive to feedback is also high on the list. Feedback is valuable regardless of who is providing it–be it a supervisor, co-leader, professor, or even group members. I never want to overstep my boundaries and I never want to make anyone uncomfortable. I will always want people to feel like they can speak freely with me, including when an issue pertains to me. I hope that I always make that clear and I also believe that to be a tool that will assist in making me an effective group leader.

Which brings me to my second evoked emotion: disgust. We’re a human race, people. I’m dismayed at how many of us don’t have a humanitarian molecule in our body. Jokes are fine, especially considering how calming humor is, but when you pair a picture of people running out of buildings screaming because they’re afraid and then poke fun, I want to punch you in your disrespectful face. I hope you get mugged at gunpoint and you shit your pants so someone from the ghetto can take a picture of it and caption it with “what a pussy” because they live that shit on a daily basis and you got scared. You girl. 

Oh, and one last thought: part of me would like a volcano to erupt so that people who live just outside the radius of the molten lava could say, “damn, I’m so disappointed I didn’t get to feel lava.” You didn’t feel the earthquake? Good. Me either, but I’m not going to whine about it.

Edit: I have two blogs — one for people to know about and one where I complain about every little thing that annoys me (and there are many). This might have been more appropriate for that second one. 

I woke up this morning and, in an effort to keep any ninja rain that might come through out of my bedroom, I slammed my finger in a window. My first thought was, “if this is any indication of how this Foundations Exam/Comps is going to go, I quit now.” My second thought was that maybe it would be the yin and the yang of my day, so I’d better get moving.

The test itself was…exactly what I expected, I suppose. Two hundred questions is rather long, and I swear I’d never heard of a few terms that were on there (Intersubjectivity? Really?), but all in all, as a colleague described it, there were a bunch of questions I definitely knew, a bunch I definitely didn’t know, and the best I can hope for is that they balanced each other out and I passed. I’m not going to sit around brooding over how poorly I might have done when I might have done well; I’ll know when the grades get posted. I just don’t understand the point of running around saying “Well, I failed that.” I mean, to each his own, but I actually annoyed myself when I heard myself saying it after every test I took (and I wound up passing each and every one of them). So what purpose does it serve? Does it lessen the embarrassment later if you act like you’re expecting it? (“See, told you I did so bad I didn’t pass.”) Hindsight bias? Does it make you look or feel smarter if you don’t fail? (“Wow, I thought for sure I didn’t know nearly as much information as required to pass!”) A cognitive dissonance strategy of some kind, maybe? I don’t know, but I do know it doesn’t help anything to be so certain of failure. I’m not saying I passed, but I’m certainly crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. And I’m not going to be a Debbie Downer about it unless I know for sure that I failed. The embarrassment will be all the same at that time than it would be if I started preparing people for it today. But that’s just me. Again, to each his own, I’m sure.

I didn’t schedule my client, but I should definitely call them tomorrow and set it up for next week. I feel like I’m being completely selfish by taking the next six days off before the storm hits (classes, clinic & practicum), but I’m not going to get another break like this (and I have to read for the first day of classes anyway), so why not, right? :-/ Am I a bad person?

Now if those DAMN KIDS would go to bed already, I could re-open my bedroom window and not get a headache. Sheesh. Would I rather buses and ambulances over screaming suburban 6 year olds? At least the latter doesn’t go all night long. Then I’d have to kill them. Instead, I shall nap them away.

Lucky for me, the woman who lived in my apartment and moved to the first floor two years ago had lived here for thirty years. She and her poison-free flying insect spray came upstairs and combated the problem with Stefan. Between the two of them, my windows are sealed up (where the air conditioners are) and the nest is gone. Then we caulked a hole in the living room window frame outside that Comcast must have made.

So far today there don’t appear to be any wasps, but I was still in bed at this time yesterday and hadn’t yet discovered any.

Today’s adventure? Internet and cable. We’ll see what the tech says (and I’ll be surprised if he shows up in his 1-3pm window). More later!